Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  It doesn’t help to travel in first class, which is only marginally less crowded during rush hours. Girish’s brother Dharmendra has a first-class season pass. But when the train is really crowded, he’ll go for the second-class coaches. “In second class they are more flexible. First class, you’ll have some Nepean Sea Road type. He won’t move, he’ll stand where he is.”

  I mention to Girish a statistic I’d read, about the “super-dense crush load” of the trains being ten people per square yard. He stretches out his arm, says, “One yard,” and makes a calculation. “More,” he says. “More. In peak time, if I lower my arm like this, I won’t be able to raise it.” Many movements in the trains are involuntary. You just get carried along; if you’re light, you might not even have to move your legs. In 1990, according to the government, the number of passengers carried in a nine-car train during rush hour in Bombay was 3,408. By the end of the century, it had gone up to 4,500. According to a letter to the Times by G. D. Patwardhan:

  This is a mockery of our statutes, which lay down the precise number of live animals—cows, buffaloes, goats, donkeys, and so forth—that can be carried in a wagon of specified dimensions. Any breach of such rules is an offence punishable under the railways’ own disciplinary action procedures and also under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals legislation. But no such rules and legislation govern the transportation of human beings.

  When I ask people how they can bear to travel in such conditions, they shrug. You get “habituated.” You get “used to.”

  The commuters travel in groups. Girish travels with a group of some fifteen people that take the same train from stations farther down the line. When he gets on, they make space on their laps for him and have a potluck breakfast together; each of them brings some delicacy from home—the Gujaratis batatapauua, the Telugus upma, the bhaiyyas alu-poori—and they unwrap their contribution in the cramped space of the compartment. They pass the hour agreeably, telling jokes, playing cards, or singing, sometimes with castanets on their fingers. Girish knows where the best singers are on each train. There is a group on the eight-fifteen that sings nationalistic and anti-Muslim songs very well. There are others who specialize in bhajans, and in call-and-response chanting. Thus the journey is made bearable for those who get a seat, and diverting for those standing. When Girish worked for Kamal right at home in Mira Road, he continued taking the train to Bombay Central once a week, just for the pleasure of breakfast with his train group.

  The trains are a hive of industry. Women sell underwear in the ladies’ compartment, huge abdomen-high panties that are passed around and inspected, the money passed back through many hands for those bought. Other women chop vegetables for the family dinner they are going to cook immediately on reaching home. The ads on the Bombay locals are the same as the ads in the New York subway, dealing with indescribably private subjects: hemorrhoids, impotence, foot odor. In this safely anonymous mass, these ads can be perused; there is comfort in knowing that these afflictions of the body are universal, shared by the flesh pressing all around. They too need these pills and potions, this minor surgery.

  THE WESTERN BRANCH of the train terminates in beauty, the eastern branch in horror. On the Churchgate train, past Charni Road station as it sees the sea, past the gymkhanas—Islam, Catholic, Hindu, Parsi—as the shacks fade away, Bombay becomes a different city, an earlier city, a beautiful city. All of a sudden there is the blue sky and the clear water of Marine Drive, and everybody looks toward the bay and starts breathing.

  The eastern branch, the Harbour Line, toward its end passes slowly through people’s bedrooms: in stretches the shacks of the poor are less than a yard away from the tracks. They can roll out of bed and into the path of the train. Their little children come out and go wandering over the tracks. Trains kill more than a thousand slum dwellers a year. Others, who are on the train, are killed by electricity poles placed too close to the tracks, as they hang on to the train from the outside by the windows. One such pole kills about ten commuters a month as the train comes rushing around a curve. One of Girish’s friends on the 9:05 from Jogeshwari was killed when he was hanging from the window and a pole loomed up, too close, too fast. Just the previous year another of that group, playing the daredevil by riding on top of the moving train, was hit by an arch and survived. Girish muses on the injustice of the two accidents. The showoff survived and the shy window hanger, to whom Girish had only minutes before offered a place inside the train, died.

  Paresh Nathvani, a kite dealer from Kandivili, performs a singular social service: He provides free shrouds for those killed by train accidents. About a decade ago, the kite merchant saw a man run over by a train at Grant Road. The railway workers tore down an advertising banner to cover the body. “Every religion dictates that the dead be covered with a piece of fresh white cloth,” he realized. So every Thursday, Nathvani visits four railway stations and supplies them with fresh shrouds, two yards each. The biggest station, Andheri, gets ten shrouds a week. The stationmaster initials a ledger that Nathvani maintains and stamps it with his seal. He runs through 650 yards of cloth a year. But it’s not enough; it’s a long way from enough. The trains of Bombay kill four thousand people yearly.

  THE MANAGER of Bombay’s suburban railway system was recently asked when the system would improve to a point where it could carry its 6 million daily passengers in comfort. “Not in my lifetime,” he answered. Certainly, if you commute into Bombay, you are made aware of the precise temperature of the human body as it curls around you on all sides, adjusting itself to every curve of your own. A lover’s embrace was never so close.

  Asad bin Saif works in an institute for secularism, moving tirelessly among the slums, cataloging numberless communal flare-ups and riots, seeing firsthand the slow destruction of the social fabric of the city. Asad is from Bhagalpur, in Bihar, site not only of some of the worst communal rioting in the nation but also of a gory incident where the police blinded a group of petty criminals with knitting needles and acid. Asad, of all people, has seen humanity at its worst. I asked him if he feels pessimistic about the human race.

  “Not at all,” he responded. “Look at the hands from the trains.”

  If you are late for work in the morning in Bombay, and you reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outward from the train like petals. As you run alongside the train, you will be picked up and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of the open doorway. The rest is up to you. You will probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, being careful not to lean out too far lest you get decapitated by a pole placed too close to the tracks. But consider what has happened. Your fellow passengers, already packed tighter than cattle are legally allowed to be, their shirts already drenched in sweat in the badly ventilated compartment, having stood like this for hours, retain an empathy for you, know that your boss might yell at you or cut your pay if you miss this train, and will make space where none exists to take one more person with them. And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.

  Good-bye World

  I AM SICK OF MEETING MURDERERS. For some years now, I have been actively seeking them out, in Varanasi, Punjab, Assam, and Bombay, to ask them this one question: “What does it feel like to take a human life?” This unbroken catalog of murder is beginning to wear on me. So when my uncle phones me one day and tells me about a family in the diamond market that is about to renounce the world—take diksha—I put aside everything else and go to meet them. They are the other extreme from Suni
l, Salaskar, Satish, and their ilk; they are Jains. They are becoming monks in a religion which for 2,500 years has been built on the extreme abjuration of violence. They are preparing to enter an order that has a different conception of life and its value, where they will stay indoors all four months of the rainy season because if they inadvertently step into a puddle of water they will be taking life—not only killing minute water organisms but also killing the unity of the water. From men who sleep tranquilly after taking human life, I want to go to a family that thinks it sinful to end the life of a puddle of water.

  I grew up with Jains. Many of my best friends in India and in America are Jains, and when the marriage broker came to my uncle with proposals for me, he brought them both from Gujarati Hindu and Jain families, since there is so little difference. My uncle is married to a Jain. In Sripal Nagar, in Bombay, we lived above a Jain temple; every day I saw monks sitting in the lobby of our building working on each other’s hair. I did not know what they were doing; it looked like they were picking lice. Later I learnt that it was how they kept their hair short, by pulling it out by the roots. Some days they sang hymns about renunciation set to Hindi film tunes. On a particular day, the Jains paid the men with birdcages sitting outside the temple to release the birds; every soul they freed aided in the account book of their personal salvation. The small birds flew out and settled on the rooftops of the city, there to be devoured by crows, kites, and eagles. And the bird sellers went back to the forests and trapped more birds to bring next year to the city.

  My family never thought of the Jains as members of a separate religion; we just regarded them as especially, sometimes nuttily, orthodox Hindus. In the diamond market, Hindus are in the minority; most of the merchants are Jains. In America, I found almost nobody who knew about Jainism. It is the least accessible religion. Nobody drops out of Berkeley to become a Jain monk. No Hollywood actors or rock stars make public declarations of their devotion to Jain gurus.

  THE FAMILY’S FLAT IS HIGH UP in a good building near Haji Ali, with a Jain temple in the compound. When the door opens, I step into a space that could be a village hut or an Indian restaurant abroad straining for the native ambience. The space is lit only by oil lanterns encased in glass, suspended from the ceiling. The walls are hung with religious tapestries. On one wall is an exhortation, written in chalk: Samsara [worldly life] is as worth leaving as Moksha [salvation] is worth reaching. The floor of one room is lined in a mud-and-cowdung mixture, the same flooring I have seen in village houses all over India. A village abode has been re-created in this flat. I have seen this sort of design before in Bombay, in the flats of other rich people, but for different reasons. It was in style a few years ago, the “ethnic” look.

  My escort, another diamond merchant, leads me to a divan at the far side of the room by the window—there is no fan—on which reposes a dark, slender man in his forties with a thin mustache, wearing a gold-braided silk kurta and diamonds on his ears and fingers. This is Sevantibhai Ladhani, the patriarch of the family that is going to give up everything. He is one of several brothers in an extended family that has done very well in the metal business and then expanded into diamonds. He looks like a minor princeling. My escort goes up to him and touches the much younger man’s feet; the figure on the divan blesses him.

  In one month, this family of five—a father and mother in their early forties, their nineteen-year-old son, and seventeen-year-old twins, a son and a daughter—are going to leave this flat, this city, and everything they own. They will spend the rest of their lives wandering on the rural highways of the country, the men and the women separated, never to be a family again. Sevantibhai says, of his wife of twenty-two years—he refers to her as shravika, laywoman—and the three children she has given him, “Now we are only united by selfishness. Hundred percent.” In a month, they will go to a small town in the northernmost part of Gujarat, and there Sevantibhai will say good-bye to all of them. And they will say good-bye to each other. From then on, the sons are to travel with the father, and the daughter with her mother, but as their disciples, not as their children. His sons will stop calling him pappa and refer to him as gurudev; his daughter will call him gurubhagvan. But male and female members will be forever separated: The mother can never again meet her sons or her husband, unless they happen to be passing by on the road. Sevantibhai will never meet his daughter, except by accident, and then only in the presence of the guru maharaj of his order, lest his vow of celibacy get contaminated. The bonds of family, formed over a lifetime, will be voluntarily broken in one massive public ceremony.

  They are doing this in order to sever all ties with samsara and attain moksha. In the simplest sense, moksha means not having to be born again. Sevantibhai is looking for moksha to end not just his life or his children’s lives, but his entire lineage. But before doing this, they will show everybody that they aren’t leaving the world because they have failed in it; they will go out in the full noonday light of worldly success. In one month, they will go to the Gujarat town and give away, physically throw away, everything they have earned up to this point: between $2 million and $3 million. It will be a dramatic rejection of Bombay, of the sole reason why anybody would want to live here. Once your desire to make money stops, you should leave by the next train.

  Sevantibhai had originally been a most unobservant Jain. He didn’t even go to pray in the Jain temple below his own building. He lived like any well-off Bombayite, enjoying the city and its pleasures. One evening at 11 p.m., Sevantibhai was reading a book written by a Jain swami titled I Should at Least Be Human. In the book, Sevantibhai came across a sentence that electrified him. “Are you going to be dismissed or will you resign?” He thought about it and then woke up his wife and told her he had decided to take diksha. He had decided to resign before he could be dismissed.

  It was a momentous decision, but it was not sudden. Several years ago, he had chanced to hear a speech at Chowpatty by a Jain guru, Chandrashekhar Maharaj, which had set him thinking. For the last few years, Sevantibhai had been progressively renouncing modernity. He had already ceased using allopathic medicine eighteen years ago, well before his interest in his religion had been awakened. After the twins were born, they were in some pain. Sevantibhai went to an ayurvedic doctor in Khetwadi, who gave him the urine of a cow. He made the babies drink it twenty-one times a day, and they got better.

  Next to go was diesel and petrol. He gave up using automobiles. Sevantibhai impresses upon me the great sins committed during the extraction of fossil fuels: the drilling through the layers of the earth, the killing of snakes and other subterranean life forms while doing so. It is bad for the country too: “You have to import the petrol from Saudi Arabia and send them things like laboratory mice and human blood in exchange.” The use of the automobile also takes life. “If you use a bullock cart, a man doesn’t die if he collides with it. And then the bullock is also employed.” For the actual diksha ceremony, he wanted to go from Bombay to Dhanera, the diksha site, in a convoy of bullock carts, a journey that would take several days. His extended family objected vehemently, so he has reluctantly agreed to take a train.

  Then went electricity. For the last seven years, Sevantibhai has been living in his Bombay high-rise flat without electric lights or appliances. He enumerates the sins racked up in its production. In the case of electricity generated through a dam, he explains, the great force of the water falling onto the turbines kills so many fish and crocodiles that every half hour the dam builders have to clean out the turbines. The disaster at Chernobyl, he points out, was a direct result of the desire of people to have electricity. Even the oil lamps that burn in the apartment kill germs. Sevantibhai admits with some shame that for the last year and a half, because of a back problem, he has had to use the electric elevator in his building instead of the stairs. He asks me to think of all the electrical connections in the city of Bombay, the immense accumulation of sin in the bright lights of the city.

  I ask Sevantibhai if it is
all right to use my computer to write down what he is saying. I assure him that it is battery-powered and won’t use the electricity in the flat. He looks doubtful but then assents, on the grounds that what I am writing may spread the Jain message in the wider world. This, as he puts it, is “using sin to combat sin.” So we continue the conversation, the light of the screen illuminating my face in the lamplit apartment as I write.

  Sevantibhai began a course of study in Gujarat with Chandrashekhar Maharaj, the senior Jain guru he had heard speak at Chowpatty, and started taking his family along. The children had been studying in English elementary schools in Bombay—his older son at the Tinkerbell School—but Sevantibhai had pulled them out seven years ago to study the dharma, first at home and then with Chandrashekhar Maharaj. When the children were first taken out of school, there was no talk of diksha. Sevantibhai had simply felt that something was lacking in the education provided by their schools. Now the children have been studying the Jain scriptures in the languages they were written in, Sanskrit and Prakrit. They are more advanced in the study of these languages than Sevantibhai, because the children’s minds are younger, sharper. “They are reading the Tilakmanjari, the hardest book in Sanskrit,” he says with pride.

  He followed the tenets of the religion as a layperson, from his comfortable flat in Bombay. Underlying the guru’s lectures was always this theme: The only way to reach moksha is to renounce the world, to take diksha. Sevantibhai says it was not he, but his older son and his wife, who first felt the strong urge to take diksha. The teacher had said that the family should start with his older son, Snehal. But Sevantibhai’s brothers objected; they said they would give their consent only if he, Sevantibhai, took diksha along with his son. Sevantibhai wasn’t quite ready, and the family stayed in Bombay.