Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  SANJAY: I just couldn’t believe what was happening around me. I was in a haze. I was in a state of delirium. I couldn’t for the life of me believe that I who was considered and is still considered a criminal by the court was invited by the President of India himself. I also started believing that the high powers in the land were aware that I was innocent, caught in a trap, built by my enemies whom I couldn’t visualise or recognise. It was my greatest moment when the President, Mr. Narayan, shook my hands and patted me. I slept that night like I have never slept before. India loved me. The people of India wanted all the best things to happen to me. They were willing to give me all the love I asked for.

  Success had sanitized everything.

  When the film is released in Kashmir, the audience in the Jammu theater is split, the Hindus cheering for Sanjay and the Muslims for Hrithik. Something that I haven’t foreseen happens: The militants claim Hrithik for their own, delighted that this most handsome star, the country’s most recognizable face, is playing one of their own, never mind the ending. This movie will not give Vinod trouble with the terrorists. It will bring more young men into the movement, so that they too may sing and dance with Preity and imagine themselves as godlike, Hrithik-like. Other Kashmiris like it because at least it demonstrates that their young men have a reason to turn to militancy; Hrithik becomes a terrorist only after his family is wiped out by the security forces. So little do the Kashmiris expect from the mainstream Indian media.

  In Pakistan, which has gone to battle with India three times over Kashmir and even now is training subversives to send over the border, the “Bumbro” song from the film becomes obligatory at every wedding. The people of the enemy country ignore the message and dance to the music, blocking out the topicality of the story and focusing on the eternal themes at its core: a boy who wants a girl, a father who is in conflict with his son. Opposition, in fact, comes from the right. Members of the Indian security forces complain that the film is too soft on terrorists. The sentiments of a particular community are hurt, but it is not the community we expected. Shortly after the film’s release, a Sikh organization demands that Vinod issue a public apology and delete a scene in the film where a Sikh policeman is shown pissing his pants from fear as a bomb is about to go off on a boat he’s standing on. The Sikhs claim that this reflects poorly on the martial prowess of their people.

  When his third film comes out, Hrithik’s fame approaches maniacal proportions. Schoolgirls scratch his initials on their arms with their geometry compasses. When Pepsi makes a commercial with Shahrukh and a Hrithik clone who is made gentle fun of, many of the country’s youth boycott Pepsi. Calcutta police stop more than a dozen teenagers from boarding trains and planes to Bombay to get a glimpse of Hrithik. Schoolteachers try to confiscate the wave of Hrithik posters and souvenirs that are swamping the classroom, but there is no end to it. His face starts appearing on the covers of school notebooks, along with such inspirational phrases from the star as: “To dream of the person you would like to be is a waste of the person you are.” Some authorities propose using the star for educational purposes. One school principal feels students would appreciate their subjects better if Hrithik’s appeal were employed imaginatively. “For instance, students could be told that the capital of Maharashtra was Bombay, from where Hrithik hails, or the longest bone in Hrithik Roshan’s body was the femur.”

  Once again, things are going too well for the superstar. A month after the film is released, a rumor sweeps Kathmandu that Hrithik said, in a television interview, that he hated Nepal and its people. I think of the gentle, courteous actor I met and find it impossible to believe he said anything of the sort. But the rumor has currency. The leftist student unions in Nepal send their followers into the streets. They ransack the theater in which Mission Kashmir is playing, burn down posters and cutouts of Hrithik, and are about to do the same to the Indian embassy when the police intercept the march. They shoot two teenagers dead. Three more people die that night; 150 are injured. The government bans all of Hrithik’s films from playing anywhere in the kingdom. Hrithik goes on the radio, denies making the alleged remarks, and says he loves Nepal and its people. As evidence, he cites the fact that his family has had a faithful Nepalese cook for decades. This fails to mollify the students. Mobs go out and target Indian-owned businesses, setting them on fire. The city of Kathmandu is effectively shut down for several days. The incident almost brings down the Nepali government. Sixty of the ruling party’s 113 members of parliament ask the prime minister to resign over the episode, even after Hrithik’s denial. The same face that inspired mass fainting among young girls is now inspiring mass hatred. In both cases the reaction is hysterical. I understand again Vinod’s concern that the script might give offense. In this part of the world, people are ready to die for a lie.

  Over the next few weeks, the origins of the Nepalese rumor become apparent. It first appeared in a Kathmandu newspaper owned by the country’s biggest cable network and was then taken up by Maoist students. Pakistani intelligence services have long used Nepal as a base for incursions into India, and the D-Company’s Pakistani hosts would be only too happy to stir up trouble over films in a country friendly to India. According to Indian intelligence, the D-Company instructed the newspaper owner to print the fabrication, and then the cable network pulled all Indian films off the air and did not carry Hrithik’s denial for several crucial days. This time it was not Hrithik’s father that was targeted for assassination. It was his own character.

  VINOD MAKES A LOT of money off Mission Kashmir; it is the biggest hit of his career. Although the film tapers off at the box office after the first week, the film’s distributors and exhibitors in India all eat well. Now Vinod has been having meetings with Columbia-TriStar about the possibility of making an English-language film for an international audience. It’s a way of hedging his bets, getting out of the country. “In ten years I don’t know if the politicians we are electing will make life worth living.” After I’m back in New York, I get a package, overnight mail from Bombay. It is a poster for Vinod’s new film, Chess, which doesn’t have a script, cast, or budget but does have this poster, which shows a chessboard rising out of someone’s nightmare and the tagline TWO PLAYERS. ONE ALIVE, ONE DEAD. A GAME UNFINISHED. And, of course, the obligatory A Vidhu Vinod Chopra film. For Vinod, step one in the creation of a film is its publicity.

  He wants me to work with him on the script. “Forget about your book,” he says. “How many people read books? Millions watch cinema.” And he is right. There is something about the movies, about a big commercial blockbuster, that no book can compete with. I have never felt more truly accepted back into the country I was born in than when I was asked to write Hindi films, to construct the dream lives of my countrymen. No outsider, no firang would be allowed near our dreams. Everything about Bollywood—the numbers, the personalities—is huge, but after all is said and done, it is an intimate passion.

  PART III * PASSAGES

  Memory Mines

  THE ONLY EVENT in the Bombay weather is the monsoon. The first rain comes early this year, in the middle of May. I can smell it coming, over the sea. I say to the workmen in my flat, “It’s going to rain.”

  “Now?” they ask, surprised.

  Now. I know that smell.

  It used to be like this, when I was a child: For four days there was thunder. All of us looked at the pale gray sky. Animals and men drew long breaths, felt dry and humid at the same time. Winds came up suddenly, stirred the sleeping dust, and carried it away in little whirlpools. The summer had been hotter, longer than anyone could remember, although they said the same thing at the end of last summer and every summer before that. It’s what you say at the cusp.

  It was the time of the year at which the season of cricket, that game of hot long summer days, was poised to give way to soccer, hopscotch, and marbles. We swatted the bat desultorily, bored of the waiting.

  Day by day the tension grew in the sky. At times everything would be c
overed in the false black. Birds would fly rapidly; we would think they were flying in advance of the storm, so we came out in old clothes to the compound. As we waited, we grew irritable and hit each other, fooled around, played tricks on the weak and the stupid. We let the air out of tires, wrote obscene doggerel on the walls of the girls’ school. The grandmothers said, “It is coming for sure.”

  And yet it would not.

  Farmers and governments grew alarmed. The papers were full of dire predictions. Grass wilted in the playing fields of the girls’ school, forbidden to us, so we made it a point to sneak in and play hockey and trample the carefully tended flower bushes.

  The sea lay supine, exhausted, needing rain to lubricate, replenish herself. We went to the shallows and fished with our palms, catching the minute sea creatures left behind in the suddenly created lakes when the sea retreated from the rocks.

  The city and the building ran out of water.

  There was nothing with which to wash bodies or the clothes the bodies had made dirty. There was barely enough to drink; tankers came from the interior, and all the servants lined up with buckets, paying exorbitant rates for the brackish water and then splashing half of it into the thirsty ground, earning them outraged shouts from their mistresses.

  At night the exhausted people dreamt of rivers and waterfalls; in the cinemas they watched the song sequences for the shots of snow in Kashmir and saris wet in manufactured rain, watching the falling, flowing water, silently, greedily. They bought and fell asleep to the recorded sounds of oceans and running brooks, clear water over mountain rocks.

  Then one day you knew. You saw it coming over the sea. There was a powerful wind and at first just a shower of dust, a huge hell of a lot of dust, all the dust of the world up and in through the open windows of the buildings. If you were downstairs you had to stop your games and cover your mouth and your eyes. It entered your hair and your nose and you were sick of summer, you had been sweating all day and you could not stand summer for one more second.

  The clouds passed by overhead at great speed, carrying urgent dispatches from someone unknown to us to somebody whom we could never talk to. The sky was blue-black, like the poison-filled neck of Shiva.

  Then the first drop, so light you might have imagined it. It might have been an air conditioner leaking.

  The leaves and branches were in a fine frenzy. Windows slammed open and shut, and there was the sound of breaking glass. The birds knew. They were gyrating wildly in the sky, desperate to get to their nests, to the crannies and crevices of the buildings.

  All at once, the next few drops, and everybody knew. Servants and wives rushed to the windows to take in the laundry.

  A massive crack in the sky and then another huge roar from the earth, from hundreds of thousands of children all over the city as the torrent fell upon them. All day long you have been sweating, all day long your body has been ready to receive it and has sensed it like the cows and the crows, and now the first rain is upon you. Your parents have warned you about it, screamed at you about it: Never bathe in the first rain! It is black with the dust and pollution of the atmosphere and you will get sick but you don’t care. All the children of the world are out dancing in the streets and the parking lots and the gullies, and for once the cars are stilled by the mighty juvenile throng, with the invincible force of the monsoon at their backs. Big drops of water are coming down very close together, walls of water, worlds of water. And you are in the middle of it and nothing can be seen except the water. There is lightning and all is daylight again, but only for an instant. You raise your face to the water and wash the summer off. It enters your eyes and nose and mouth and carries away all sin and sorrow with it.

  When the rain stops, the air is suddenly sweetened. The trees and the shrubs and the weeds have dispensed fragrance into the air. Hundreds of long brown earthworms are crawling out of the softened ground. Bombay will open its windows and the rain-sweetened air will come in and Bombay will sleep well tonight. And if the first rain is early, you will sleep especially well tonight, because you still have fifteen days left till the beginning of school.

  Mayur Mahal Multipurpose

  The bell is still there. I am sitting in the principal’s office when a peon comes in, reaches out the window, and yanks at a thick white rope. There is a peal; I know that sound well. The rope leads across the yard to the other school building, to a thick brass bell whose ringing could be a glad sound, signifying release from a day of torment, or a dread sound, bringing on Mrs. Qureshi’s period. Period means “class,” but so cranky was the Hindi teacher that it could equally well have meant the other thing.

  “We would like to felicitate you.” Cheroot, as we called the man who was my science teacher and is now the principal, is smiling. “On November fourteenth, we will be holding a function for you. Also for Salil Ankola, cricketer, Shweta Shetty, singing sensation, and Krishna Mehta, designer. All Mayur Mahal students,” he informs me happily. He has cut out a newspaper article about me and put it up on the notice board. I am now a “distinguished alumnus.” The invitation that came in the mail said We are proud of your outstanding performance in the field of Literature. At last the institution that displayed no signs of pride in me while I was enrolled in it, that first beat me for having bad handwriting and then for not taking notes in class, wants to honor me for being a writer.

  Mayur Mahal Multipurpose. Its full name is Mayur Mahal’s Shreemati Nandkunvar Ramniklal J. Parikh Multipurpose High School, and it is principally known for having its own street named after it. It imposed the title on one of the lanes that connect the sea with the top of Malabar Hill. The original name can still be seen on a faded BEST electricity box: Wilderness Road. When the wilderness disappeared, so, appropriately, did the name.

  We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes we lived in both of them at the same time. Mayur Mahal was where the Gujarati and Marwari traders sent their offspring. Not for us the sophistication of the convent schools, Cathedral or Campion. Our parents were more likely to discuss grain prices than Gershwin; we ate fafda rather than foie gras. Mayur Mahal dispensed instruction in two languages, Gujarati and English, but the English medium tended to be nominal. The administration strove mightily to get us to speak in English at all times, but we jabbered away in Hindi and Gujarati. “Gadherao, English ma bolo ne!” a teacher famously screamed at us. “Donkeys, speak English!”

  Mr. Maskawala, the gym teacher, had been standing by the gate when I returned to Mayur Mahal. He had clasped my hand with his sweaty one. He is still a buffoon, with his split lip; he’s probably still trying to romance the Catholic teachers. He led me past the stone elephant and past the little shrine to Saraswati. Past the cold-water taps under which we cupped our palms and drank and in the trough of which you could always discover, from the chewed debris that had slipped out of the mouths of previous drinkers, what everyone had been having for lunch. Past the little compound in the back where we made pav bhaji in our scouting class, up two flights, and into the principal’s office. Here, the same old scene is being played out. Two boys are standing by Cheroot’s desk. He calls in Verma Sir (the biology teacher, who scandalized the Jain trustees by bringing in a fish to dissect). “There have been three written complaints against these boys. Take them away, and tell them that they will have to leave school, and they won’t be able to continue SSC or anything.” The boys are led away to their fate, the threat of not matriculating hanging over them. It comes back to me, how when I was fourteen, another teacher had slapped me hard on my face for shutting a classroom door during recess, then dragged me to this same principal’s office, and the vice principal had written out a leaving certificate, and I cried, thinking I would never be able to get into a school in the country I was about to move to. He let me sweat for a couple of days and then, after repeated apologies on my part, he rescinded the certificate. He was just having his sadistic little bit of fun.

  All the teachers are old now, and they look not much diffe
rent from the peons. Cheroot explains why the school has deteriorated. The school administration had embarked on a policy of deliberately taking in poor students, the residents of the slum colonies all around Malabar Hill that I had seen when I went campaigning with Jayawantiben Mehta, the “lower strata,” as Cheroot calls them. “We are a trust, after all.” It is a huge school now: eighteen hundred students in two shifts, tended to by some sixty teachers and staff. A blanket of melancholy, of sadness, of decay, hangs over the entire place. The children streaming from school in the late afternoon are now darker and worse dressed, their haircuts more unfashionable, than when I studied here. “It’s a school for the children of dhobis and drivers,” my cousin had told me. When I went there, “the aristocracy sent their children to Mayur Mahal. But now you wouldn’t send your son to this school. You sent him to New Era,” Cheroot points out. “You wouldn’t want your son and your driver’s son studying in the same class,” he concludes. He is presiding over the systematic deterioration and democratization of an institution.

  I ask him what kinds of methods the school uses these days to discipline its students. “We have to use ‘threatening.’” He pronounces the word like a thunderclap—“threatening!”—shaking his hands as he does so. “Of course now we don’t do it so much. But we give a couple of slaps now and then,” he admits, chortling. “You know that I and Verma Sir were known as disciplinarians. We even slapped the students!” Yes, as you did me.

  I have been reading reports in the newspaper, on two successive days, of children being brutalized in Bombay schools. Yesterday’s article was about an eighth-grader in J. B. Khot High School who didn’t hand in an assignment. The teacher stripped off his shirt in front of the class; then she wanted him to take off his shorts. She pulled at his zipper to take them off, yanked it, and his penis got caught. When he got home, he went to bed. He can’t piss properly now. “His mind is disturbed,” his father stated. In the same school, a kindergartener was asked to produce his calendar. Some other children were playing with it. So the teacher stood him in front of an adjoining class and stripped him, amid a jeering chorus of his schoolmates yelling, “Shame, shame!” A counselor, interviewed in the paper, condemned the incidents and suggested that when teachers need to discipline students, “the whole class should participate in framing a punishment.” I think of a Mayur Mahal class collectively framing a punishment. What pleasant hours we would have passed! We would have come up with some good ones.