Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Another cancerous outgrowth of the Bombay Rent Act is the “paying guest.” In looking for an office, I am referred to the “PG rooms,” which are rooms in someone else’s flat. The city has a whole tribe of “paying guests,” usually young professionals from other cities, suffering the daily humiliations imposed on them by their landlords—what time you can come in and who you can bring with you, how much ice you’re entitled to from the fridge, how loud you can play your music. There are three personal gods that every Hindu is supposed to revere: mother, father, guest. There is no category for “paying guest.”

  The Rent Act was an institutionalized expropriation of private property. Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books. This allows the perpetual continuation of the most absurd, unreasonable practices. In America I can walk into a gun show and buy a handgun for less than the price of a good dinner for two, even if I am insane or a convicted criminal. In Bombay I can walk into a flat I’ve rented for a year and stay there for the rest of my life, pass it on to my sons after me, and defy the lawful proprietor’s efforts to get my ass off his property. In both instances, I have the law behind me.

  The city is full of people claiming what’s not theirs. Tenants claim ownership by virtue of having squatted on the property. Millworkers demand that mills be kept open at a loss to provide them with employment. Slum dwellers demand water and power connections for illegal constructions on public land. Government employees demand the right to keep working long past when they’re needed, at taxpayer expense. Commuters demand further subsidies for train fares, which are already the lowest in the world. Moviegoers demand that the government freeze ticket prices. The Indian government has long believed in the unreality of supply and demand; what you pay for an item, for a food or for a service, has no relation to what it costs the producer.

  ON A VISIT to the caves of Elephanta Island, I come out to a courtyard just off the main cave. From here, I can look at two sets of pillars: on my right, the pillars commissioned by the Rashtrakuta kings in the eighth century; in front of me, the new pillars built by the Archaeological Survey of India. In one panoramic sweep you can see the whole decline of culture in India. The original pillars, built a thousand years ago, are delicately fluted and in proportion, curving gently outward like an infant’s belly. The ASI pillars are stolid blocks of stone, each unmatched in shape and color and size with the others; at a glance you can tell they are wonky. They are devoid of ornamentation, which is probably just as well, since God knows what monstrosities their house sculptors would carve on the pillars if they were allowed to. What we could do so exquisitely in this country a thousand years ago we can’t even attempt today. We were making some of the greatest art of the ancient world. Shattered by invasion and colonialism and an uneasy accommodation with modernity, we now can’t construct five pillars of equal proportions.

  We built the Konarak Temple, Hampi, the Taj Mahal. Then what happened? The quality of architecture in Bombay demonstrates the devolution of the species: What is being built today is worse than what was built fifty years ago, which is worse than what was built a century ago. The public buildings of British Bombay, in the third decade of the Victorian era, took their cue from Gothic church architecture. “It’s got nothing to do with propagating Christianity,” a historian had pointed out to me. “It’s a sample of what they thought of as fine design and good taste.” The colon naded arcades of the stately Victorian buildings of the Fort area pullulate with the traffic of an illegal, immovable, and necessary oriental bazaar. The railway terminus and university and court buildings of the Fort area are either lovable or Gothic follies, depending on your taste, but you can look at them and feel something. There are no modern buildings in Bombay that make you feel anything.

  This, then, is the geography of my childhood: tower blocks of a bastardized Bauhaus design, dwarfing and shadowing the red-roofed bungalows of the earlier rich. In front of my uncle’s building is a monstrous skyscraper, its skeleton having been completed over a decade ago, lying vacant. Several of these buildings dot the city. The flats have been bought for huge sums; they are empty because they violated municipal height limits. The builders knew they were violating the limits and built them anyway, figuring the first priority was to put up the concrete reality and deal with the extraneous issues—municipal clearances, legal papers, bribes—later. But the municipal corporation put its foot down and either demolished some buildings or prevented further construction. The fate of the surviving buildings then entered the courts, where they have settled in for a prolonged spell.

  The country’s oldest buildings are still around. The walls of the five-thousand-year-old public buildings of Mohenjo-Daro are still standing. Not so buildings made in the 1970s. All day long, all around my flat, there is construction; gangs of men and women with hammers and picks, chipping away at the older bungalows and buildings in bits, here and there, not quite destroying but gnawing like an army of mice, then erecting awful structures much less durable than what was there before. There is no professional body that certifies civil engineers in India; they are badly trained. The sand used in the concrete comes from the creeks around Bombay, which contains salt, silt, and shit, so new buildings look weather-beaten, moth-eaten. Many of the newer buildings have one whole side covered in brown cloth, their windows blocked for a year, and scaffolding erected while workers inject granite into the spiderweb of fissures in the building’s walls, shoring them up. Just when the residents are able to open their windows on one side, work begins on the next side. This can go on for years.

  RAHUL MEHROTRA, whose architectural projects—particularly the combination of low-and high-tech material in his buildings—are praised by critics, is in his tenth year of working in Bombay. More than half of his work, the unpaid part, is an urban planning institute in Bombay. He talks to anyone who’ll listen—governments, journalists, Rotarians—about what needs to be done in Bombay. “If you say it long enough, it might become the truth.” He is speaking to me in his new office in Tardeo, furnished in the uncompromisingly modernist style that is his trademark. Pictures of his kids break the rigor. “We have a special problem as planners in Bombay,” says Rahul. “If we make the city nice, with good roads, trains, and accommodation—if we make the city a nicer place to live—it attracts more people from the outside.” I see; then the city’s screwed up again, from too many people. It’s like building roads. The more roads you build, the greater the number of new cars that will rush in to use those roads, and then they’re jammed again. “Planning in India has to take into account the whole country, the rest of the cities.” Unless entry to Bombay is restricted—the Shiv Sena’s plan—it’s an exercise in futility to make this a more livable city. The crowd of bhaiyyas on the Gorakhpur Express will continue to swell, all the more so if they think they can get off the train and be housed by the government. Bombay’s fate is solidly, inextricably, linked to India’s fate, much as the city would like to pretend otherwise.

  Rahul traces the deterioration of Bombay to the late sixties. In 1964, a commission headed by the architect Charles Correa—Rahul’s father-in-law—proposed New Bombay, a “magnet city” for Bombay, a pressure valve. It would be located right across the bay, just to the east of the island city. It would be a planned city; the government would own all the land, and it would have unlimited scope for expansion, because it had all India as its backyard.

  But in the late sixties, the state government backed out of a commitment to move its offices from the Nariman Point Reclamation, on the southern tip of the island, to New Bombay. Private businesses followed suit. “They let Nariman Point go. It was a complete slap in the face of New Bombay. The hubris of money and the nexus between politicians and builders had reached a point where the city’s concern was not primary.” Rahul identifies the five builders who, along with the V. P. Naik government, ruined Bombay: the Makers, the Rahejas, the Dalamals, the Mittals, and the Tulsianis. Their names are immortalized
on the office complexes they constructed in Nariman Point, which, in the original development plan, had been designated for educational and mixed-use residential housing.

  If the builders hadn’t violated the development plan, all the offices they put up in Nariman Point would have gone up in New Bombay, and that momentum and that energy would have driven the new city into being. It would have reoriented the commuting axis of Bombay for the better. Bombay grew along a north-south axis; people live in the north and commute, in inhumanly packed trains, to the south. Its future depends on the axis being reoriented in an east-west direction. Metropolitan Bombay is the largest urban area in India: 32 percent live in the island city, 42 percent in the northern suburbs, and 18 percent in New Bombay. But 72 percent of the jobs are in the island city, where too much of the commuting traffic heads each day.

  The reason the builders took over Nariman Point instead of New Bombay was simple: “The greater you skew demand and supply, the higher prices rise. The five boys must have met and had tea and decided among themselves to corner it all in a smaller plan.” Now New Bombay is that melancholy creation, a dormitory town.

  Rahul spreads out a map of Bombay and points to another solution. He has just drawn up a new plan to develop the eastern waterfront of the island, huge tracts of land now held by the Bombay Port Trust. This looking east puts him squarely at odds with the prevailing vision in Bombay, which is directed west, “where the sunset is beautiful and the breeze is better,” explains Rahul. By opening up the eastern waterfront, “you could visually link the city to New Bombay; you could stand at Ballard Estate and see New Bombay.” But there is stiff resistance from the Bombay Port Trust. “They’re beginning to behave like builders.”

  There is land, thousands of miles of land, to the east. But the east is not good enough for Bombay. It is determined to claim the west, all the way until it reaches Arabia. In Bombay, we grew up looking west, because the sea was the only direction in which the eye could roam free. If people go out on a terrace or balcony of a Bombay apartment, and they have a 360-degree view, their eyes will automatically move toward the west, the direction of the possible.

  My science tutor in the ninth standard once looked out the window of Dariya Mahal and said to me, “All those buildings in front of us”—Dariya Mahal 1 and 2—“are going to presently fall into the sea.” I was alarmed; my grandfather and the girl I was in love with lived in those buildings. But they were not going to stay upright for long, my tutor predicted, because they were built on land reclaimed from the sea: “re-claimed,” as if we had a legitimate claim on it in the first place.

  Once Bombay was composed of seven hilly islands, which were leveled, and the soil dumped into the sea, to make one big island; as the city lost height, it gained area. The history of the construction of Bombay consists of a struggle against the sea, a child standing by the ocean and throwing pebbles into the water—as did I on the rocks behind Dariya Mahal, filling in the pools: an atavistic urge to construct land, to conquer water.

  The architect Hafeez Contractor, who makes blocks of flats in the shapes of seashells, mushrooms, and in one case, a phallus, has the ear of the civic authorities and now wants to “reclaim” yet more land from the western sea: 486 acres more. But the sea continually challenges the claim’s validity. Water takes its revenge on our buildings; it corrodes the exteriors, makes the potato chips and the pappadams soggy, enters our walls, and leaks through our ceilings. Every monsoon is an assault on Bombay. The furious rain is a severe, pitiless arbiter of basic engineering principles. What the municipality can’t do, the rain does: It demolishes unsound structures. The sea and the rain are joined by the sewage, human waste, all around us. All around where I sleep, in my rooms, there is water finding its way through my shell, invading my dry space through a dozen leaks, one drip at a time. There is water everywhere, except in my taps.

  At the age of fourteen I had experienced a miracle. I turned on a tap, and clean water came gushing out. This was in the kitchen of my father’s studio apartment in Jackson Heights. It had never happened to me before. In Bombay the tap, when it worked, was always the first step of a process. The water came out in raw form; things had to be done to it. First it was filtered through a thin cloth to remove visible heavy dirt. It was further filtered in a large white receptacle with candle filters. Then it might be boiled, especially in the rainy season. Finally it would be put in empty whiskey bottles and chilled in the refrigerator or, in my grandparents’ house, in the big clay pots that cooled it and gave it a delicious sweet taste. It took a long time, at least twenty-four hours, between the time the water came out of the tap and the time it could enter my mouth. I had grown up drinking stale water.

  Bombay depends on the hinterland for this most basic resource. It is the only city in India in which water has to be brought in from lakes as distant as sixty miles away. The reason for this was the great plague of 1896. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the city depended on well water and tanks. After the plague, the city closed the wells and tanks. The municipal corporation now treats and supplies some 800 million gallons a day. This is only 70 percent of the total water demand. Those whose demand goes unsatisfied live mostly in the slums. They have to steal the water they need, from pipelines passing their land on the way to customers whom the municipality deems legitimate users of water. Up to a third of the corporation’s water is stolen by the poor. There are periodic riots over water, even in middle-class areas such as Bhayander. The residents of this suburb, housewives and accountants alike, recently went out into the streets and burnt trains because there was no water in their taps. The police teargassed them.

  The architectural profession, says Rahul, has failed to get ordinary citizens excited about urban planning, to show them how all these issues are interconnected. Rahul dismisses as a “nonstarter” the main architecture school in Bombay, J.J., and no urban planning course is taught anywhere. Young people are not coming to him to work with him in his institute. So how, I ask him, would he save the city?

  His answer is disarmingly simple: by opening up more space. There are two ways for a crowded city to sustain itself, by creating new land or by thinking up new uses for existing land. New Bombay is an example of the first kind of approach, in which agricultural land is improved with adequate water supply, sewage, and transportation services to create new extensions to the city. The second approach, which Rahul implies has been insufficiently investigated, is to take existing serviced land, such as the Parel mill areas or the areas around the docks, and convert them to new uses, more suited to today’s needs. These are huge industrial blocks of land, and Rahul would compensate for deficiencies in the existing structure of the city by building schools, hospitals, auditoriums, parks. Another large block of already serviced urban land is owned by the railways: the vast tracts on either side of the tracks. As it is, railway land gets converted for de facto public use anyway, when the slums—Sunil’s railway shanties, for example—advance upon it.

  The notion of what is a luxury and what is a basic need has been upended in Bombay. Every slum I see in Jogeshwari has a television; antennas sprout in silver branches above the shanties. Many in the middle-class slum have motorcycles, even cars. People in Bombay eat relatively well, too, even the slum dwellers. The real luxuries are running water, clean bathrooms, and transport and housing fit for human beings. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you live in the suburbs, you’ll either curse in your car, as you drive for two hours each way toward the center, or asphyxiate in the train compartments, even the first-class ones. The greatest luxury of all is solitude. A city this densely packed affords no privacy. Those without a room of their own don’t have space to be alone, to defecate or write poetry or make love. A good city ought to have that; it ought to have parks or beaches where young people can kiss without being overwhelmed by the crowd.

  The approach being tried now by the government planners is that of a “polynucleated city,” which would spread its commer
cial districts beyond South Bombay to places like the Bandra—Kurla complex, Andheri, Oshiwara. But the greatest possibility for opening up land in Bombay is the mill areas, four-hundred-odd acres of prime Bombay land occupied by fifty-two mills, very few of them running. The mill areas are now dotted with very thin, brightly colored, very high postmodern buildings, out of context and ill at ease among the two-and three-story chawls, with banana trees in front of them, narrow roads, and vast undulating waves of factory roofs. Most of them are luxury residential flats. Where millions once worked, thousands now live. Going up into one building to look at a flat, I notice the same mediocre imagination at work: the cramped rooms and unnaturally large windows, completely unsuited for a country in which the sun is the enemy for much of the day.

  The workers want the mills to be reopened, modernized; they don’t think Bombay’s days as an industrial center are over. The government drew up a plan for the mills: turn a third into low-income housing and housing for laid-off millworkers; allow the owners to sell a third as residential or commercial space, with part of the proceeds to be used for modernizing the mills; and turn a third over to the municipal corporation for public use. There are forty thousand workers still on the payroll of the mills. The owners are trying to wait out the workers, waiting for them to die or retire. Land was given to the owners by the government, say the workers, to create employment, so it is not theirs to decide to dispose of. The millworkers who have accepted voluntary retirement take their one or two lakhs, run through the money quickly, and end up as rickshaw wallahs or drunks or in the underworld. It is, along with the Rent Act, the most potent issue in Bombay’s politics and the saddest: How do you provide a measure of justice to those who built the city, once the city has no further use for them?