Another tale of love and longing in Bombay

The city is a puppet on a string in the hands of Suketu Mehta. It bares its soul, dances to his song and wraps itself round his prose, like an audience around an adept magician.

The book sizzles with passion. Of the writer for his crew of characters, of the characters for the writer, their own lives and for the land of hope that they are waiting to inherit somehow, somewhere.

It is essential that we imbibe this passion for us to feel as strongly as Mr Mehta does for Mumbai. The book, like the city it chronicles, dares its readers to love or hate but it refuses to let you off, indifferent.

Mr Mehta, says at the outset, that he is city-bred and he would never find himself at home anywhere else. He has lived in Calcutta, Mumbai, New York, Paris and several others""it would seem that such a man would have ceased to wonder about the mangle jangle of urban life in morbid, murderous Mumbai. Fortunately for us and for his writing, he doesn't.This makes his story compelling.

The story is told through its characters who come with an invisible "Made in Mumbai" tag. These characters would cease to exist outside this city, they would live on as different people.

It would be impossible, for instance to find a man-woman like Honey, who lives with his wife and is father to his child in the day but is a beer bar dancer at night.

Honey's identity is the worst kept secret in the city but that does not stop the crowds from showering hundreds of rupees on a woman they know is a man at Sapphire""a popular bar in Mumbai.

Ditto for men like Satish, Mickey, Kamal, Zaheer, who are the foot-soldiers of the gangs that run the "underworld". They fray our nerves until we are as jittery as the writer expecting to be shot for trespassing into their lives.

Mr Mehta is able to bring out human strength and frailty by being simple and elegant at the same time. His depiction of Monalisa, the bar dancer whose life is marked by the number of times she has slashed her wrist, stings and punches us across the face like, I assume, a boxer would do to a novice in the ring. Her life makes it impossible for me to look at another girl walking down the street without stealing a look at her wrists.

The book follows its characters around, getting into the minutiae of their lives. It is unrelenting in its depiction of their loves, despair and anger. We argue, plead, cajole and condemn through the writer's voice and are as exasperated as he when he fails to tie up the loose ends in their lives.

Mr Mehta's style resembles that of gonzo journalists, the most famous among them being Hunter S Thompson, as he lives the many lives that he tracks.

Gonzo is an adjective meaning bizarre, crazy, or far-fetched. It was first used to describe a type of journalism practised by Thompson where the writer is not objective about the subject. He becomes part of the lives he profiles or the events he describes.

Mr Mehta narrates the story of Mumbai in the words of its people and makes an impact on the reader by sketching himself in as a character in his book. He lets his emotions, his likes and his dislikes play with that of the reader.

He does the same with the structure of the book that is carefully chosen to follow his return to the city""it is not a chronological account of his time in Mumbai but it is how the city unfolds itself to him.

Throughout, the city is indicted by the people the book profiles. Be it Babbanji, the runaway from Bihar who lives on the pavement and composes poetry, or Ajay Lal, the cop who fights evil with the same zeal as that of a terrorist who kills for his religion, or Sevantibhai Ladhani, the diamond merchant who gives up his millions to wander around the country as a monk.

The shooters who flee from slum to slum to escape the eye of the police or the police who allow themselves to be bought over by the gangsters ""all of these reveal a slice of life that we like to bury in our forgotten sub-conscious. The book forces us to look at the city, warts and all.

The people who damn the city, however, do not turn away from it in anger and despair. In fact they embrace it without any rancour and it is us as readers who find this inexplicable but in their hearts there is no doubt.

There is only hope""a commodity that the city peddles in spades""and confidence. That is why Babbanji who finally reunites with his father and returns to Sitamarhi in Bihar, can scream out of an unreserved compartment filled to the brim: "I'll go to the Patna branch of Time magazine and write for them."

The book is powerful, distressing, and even deeply depressing at times. But like his characters, the writer rises above the decline he portrays and is able to find a city that is not dying. He finds hope among the hopeless in the city.

Not all his readers may be able to look beyond the pain and the hurt the city inflicts on its people; not everybody will be as fortunate to be optimistic about the future of Mumbai as he is. But they will find it impossible not to be sucked in by his storytelling.

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MAXIMUM CITY: BOMBAY LOST AND FOUND

Suketu Mehta
Penguin
Price: Rs 595