Maximum City (89 page)
Authors: Suketu Mehta
The Battle of Bombay is the battle of the self against the crowd. In a city of 14 million people, how much value is associated with the number one? The battle is Man against the Metropolis, which is only the infinite extension of Man and the demon against which he must constantly strive to establish himself or be annihilated. A city is an agglomeration of individual dreams, a mass dream of the crowd. In order for the dream life of a city to stay vital, each individual dream has to stay vital. Monalisa needs to believe she will be Miss India. Ajay needs to believe he will escape the police force. Girish needs to believe he will be a computer magnate. The reason a human being can live in a Bombay slum and not lose his sanity is that his dream life is bigger than his squalid quarters. It occupies a palace.
But what every Indian also desires, secretly or openly, is to devote his life to a collective larger than himself. The Muslim hit men of the D-Company think of themselves as warriors for the qaum, the universal nation of Islam. Girish wants to bring money home to his family. Sunil claims, when he is not thinking about business, to be working for the nation. For in this country, which of all civilizations has been devoted to the most exquisite consideration of the interior life—of the form, structure, and purpose of the self—we are individually multiple, severally alone.
One blue-bright Bombay morning, in the middle of the masses on the street, I have a vision: that all these individuals, each with his or her own favorite song and hairstyle, each tormented by an exclusive demon, form but the discrete cells of one gigantic organism, one vast but singular intelligence, one sensibility, one consciousness. Each person is the end product of an exquisitely refined specialization and has a particular task to perform, no less and no more important than that of any other of the 6 billion components of the organism. It is a terrifying image. It makes me feel crushed, it eliminates my sense of myself, but it is ultimately comforting because it is
such a lovely vision of belonging. All these ill-assorted people walking toward the giant clock on Churchgate: They are me; they are my body and my flesh. The crowd
is
the self, 14 million avatars of it, 14 million celebrations. I will not merge into them; I have elaborated myself into them. And if I understand them well, they will all merge back into me, and the crowd will become the self, one, many-splendored.
I
WOKE UP
in Brooklyn one September morning to find a thick gray cloud outside my window: the debris blowing over the East River from the burning World Trade Center. That morning, in the city I had moved back to, set off a chain of events that decisively changed the nature of the gangwar in the city I had recently left.
In December 2001, Kashmiri separatists attacked the parliament in Delhi, and war almost broke out between India and Pakistan, hampering the movement of men and matériel across the border. President Pervez Musharraf has always publicly denied that Dawood Ibrahim lives in Pakistan. The country’s image was not good after it emerged that its intelligence service had fostered the Taliban, and after the murder of Danny Pearl; it would make the country look even worse to be harboring gangsters. In October 2003, the U.S. Treasury Department officially designated Dawood Ibrahim a “global terrorist,” saying that the don “has found common cause with Al Qaida, sharing his smuggling routes with the terror syndicate and funding attacks by Islamic extremists aimed at destabilizing the Indian government.” It listed him as living in Karachi and published his Pakistani passport number.
The D-Company leaders now live in a constant state of anxiety: They fear being killed or handed over to India as part of a goodwill gesture on the part of their Pakistani hosts; they fear being assassinated by Rajan’s men; and, most of all, they fear one another. The fear they use to make their livelihoods, to convince an extortion target to part with millions of rupees without a shot being fired, has come home to stalk them. But the terror in Bombay hasn’t stopped. In August 2003, two car bombs went off, at the Gateway of India and in the diamond market, killing 52 and maiming 150 people. It was a form of revenge, again: for the riots in the neighboring state of Gujarat, in which hundreds of Muslims had been burnt alive by Hindu mobs earlier that year. His city again needed Ajay Lal, who was brought in from the railways to take over the investigation.
In September 2000, a squad of Chotta Shakeel’s men stormed into a house in Bangkok, where Chotta Rajan was attending a dinner, and blazed away. While the assassins were firing, they kept their cell phones on; Shakeel, sitting in Karachi, had the pleasure of hearing the screams of the traitor as the bullets penetrated his body. Then, as a don in a Hindi film might, Rajan jumped over the balcony and escaped, hobbling away on broken legs. He was last reputed to be in Luxembourg, still controlling, by telephone, what was left of his gang in Bombay. Abu Salem, the man who had ordered the hit on Rakesh Roshan and had threatened Vinod, was arrested in Lisbon in 2003, in the company of a Hindi movie starlet, and is being held pending extradition to India.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the Bombay cops had embarked on a wholesale campaign of encounter killings. In 1998, forty-eight men that the police had labeled “gangsters” were killed in encounters. In 1999, the number shot up to eighty-three and declined slightly to seventy-four in 2000. In 2001, more than a hundred men were shot dead by the Mumbai Police. As the gangwar diminished, the crime columns of the city papers began filling up with unorganized crimes: servants murdering their employers, spurned lovers extracting revenge.
And then, in 2003, came Abdul Karim Telgi. He was a former peanut vendor who had printed 320 billion rupees’ worth of forged revenue-stamp forms, one of the biggest corruption scandals in the nation’s history. He got away with the forgeries by bribing Bombay’s politicians and cops wholesale. The scandal affected all ranks of the police, including the commissioner, who was arrested. So were encounter specialists like Pradeep Sawant, who was packed off to jail, as he never had been for killing human beings. Telgi, it emerged, had been taking his stacks of rupees and blowing them over the dancers at a beer bar called Sapphire, which Honey had just quit after fathering a child, a beautiful, bright-eyed little boy named Love.
G
RATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE FOLLOWING
:
In Bombay: Vasant and Naina Mehta, Anupama and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Farrokh Chothia, Manjeet Kripalani, Dayanita Singh, Mahesh Bhatt, Tanuja Chandra, Rahul Mehrotra, Naresh Fernandes, Meenakshi Ganguly, Anuradha Tandon, Ali Peter John, Eishaan, Asad bin Saif, Kabir and Sharmistha Mohanty, Adil Jussawala, Rashid Irani, Kumar Ketkar, Foy Nissen, Sameera Khan.
In New York: Ramesh and Usha Mehta, Sejal Mehta, Monica and Anand Mehta, Ashish Shah, Amitav Ghosh, Akhil Sharma, Zia Jaffrey, Somini Sengupta.
In London: Viswanath and Saraswati Bulusu, Ian Jack.
My gurus: James Alan McPherson and U. R. Ananthamurthy, and my agent, Faith Childs.
My editors: David Davidar, Sonny Mehta, Deborah Garrison, Geraldine Cook, Ravi Singh, Vrinda Condillac, Janice Brent.
The Whiting Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony.
Many of the names in this book have been changed, as has that of the city. Much of this book was made possible through the generous help of people I cannot name. They have my profound thanks.
And most of all, to Sunita, Gautama, Akash. Thanks for bringing me back to the present tense. I owe you.
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2005
Copyright © 2004 by Suketu Mehta
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2004.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book were originally published in
Granta
and
Condé Nast Traveler.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Oxford University Press India for permission to reprint “Irani Restaurant Instructions” by Nissim Ezekiel. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press India, New Delhi.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Mehta, Suketu.
Maximum city: Bombay lost and found / Suketu Mehta—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Bombay (India)—Description and travel. I. Title.
DS486.B7M42 2004
954’.79205—dc22
2004048969
eISBN: 978-0-307-57431-2
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
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