Maximum City

I started Maximum city with a strange feeling of excitement and trepidation. I have lived away for 6 years, and every year that I come back, I travel by rickshaws and cars ( not usually trains), since time is short and most of the people I know live in the suburbs, I almost never going up to the town I knew as my own. So now, with book about the rediscovery of Mumbai in hand and an extended vacation to boot, I decide I will explore Mumbai, a s a tourist in my own city.

Maximum city is the autobiographical story of Suketu Mehta’s rediscovery of the city he lived 15 years ago. The book released in 2004, so everything new is 10 years old. But the changes in the beating megapolis that took place in those 10 years. I lived in India in the 10 years , but I was too young, leading a life that was sheltered and protected from the life that is described in MC.

However I’ll say this though, after a chapter on Power shifts between Shiv Sena and Mumbai and Mumbai Police and encounter specialist and the D company and underworld shootings, I’m too drained to read the following chapters on the red light area and the beer bar dancing industry. Everything seems a tainted and corrupted. I need to carry a happy part of Mumbai with me, so I skim through the  chapters that talk about those two. And then stumble upon a striking chapter about a dancing girl who dreams of winning the Miss India pageant and the migrant worker from Bihar who dreams of becoming a poet. If by the Mehta till now talks about why do people migrate to Mumbai? These chapters answer these questions- the story of hope. And I respect Mehta to not talk about the rags to riches story of a well settled Nariman point merchant, no, he talks about a day dreamer living on the streets on south Bombay. ( I write the word homeless, and then I backspace it out. Homeless is not a word I associate with people who sleep on the streets of Mumbai, I gives it a feeling of losing hope and the end. ) Living on the Mumbai streets is the sign of a dream and a hope to live, “closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known” as Mehta puts it).

He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bombay, and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up on the sidewalks.

Much of Mehta’s book is a discover of his relationship with the city, much like meeting an ex love after a long time, he is filled with excitement and trepidation if the city will accept him back into its arms, and will he want to still want to live in the city he has idolized throughout his adolescence and put on a pedestal as a home while he is in exile.