How to Plot in Maximum City

From Arun Kolatkar to the recent three big Bombay books, the city’s fiction and its prose are part of its very being

I was born in bombay, in Matunga, where the affectionate clichés of Tamil life, the smells of coffee, sambar powder and malli flowers, wrap around you from the moment you are born, so that you don’t realise until much later that just a short distance away are people whose lives are very different from yours. My mother was the daughter of immigrants from the South; my father’s family lived one road away. We returned every year for the summer vacations which we would spend listening to the lazy jabber of pigeons and collecting wilting comic books from the tiny libraries at King’s Circle.

It was during one such summer vacation that I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and discovered in it the story of another Bombay childhood — that of Saleem Sinai, growing up just off Warden Road, near Reader’s Paradise, the old Bombelli’s confectionery and the Breach Candy Swimming Club. Unreliable, fast-talking Saleem, who played his part in the history of the nation by cutting up the newspapers to create an anonymous message about a woman’s adulterous liaison: “Why does your wife go to Colaba Causeway on Sunday morning?”

It seemed like another city altogether. That was when Bombay first became unfamiliar to me in the way that fiction makes the world different. With a thrill, through the pages of stories, I began to discover the “insaan-soup” of the city, its colourful mosaic of communities — Firdaus Kanga’s heaven on wheels, Busybee’s relaxed, brun-maska afternoons, Rohinton Mistry’s home of one small Parsi family and one small community struggling to survive a tide of change. The Bombay that flashes by in a story by Nisha da Cunha, where a father and daughter browsing in Chor Bazaar on a Sunday morning, chance upon a marble statue of a woman with one wing, holding a broken lily, and a bird bath, which they bring home for the day when that wistful Bombay dream comes true — “for when we have a garden”.

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And Bombay is the city of dreams. Ashok Banker’s Vertigo, a slangy, racy story of “despo” aspiration, begins at Churchgate station with commuters spilling out of the train.

It is also the city of ordinary people. Of Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie, Maratha Hindu and Roman Catholic boys growing up on different floors of a Mazgaon chawl, and of Ravan’s wheeler-dealer mother Parvati, who slices vegetables sitting under the ceiling fan, singing a song from Baazi. And of Arun Kolatkar’s pi-dog, that looks “a bit like/ a seventeenth century map of Bombay/ with its seven islands/ not joined yet…” The multitudinous city of which Nissim Ezekiel wrote: “In a single day/ I’m forced to listen/ to a dozen film songs,/ to see/ a score of beggars,/ to touch/ uncounted strangers,/ to smell/ unsmellable smells,/ to taste/ my bitter native city.”

In the three most recent — and fattest — “Bombay books”, we are shown a city struggling painfully with change.

With Shantaram came the Colaba of Gregory Roberts, a good-humoured and compassionate portrayal of slum life and shady business; with Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, the darker Bombay of dance bars, lovebirds and an explosively violent underworld; and with the most recent Mumbai novel, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, the city becomes the setting for a riveting drama of good and evil. In the very first chapter of this story of greed, loneliness and betrayal, the police officer Sartaj Singh drives across the city, from Bandra to a South Bombay nightclub, in his ex-wife’s car. We aren’t sure what he is looking for, but he reaches to find himself out of place. He goes home, back to his version of Bombay.

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Crime, violence, and religious fundamentalism are dominant themes in recent fiction and non-fiction set in Mumbai, but the city’s explosions of violence have been written about earlier. In Saadat Hasan Manto, a stinking, graffiti-ridden mootri between Congress House and Jinnah House stands for the failure of its leaders. In another story, a Sikh flat-dweller looks up at the sky from his Bombay balcony, feeling the sea breeze, worrying about the communal riots, recalling his failed relationship with a Jewish girl from Bombay who smokes, wears noisy wooden sandals, and saves his life.

And Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh savagely depicts the current of hate that raced through the city in 1992-93: “There comes a point in the unfurling of communal violence in which it becomes irrelevant to ask, ‘Who started it?’… They surge among us, left and right, Hindu and Muslim, knife and pistol, killing, burning, looting, and raising into the smoky air their clenched and bloody fists.”