Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  WHEN I MOVED to New York, I missed Bombay like an organ of my body. I thought that when I left Bombay I had escaped from the worst school in the world. I was wrong. The all-boys Catholic school I went to in Queens was worse. It was in a working-class white enclave that was steadily being encroached upon by immigrants from darker countries. I was one of the first minorities to enroll, a representative of all they were trying to hold out against. Soon after I got there, a boy with curly red hair and freckles came up to my lunch table and announced, “Lincoln should never have freed the slaves.” The teachers called me a pagan. My school yearbook photo shows me looking at the camera with the caption, “It’s so strong I can even skip a day,” referring to an advertising slogan for a brand of antiperspirant. This was how the school saw me: as a stinking heathen, emitting the foul odors of my native cooking. On the day I graduated, I walked outside the barbed-wire-topped gates, put my lips to the pavement, and kissed the ground in gratitude.

  In Jackson Heights we reapproximated Bombay, my best friend Ashish and I. Ashish had also been moved from Bombay to Queens, at the age of fifteen. The happiest afternoons of that time were when we went to see Hindi movies at the Eagle Theater. With one letter changed, it had formerly been the Earle Theater, a porn house. The same screen that had been filled with monstrous penises pullulating in mutant vaginas was now displaying mythologicals of the blue-skinned god Krishna; in these films not a breast, not even a kiss was shown. Maybe the theater was being purified. But I still scanned the seats carefully before sitting down on them.

  In the movies I would sometimes catch a glimpse of my building, Dariya Mahal. We spoke in Bambaiyya Hindi, Ashish and I, when we wanted to talk about other people in the subway or curse our teachers in front of them. It became a language of sabotage. It was a good language to joke in; it was a boys’ language. We drank and swore in Hindi. We would walk around the streets of Jackson Heights, Ashish, his neighbor Mitthu, and I, singing Hindi movie songs from the seventies, when we had been taken away; traveling back on music, the cheapest airline. On spring nights the newly softened air carried news from home, from the past, which in Gujarati is known as “bhoot-kal”—the ghost time. A police car drew up one of those nights. Cops got out. “What’re you fellas doin’?” “Nothing.” Three young Gujarati men on the streets, singing suspiciously. “Don’t you know you can be arrested for loitering?” It was a jailable offense: loitering in the ghost time. We moved on, waited for the cop car to go, then resumed our singing, softening the harsh Jackson Heights landscape, making it familiar, transforming it into Jaikisan Heights.

  That was the true period of my exile, when I was restrained by forces greater than myself from going back. It was different from nostalgia, which is a simple desire to evade the linearity of time. I made, in the back of my school notebook, a calendar beginning early in the spring. I had been told by my father, or so I thought, that he would send me to Bombay in the summer of my junior year. Each day I crossed off the previous one and counted the remaining days like a jail sentence. I was happy toward evening because it was one less day in America and one more toward my liberation. Then, in the last week before the summer holidays, my father told me he couldn’t send me to India. He’d send me the next year, after I graduated. I was lost.

  I existed in New York, but I lived in India, taking little memory trains. The fields at dusk. Birds flying home overhead, your car stopping by the side of the road and you getting out. Noticing minute things again: the complexity of the gnarled peepal by the roadside, the ants making their way around it. You go to take a leak in the bushes and lift your head and see. It is warm and close and humid; you are protected once again. There are no people to be seen, not in the fields, not around the one hut you can see in the distance. Dinner is waiting in the city, at the house of your aunt, but you want to stop right here, walk across the fields by yourself, walk into the peasant’s hut, ask for some water, see if you can stay in this village for a few days. A couple of flies have sprung up and are buzzing around your head; you are trying to piss and wave them away at the same time, ruining your shoes. “Bhenchod,” you say.

  I missed saying “bhenchod” to people who understood it. It does not mean “sister fucker.” That is too literal, too crude. It is, rather, punctuation, or emphasis, as innocuous a word as “shit” or “damn.” The different countries of India can be identified by the way each pronounces this word—from the Punjabi “bhaanchod” to the thin Bambaiyya “pinchud” to the Gujarati “bhenchow” to the Bhopali elaboration “bhen-ka-lowda.” Parsis use it all the time, grandmothers, five-year-olds, casually and without any discernible purpose except as filler: “Here, bhenchod, get me a glass of water.” “Arre, bhenchod, I went to the bhenchod bank today.” As a boy, I would try consciously not to swear all day on the day of my birthday. I would take vows with the Jain kids: We will not use the B-word or the M-word.

  In my first New York winter, wearing a foam jacket my parents had bought in Bombay that actually dispersed my body heat out to the atmosphere instead of preserving it, sucking in the freezing winds during my mile-long walk to school and drawing them to my body, I found I could generate warmth by screaming out this word. Walking into the wind and the snowdrifts, my head down, I would roar, “Bhenchod! Bheyyyyyn-chod!” The walk to school led through quiet Queens residential streets, and the good Irish, Italian, and Polish senior citizens who happened to be home in the daytime must have heard this word on very cold days, screamed out loudly by a small brown boy dressed inappropriately for the weather.

  WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN and finally went back to Bombay for a visit, three years after I’d left, the city and my friends in it had grown in wild and strange ways. They all smoked cigarettes, for one, and I did not. They drank heavily, and I did not. Nitin showed me a trick with the quickly emptied bottle of Chivas Regal I’d brought: He rubbed the bottom of it between his hands till the glass was warm and then threw a lit match down it. A pleasing blue flame shot up for an instant. He knew what to do with the bottle when it was full, and he knew what to do when it was empty.

  My friends had forsaken the seaside rocks in front of our building, which a shantytown had completely taken over, for the attractions of a video-game parlor. The palace in the compound downstairs, which had become a girls’ school, had sprouted an extra story. I resented this. We need to have the rooms of our childhood preserved intact, the same pictures up on the wall, the bed in the same corner, the sunlight to come in at the same angle at the same time of day. I felt this room had been let out to a boarder, and I could never move back in. I was no longer a Bombayite; from now on, my experience of the city would be as an NRI, a nonresident Indian. But even when I was living there, there were whole worlds of the city that were as foreign to me as the ice fields of the Arctic or the deserts of Arabia.

  My family tried to involve me in the diamond business. I would wake up and go with my uncle to his office. It was not a successful apprenticeship. I very quickly got bored of “assortment,” the arranging of the glittery stones into different lots depending on their imperfections. I made mistakes. “You goof,” my uncle’s business partner said, in 1980, “like President Carter.” I didn’t join the business, but I kept going back and forth, spending longer and longer periods in India, up to six months at a time. It could not be called traveling; it was more like migrant work. I would get my commissions from the West—I had begun writing about India—and fulfill them in the East. I went back every four years, then every two years, then every year. In recent years, I have been going back twice a year, to write about the country. “Look at Suketu,” one of my friends pointed out encouragingly to another friend, who had returned to India from the States and missed America. “He’s become almost a commuter.”

  I ALSO CAME BACK to Bombay to marry. I had met my wife, who was born in Madras and raised in London, on an Air India plane, the perfect metaphor for a meeting of exiles: neither here nor there, happiest in transit. I was going to Bombay and Sunita to Madras. W
e talked about exile—and I knew at once.

  My mother had come here to study at Sophia College in the fifties, all the way from Nairobi. My father would take the train from Calcutta for three days and get her at her hostel, on Marine Drive, and they would walk to Nariman Point. Then they would walk back, all the way to Chow-patty, the young suitor and his teenage fiancée, and eat chana bhaturas—chickpeas and big puris—at Cream Centre or go up to the Café Naaz and drink milkshakes. Sometimes they would go to the Jehangir Art Gallery. Thirty years later, without conscious intention, I found myself revisiting the cartography of my father’s courtship with another Indian girl from abroad. We walked along the bay; we took in the pictures at the art gallery. Bombay is where my family found love. It is where my uncle, newly arrived from Calcutta, spotted my aunt at a fun fair. We came back from distant places—Nairobi, Calcutta, New York—to chase love here.

  The day after my first date with Sunita, a cousin was going to Kanpur and I went to Victoria Terminus to drop him off. As the Gorakhpur Express pulled into the station, an enormous horde of migrant workers going back to their villages rushed it. The policemen beat them back with lathis. There was an immense clamor, and I stood to one side, watching, despairing. I thought of the girl I had just met, her beauty, her Englishness. She was the way I could distinguish myself from this herd, prevent myself from getting annihilated by the crowd. At that moment I realized I was in love. Being with her, with a fine woman like her, would make me an individual.

  The next day, in love, I took her to Juhu Beach. The sea washed her feet and made her languorous, vulnerable. I put my arm around her, and she allowed her head to rest on my shoulder. On our third date, at the Sangam Bar overlooking the Arabian Sea—where, I found out later, my father had wooed my mother, and my uncle took my aunt—after seven bottles of London Pilsner, I proposed to Sunita. She laughed.

  IN THE PLAYGROUND of New York my first son, Gautama, was always hesitant; he would look at the other children from a distance. I would watch him smiling at the other kids, rocking back and forth. Even when they returned his smile, came forward, and sought to include him in their gangs, he would run away, run to me, maintain his distance. At a very early age, too early an age, he became conscious of his difference.

  I took Gautama to his first day of preschool, at the Y on 14th Street. All the two-year-olds were speaking English except my son. We had raised him speaking Gujarati at home. The teachers led the kids through a drill, telling them when to raise their hands; they sang songs. My son could not understand. I sat with him, feeling miserable. The kids in our building said about him, “He can’t talk.” He looked up at them hopefully, but they didn’t invite him to play. When he sat in the garden downstairs, eating his khichdi—which the British had changed into kedgeree—from his little bowl, the girl living across the hall screwed up her face. “Eeeuww.” This was what colonialism, fifty years after the Empire ended, had done to my son: It had rendered our language unspeakable, our food inedible.

  Then our second son, Akash, was born. More and more we thought: We have to take the children home. Our children must have the experience of living in a country where everyone looks just like them. Where we can go into a restaurant in a small town in the country and all heads will not automatically turn to stare at us. In India they can grow up with confidence; they will get a sense of their unique selves, which will be welcome in the larger self. Home is not a consumable entity. You can’t go home by eating certain foods, by replaying its films on your television screen. At some point you have to live there again. The dream of return had to be brought into the daylight sooner or later. But to what place would we return, my Bombay, Sunita’s Madras, or someplace cheap and lovely like the Himalayas? In 1996, I had been in Bombay for two months, to write an article about the Hindu—Muslim riots. It was the longest span of time I had spent in the city since leaving, and it felt hospitable to me. Sunita could go back to school, for a master’s degree. There are many Bombays; through the writing of a book, I wanted to find mine.

  JUST BEFORE I LEFT New York, I walked into a magazine store where I had often browsed in the afternoon. I had never before spoken to the cashier. I picked up a magazine, took it to the counter, and realized I had forgotten my wallet. I set it down and told the cashier I would be right back. “You can give me the money later,” he said, waving me on. “I know you.”

  I walked out of the store, exhilarated. In these last five years, I had made the East Village my home. Home is where your credit is good at the corner store. New York, under Mayor Giuliani, had experienced a rebirth. We left a safe city, where you could come out of a club at 4 a.m. and still find people on the street, couples, lovers. A city that worked, where the garbage got picked up, the fallen snow was cleared within hours, the traffic moved predictably, and subway trains were frequent and air-conditioned. There were parties at every corner.

  But each time we have gotten comfortable in a place we have moved. Each time we have gotten to know a group of people, we have needed to go somewhere else to find people we didn’t know. We were now going to India, not as tourists and not to visit relatives, either. Other than my uncle in Bombay and my aunts in Ahmadabad and Kanpur, I have almost no relatives left in India. They’ve all moved—to America, to England. India was the new world for me. And Bombay was landfall.

  COMING BACK from a trip to Elephanta Island, and seeing the wedding cake of the old Taj Hotel, the imitation skyscraper of the new one, and the Gateway of India in front of them, I feel the slightest souvenir of the quickening of the heart that European travelers to India must have felt, through all those long centuries. After several months at sea, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, after many perils and storms and illnesses, beyond this massive gate lies all of India. Here are tigers and wise men and famines. A hurried stop, a quick halt to take a bath and get a night’s sleep on solid land, before the train departs early the next morning for the real India, the India of the villages. Nobody back then came to Bombay to live there forever; it was just a way station, between paradise and hell. You came to Bombay to pass through it.

  It was called Heptanesia—the city of seven islands—by Ptolemy in A.D. 150. The Portuguese called it Bom Bahia, Buon Bahia, or Bombaim—Portuguese for “good bay.” In 1538, they also called it Boa-Vida, the island of good life, because of its beautiful groves, its game, and its abundance of food. Another story about its name concerns the Sultan Kutb-ud-din, Mubarak Shah I, who ruled over the islands in the fourteenth century, demolished temples, and became a demon: Mumba Rakshasa. Other Hindu names for these islands were Manbai, Mambai, Mambe, Mumbadevi, Bambai, and now Mumbai. It is a city that has multiple aliases, as do gangsters and whores. Waves of rulers have owned this clump of islands: the Hindu fisherfolk, the Muslim kings, the Portuguese, the British, the Parsi and Gujarati businessmen, the sheths (joined by Sindhis, Marwaris, and Punjabis later), and now, finally, the natives again, the Maharashtrians.

  If you look at Bombay from the air, if you see its location—spread your thumb and your forefinger apart at a thirty-degree angle and you’ll see the shape of Bombay—you will find yourself acknowledging that it is a beautiful city: the sea on all sides, the palm trees along the shores, the light coming down from the sky and thrown back up by the sea. It has a harbor, several bays, creeks, rivers, hills. From the air, you get a sense of its possibilities. On the ground it’s different. My little boy notices this. “Look,” Gautama points out, as we are driving along the road from Bandra Reclamation. “On one side villages, on the other side buildings.” He has identified the slums for what they are: villages in the city. The visual shock of Bombay is the shock of this juxtaposition. And it is soon followed by violent shocks to the other four senses: the continuous din of the traffic coming in through open windows in a hot country; the stench of bombil fish drying on stilts in the open air; the inescapable humid touch of many brown bodies in the street; the searing heat of the garlic chutney on your vadapav sandwich early on your first jet-lagg
ed morning.

  From the beginnings of the city, there was a Bombay culture, unique in India. Bombay is all about transaction—dhandha. It was founded as a trading city, built at the entrance to the rest of the world, and everybody was welcome as long as they wanted to trade. Gerald Aungier, the East India Company’s governor from 1672 to 1675, gave the city freedom of religion and of movement, a marked departure from the Portuguese feudal and religious policies. From then on, Bombay flourished as a free port, in every sense of the word. When the American Civil War stopped the supply of cotton to England, Bombay stepped into the breach and earned in five years, from 1861 to 1865, £81 million more than the city would normally have received for its cotton. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which cut travel time to the Empire in half, Bombay truly became the gateway to India, supplanting Calcutta as the richest city in the Indian Empire. So they came, from all over India and the world: Portuguese, Mughal, British, Gujarati, Parsi, Maratha, Sindhi, Punjabi, Bihari . . . American.

  On the map of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region issued by the region’s Development Authority, the land beyond the eastern boundary is marked WEST COAST OF INDIA. It is probably a cartographer’s impreciseness, but the distinction is significant and valid. It was not until the late nineteenth century that Bombay started thinking of itself as an Indian city. And even now there are people who would prefer it if Bombay were a city-state, like Singapore. Oh, can you just imagine if we were like Singapore! they say. Relieved of having to bear the burden of this tiresome country, like a young couple whose bedridden aunt, whom they have been supporting and nursing for long painful years, has just died. It takes trauma to establish a city’s connection with the hinterland. With the 1992—93 Hindu—Muslim riots and bomb blasts in Bombay, and the 2001 airborne demolition of the World Trade Center in New York, a certain notion of geography got altered along with the skyline: the idea that the island city could live apart from the landmass immediately to its east—India in the case of Bombay; the rest of the world in the case of New York. All that, we had felt, happened out there, to somebody else.