Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Babbanji is torn between science and poetry and between Bihar and Bombay. He had researched the plastics-into-petrol phenomenon for three years and then presented it on the national level. He feels the burden of his discovery. “If I pursued this and brought it in front of the world, I would have to go again into the research line. But I want to be a poet. I will transfer this research to my father.” Science and poetry can coexist in his life, he thinks. “I will become a poet but somehow science will be in my poems.” He says he might have to travel back to Bihar to receive a science award. I suspect he’s ready to go back home, but he denies this, saying, “Bombay is my karmabhoomi. If I die it will be in Bombay. I have forgotten my previous life, in Sitamarhi.”

  But his parents probably have not forgotten about him, I point out. At my urging, he writes a postcard to them:

  Dear Papa and Mummy,

  I touch your feet.

  I have broken your dreams and come here. Please forgive me. But I am trying to mend your broken dreams. I have left the career of science and entered a career of literature and I am starting my career on the footpaths of Bombay, and I am trying to do something through my poems.

  If they want to search for him, he tells me, he has written his address—Flora Fountain, Churchgate—and they can find him in a second. He is close to tears as he considers the possibility.

  “SUKETUJI!” Babbanji phones me early on a Sunday morning. “My papa has come!”

  “Where is he?”

  “He is here with me now. I have to go back to Bihar at eleven o’clock. Some important work has come up. Some very important work.”

  At nine-thirty, we are at the Café Mondegar, a short walk from Babbanji’s home on the sidewalk. The Café Mondegar, open to the traffic of Colaba, is conducive to gaiety. The beer is cold and arrives in inventively shaped pitchers; one looks like a fishbowl. The tables are close together, and a sort of beery bonhomie links the young men, the backpackers, the dating couples in the bar. But the waiter is smarmy with the two Biharis; they don’t know what to order. The waiter insists on speaking to them in English. I order breakfast for them.

  The father hasn’t shaved during the three days it took the train to get here. He is a balding, bespectacled man of forty-five who looks older, in the way college lecturers do, and has a nice smile. Today he talks and talks, nothing can stop him. And it is a pleasure listening to him speak in Hindi, for he has a nice touch with a phrase. At least some of Babbanji’s poetry fire seems to be inherited.

  Babbanji’s father had arrived at Victoria Terminus with his father-in-law at five-thirty this morning and had walked from V.T. to Churchgate, looking for bookstalls along the way. Near one of them, he saw a group of sleepers on the footpath; one of the figures stirred and lifted the thin cotton sheet over his head for a moment, and the professor exclaimed, “Son!” Babbanji was wearing the same shirt he saw him in last. “Father and son clasped each other and were weeping,” the professor tells me. He recalls that Babbanji was always a delicate child; he was born in great difficulty. At this point he almost breaks down. “He couldn’t drink mother’s milk—his jaw wouldn’t latch on. I’ve kept him since he was four. He has never asked anything from me.”

  Babbanji’s eyes water.

  “How did he treat his body,” the professor wonders, holding up his son’s thin hand, “that his parents worked so hard to bring to this stage. Didn’t take a sweater, didn’t take money from home.” They noticed that he had taken a khadi sheet with him, not a more expensive woolen one. “I feel that my house was of glass and has shattered. He was the support of this old man, and he did a very bad thing.” But he’s also trying to explain his son’s behavior to me, as if apologizing, letting me know it’s not Babbanji’s fault. “The reason is that at an early age he got more knowledge than necessary. He should have told his father about his troubles, but he didn’t want to trouble his father. The students beat him because of me.”

  When Babbanji disappeared, his mother started having dreams about her son, visions. In one, the boy was holding his head and was kneeling on the road. He had a fever, and some kind man was helping him. If she saw a boy with a headache, she would say, “That’s my son.” They thought about who they could call on for help in locating Babbanji. As is done in times of crisis, times of insufficient knowledge, they went to an astrologer. The astrologer consulted the stars and told them that he was living in Varanasi, with a man whose first name began with the syllable “Ra.” Further, the astrologer said, Babbanji was living in a house colored yellow and white.

  So the father’s wanderings had begun, through the town and cities of North India, searching for his lost son. He had gone from house to house in Varanasi, looking at the walls to see if they were yellow and white, asking groups of students if they knew of a boy with such a name. He went to Deoband, Saharanpur, Aligarh. In the lanes his heart would quicken whenever he would see a group of boys, and he would scan each one’s face to see if it matched that of his boy. Nobody could tell him anything.

  On the second of April the college lecturer had a dream. His son came to him in the college campus and walked across the campus toward him, in silence. No words were exchanged between them in the dream. On that same day Babbanji wrote to his father at last. “The peon gave his mummy a letter. Daily she waited for the peon. The address was in English. She ran to me. I was afraid that it might be a self-addressed letter for a competition.” The letter was signed Babbanji of Flora Fountain. He read it twice, thrice. Only two words in the letter made him angry. He pulls it out now and reads out what Babbanji wrote above his name: “Your worthless and vagabond son.”

  “These two words hurt my heart. My beta is not worthless or vagabond.”

  Babbanji says, “The world will call me a vagabond, no?” His eyes are full of tears.

  “No son is a vagabond for his mother and father.”

  The jukebox behind us is playing the Bee Gees song “It’s Only Words.”

  After receiving the letter, the professor and Babbanji’s grandfather set out immediately for Bombay, to find the boy lying in front of a wall colored yellow and white. Later, Babbanji’s father found out that the first man to have given his son shelter was the bookseller Ram Babu Joshi.

  Babbanji’s father is also angry that his son did not reveal his troubles in the college. “I won’t keep my son in Sitamarhi. I’ll try to get a transfer.”

  His son objects. “I will stay in Sitamarhi. When I go back to Sitamarhi I won’t be a local man.” He will be Bombay-returned. The college bullies will look upon him differently now.

  His father, too, can see the positive side of Babbanji’s adventure in the huge city. “He has not been derailed. He got an education. Now you have to help him.” The lecturer appeals to me. “We are only his parents.”

  “You tell me as a friend what I should do,” Babbanji asks. Should he go back or not?

  I point out that Bihar is in pretty bad shape.

  They forget their differences and both jump to the defense of their home state. “Bihar has many scientists. There is a ten-year-old boy who has a BSc degree. Each one is brilliant.”

  “Our earth is very fertile,” says Babbanji. The best Hindi poets are Biharis, he says.

  The father wants Babbanji to return to Bihar and to science. “A scientist is a very great litterateur,” he avers.

  “I will do in Bombay; my karmabhoomi is in Bombay,” Babbanji repeats, trying to convince both his father and himself. “Look at how fate works. If I weren’t working at a bookstall I wouldn’t have met Adil.”

  “But the way you lived?” I ask him.

  “I have no fear of the footpath. Now that I’m on the road, I’m on the road.”

  He reads out a poem he has just written, on a Bombay train “which carries thousands on its shoulders and brings them back.” No one understands the train’s pain, the poet feels.

  “How did he learn all this?” his father asks in wonderment. “How did he enter the world of lite
rature? I find it strange, these additional qualities, how did they come? Maybe it has come down to him through my grandfather, who had many books of literature.” While searching for clues about why his son had run away, he had come across a notebook in which his son’s secret was revealed: a long poem he had written. “I was surprised—when did he start writing poetry? I couldn’t write like that. In Bihar’s present condition even an MA pass boy couldn’t write like that.” But he should get a degree. The professor had one great regret in his life; he had been unable to do his doctorate. “Last year I took a vow that I would get my PhD through my son. My son should be two degrees ahead of me, not less.”

  Now he would like his son to be a teacher or doctor, “but not a doctor for money.” His father is trying to convince me to tell Babbanji to reenroll in college. “This work won’t stop,” he says of Babbanji’s poetry, gingerly stepping around the word. “If you get the inspiration you can write it immediately, half an hour a day. It can’t be stopped.” And besides, “When will the world recognize him? How many people will like his poetry? There are many poets, writers. The only ones who do well are in the film world. Who reads literature, who reads the truth?” He recites a shloka in Sanskrit: “You should say the truth, but not if it’s bitter.” All sound, practical arguments against the world of literature. I hear the voice of my father using almost these exact words in New York with me, many worlds away. Babbanji’s father isn’t directly prohibiting him from entering into a career as a writer. He’s using love and fear instead, projecting the anxiety of his middle forties onto the young man of seventeen. Babbanji conceives of himself as a poet; and as he walks the city that gives him rich layers of experience for his poetry, this idea of himself exalts him way above the billionaires on the twenty-third floor.

  His father now wants to leave Bombay at once, a few hours after he stepped into the city. When he arrived this morning, he said to Babbanji, “Come, son, let’s leave at once. This is a maya ki nagri”—city of illusion. “All these big buildings, they aren’t made with truth; they have been built by snatching someone else’s wealth.” He tells me, “This is a town of money, and I don’t give much importance to money.” It is a hierarchical city; you are always comparing yourself to others. “There is someone on top of you, and someone on top of them.”

  Babbanji suggests to his father that he go to his grandfather, whom they have left waiting at the train station, while Babbanji gets his belongings. His father emphatically refuses. He won’t let his son out of his sight. That morning when Babbanji went to the public toilet, his father went with him and stood just outside the door. All the footpath people were very happy that the two were reunited, “but they didn’t want him to go,” recalls his father. His son had found a community among them. His father paid back all the debts his son had incurred and prayed God to bless the man who had sheltered him. Babbanji has also written down a precise accounting of the number of meals he’s had at the Samovar and the dates of each. There is still money left over from my 500 rupees.

  So the three of us walk to the bookstall to get Babbanji’s belongings. What does a man take back to his village after living in the big city? For Babbanji, it is four books, an assortment of the treasures he found on the racks of the bookstalls:

  Noise: The Unwanted Sounds

  History and Problems of Indian Education

  The History of Wilde Sapte (a firm of London solicitors)

  Water: The Nature, Uses, and Future of Our Most Precious and

  Abused Resource

  Then we walk to V.T., where we find Babbanji’s grandfather sitting on his bag, placidly chewing his pan. The grandfather is an old man in a dhoti. He doesn’t want to talk about his grandson. He wants me to come to Bihar. “There is a lot to see in Bihar,” he says with pride: Buddha’s birthplace, Patna, many places of great natural beauty. I ask the father if he wouldn’t care to take the night train and see a bit of Bombay, now that he’s come here from across the subcontinent. “If I see my son I see the whole world,” Babbanji’s father points out. “My light is here. I see the world through him. I will see you through him, I will see America through him. He is my screen.” And looking at the seventeen-year-old beaming at me, his eyes and his heart eager to discover, to react, to live, and the father next to him, now also smiling, I believe it. There will be many long evenings now, after all the explanations have been made, perhaps after a thrashing from his mother, after a sense of disturbance has passed, that Babbanji will sit on the cot in front of the lecturer’s house in the stifling small town in Bihar and tell him about the Queen’s necklace, about the screen goddess he had seen weaving a garland of jasmine into her hair, about the big cars and the people living on the sewer, about the English poets with their drink, about the building that fell down and the people it fell upon, about the fight for water in the public toilet and the small kindnesses of the footpath dwellers. Isn’t that why we have children, after all: to see the world a second time, on their screen?

  Standing in V.T. under the big clock, where the commuters come and go, Babbanji says good-bye to me. “I feel like I’m leaving home. In Bihar I will meet people from Bombay, people who have come back for the summer holidays, and I will ask them about Bombay, get news of Bombay. This is just a break for me, not a stop.”

  I ask him why he has come to feel this way about the city. “Bombay is in my mind because it has given me something to write.” The simple truth of this statement comes home to me.

  We embrace in parting. He takes my hand, bows, and touches it to his forehead. And so I leave him there, in the gigantic terminus, with the train announcements booming overhead.

  “I’ll go to the Patna branch of Time magazine and write for them!” he yells out to my departing back.

  Adjust

  Bombay is a fast-paced, even hectic city, but it is not, in the end, a competitive city.

  Anyone who has a “reservation” on an Indian train is familiar with this word: Adjust. You might be sitting there on your seat, the prescribed three people along it, and a fourth and a fifth person will loom over you and say, “Psst. . . . Adjust.” You move over. You adjust.

  It is a crowded city, used to living with crowds. In our building in Manhattan, people found it strange when Sunita’s parents came to live with us for six months in our one-bedroom apartment. Our landlady withheld part of our security deposit for “excess wear and tear” caused by the presence of two more adults. Nobody in Bombay asked us how many people were going to live with us in our apartment; it was taken for granted that we would have relatives, friends, and friends of friends coming to stay with us, and how we would put them up was our problem.

  A recent magazine advertisement for an Ambassador car, the sturdy workhorse of the Indian roads, illustrates what I mean. The car, an unadorned version of a 1950s Morris Oxford, is trundling along a rain-drenched street. The ad copy doesn’t devote the usual lascivious attention to leather seat covers, digital dashboards, electronic fuel injection, or the trim lines of the car’s design. The Ambassador is actively ugly but lovable in the way elephants are, with a jaunty visor and a wide grin. Instead, there is a snatch of dialogue from within the car. Three people can be seen squashed together in the front bench seat. A man crosses in front of the ungainly pachyderm, holding a briefcase over his head to ward off the downpour.

  “Arre . . . isn’t that Joshi?”

  “Yes. Let’s take him also.”

  “But we are so many.”

  “Have a heart, we can always adjust.”

  Car ads in most countries usually focus on the luxurious cocoon that awaits you, the driver, once you step inside. At most, there might be space for the attractive woman you’ll pick up once you’re spotted driving the flash set of wheels. The Ambassador ad isn’t really touting the virtues of space. It’s not saying, like a station wagon ad, that it has lots of spare room. It’s saying that the kind of people likely to drive an Ambassador will always make more room. It is really advocating a reduction o
f personal physical space and an expansion of the collective space. In a crowded city, the citizens of Bombay have no option but to adjust.

  I am on the Virar fast train during the evening rush hour, possibly the most crowded of the locals. I am clutching the strip at the top of the open door with both hands, my only other connection the front half of my feet. Most of my body is hanging substantially outside the speeding train. There is a crush of passengers. I am afraid I may be pushed out by their pressure, but I am reassured. “Don’t worry, if they push you out they also pull you in.”

  Someone says, “This is a cattle shed.”

  Girish once drew for me on a piece of paper a diagram of the dance, the choreography of the commuter trains. The Bombay Central contingent stands in the center of the compartment from Borivali to Churchgate. The people surrounding them move clockwise around the BC contingent like this: first are the Jogeshwari batch, then Bandra, then Dadar. If you are new to the Bombay trains, when you get on and are planning to get off at, let’s say, Dadar, you must ask, “Dadar? Dadar?” And you will be directed to the precise spot where you must stand to be able to disembark successfully at your station. The platforms are on different sides of the train. There are no doors, just two enormous openings on either side of the compartment. So when the station arrives, you must be in position to spring off, well before the train has come to a complete stop, because if you wait till it’s stopped, you will be swept back inside by the people rushing in. In the mornings, by the time the train gets to Borivali, the first stop, it is always chockful. “To get a seat?” I ask. Girish looks at me, wondering if I’m stupid. “No. To get in.” This is because the train in from Dadar has started filling up from Malad, two stops ahead, with people willing to loop back.