Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Walking on, we pass a sign over a shack: BRIGHT COMPUTER CLASSES. “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry has started computer classes here,” says Girish. The slums of Bombay are filled with programmers learning Visual Basic, C ++, Oracle, Windows NT. It is a hospitable new world for the bright young slum children of Bombay, people like Girish, showing them the way out, like boxing or basketball in Harlem. The papers are filled with notices from companies near and far wanting our children, for honest work, well-paid work, with an air-conditioned office and a chance to see the world. Girish’s young sister, Raju, works at getting those children from here to there. She runs an exam-coaching class from the second floor of a shack. Dharmendra, eldest of the Thakkar siblings, pitches in with history lessons when he can.

  A first-standard girl gets up on Raju’s command to recite the pledge:

  “India is my country.

  All Indians are my brothers and sisters

  [Hence we are all bhenchods, I remember from my schooldays]

  I am proud of my country.

  I. . .”

  She looks down. She has forgotten the rest. She sits back on the floor.

  A good part of Raju’s job involves counseling children from troubled homes. She transforms her students from repeaters to successes who score more than 80 percent on their exams. But it’s a nonprofit enterprise for her; she’s not making any money this year from the classes, after the expenses of rent and salaries for the other teachers. When she goes home from the coaching class, she immediately sets to work helping her mother make lunch. Her father looks at me and nods his head. “Very hardworking.” She is good to her father and her brothers and her mother. She will be good to her husband and children when they come into her life. I see her walking along the lanes of the slum, somehow staying fresh and pretty among the open gutters.

  The high point of the year for the Thakkars is their annual trip to their village, Padga Gam, near Navsari, for two or three blissful weeks. There they own a little farm that grows sugar cane, eggplant, and this year rice. For several miles around the house the land is clear. It is a big house, Girish says. It has more than one room. In his village he gets up in the morning and immediately starts eating. His mother cooks on a clay wood-fired stove, in earthen pots, food fresh from the farm. Girish idles on the bed. He sleeps some more. He eats some more. There is a little black-and-white portable TV that they all watch in the evenings. He hates coming back to Bombay. “I feel depressed when I come into Virar,” says Girish. “I feel really depressed. If someone pulls my leg I may even hit him.”

  GIRISH AND I STROLL outside his office in central Bombay one afternoon for some bhelpuri. At Bora Bazaar, we come up to the Shree Krishna Bhelpuri House—“We exchange old and torn notes”—a cart in the middle of some mounds of onion and potato peels. Girish points to a stack of old or torn notes behind the bhaiyya. Yesterday he gave him 24 rupees in soiled notes and got back 20 in clean ones. Bombay has a service for every human need.

  Near Girish’s office, opposite the General Post Office, are a group of letter writers. They sit in front of the kabutarkhana, where thousands of fluttering pigeons gather to eat grain left by Jains, around a nonfunctional fountain. They prepare packages for foreigners, serve as a mailbox for those living on the streets, fill out forms and money orders for those literate but unskilled at bureaucratic writing, and write letters for the illiterate back to their villages. The letter writers are a bridge between the city and the village. “Household matters,” a letter writer named Ahmed explains to me. News of a son born, questions to a wife about domestic matters. Letters from workers in the city instructing their wives to send the children to school, to take care of the old folk. In the village, the letters will be read out to the recipients by the postman, who is thus an encyclopedia of the overt and secret life of the community. A subject that comes up often is an inquiry to people in the village about a wife’s behavior. The migrant men working in the city might see their wives for less than a month every year. There is a commonly told story in Bombay: “My gardener’s wife in his village had a son. But he hadn’t seen his wife for three years. My gardener was so happy. I pointed out that the child couldn’t possibly be his. But he said the son was in his name. It didn’t matter who planted the seed, the fruit would belong to him. And then he gave me some sweets.”

  The news they communicate is a mixture of good and bad, but mostly good, Ahmed tells me, because people feel it necessary to deliver really bad news in person. “And if someone is having an affair. Letters of love,” Ahmed says.

  “Love letters?”

  “Yes, if a young man is writing to a woman he comes to us. We throw in our own wordings.”

  “What types of wordings?”

  “Oh, the usual. You wait for me.” If a boy is far from his girl, he writes to her, Don’t get married without me. I’ll come very soon. I’m building a house here. Wait for me. Girls have love letters written on their behalf to Arabs in the Gulf.

  “Is there any one of you who is an expert in love letters?”

  “Him,” they say, and point to the drunk I have been ignoring. The drunk’s face lights up, his mutterings in English get louder. “Anil,” they say. “Ashok Sinha.” Perhaps Anil is a nom de plume. “The Holi effect still hasn’t come down,” the others explain, referring to the bacchanalia of the previous day.

  Initially, the largest single group of their clients were prostitutes. They would dictate letters to their parents: I have a good job in the city. Your daughter is doing well as a secretary. Here is some money. Please get brother educated, please get sister married. I will be sending you more every month. The letter writers provide the facility of a return address, as they do for street kids and runaways. Occasionally the parents will decide to visit their daughter in the big city, see how she is doing, take in the sights. They turn up at V.T. Station, right behind the GPO, and trudge with their bags and boxes and baskets of choicest fruit from the village to the address given. Seeing the puzzlement on the faces of the old folks, the letter writers guess immediately, ask them to sit down on the stools, and force upon them a glass of tea, while a messenger is dispatched to the prostitute: Come quickly, your parents are here. “We never give away their address,” the letter writers tell me.

  The letter writers also help the prostitutes craft piteous appeals to clients in other cities. Send money, come quickly, send ten thousand, I am in big problems. Many of the working girls have children, and they use guilt to manipulate the purported fathers: I need money to run the house, take care of the kids, oh, please send money, the last thing you gave me got spent or I gave it away on credit. As the letter writers recite the stock phrases, it is clear that their opinion of their clients’ veracity is not high. They are most often written in Bombay street language, a mix of Hindi, Marathi, and English, with snatches of Tamil and Gujarati thrown in.

  If you go to speak to the letter writers, you will be given a stool under the blue tarpaulin roof. When there is a gust of wind the tarp shakes and lets loose a hailstorm of pigeon shit on your head. While I speak to Ahmed, four or five of the other letter writers are busy picking pigeon droppings out of my hair. “Doesn’t it bother you?” I ask Ahmed. All their heads are covered with small white feathers, grainy pellets of dung. “We shake it off only when we go home; we don’t keep cleaning each time it happens.” It’s very picturesque, though, the men sitting with sealing wax and stamps all in a row in front of the little square, with thousands of pigeons perpetually in flight, ascending and descending, crapping on them all day while they’re trying to write love letters.

  But they won’t be around much longer. “Business is half what it used to be,” they complain. “The number of illiterates must be a tenth of what it used to be.” The availability of cheap telephone calls to the village has also cut into their business, and telegrams have almost ceased. Most of the time, these days, the letter writers are mere postal clerks, wrapping parcels, affixing stamps.

  As I’m leaving, Anil,
the love-letter expert, is gesticulating, grinning. I had introduced myself as being from America. “Saddam,” he says. “I like Saddam.”

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in a generation, the Thakkars are about to move out of the slum. They have scraped together the money to buy a one-bedroom flat in the new city of Mira Road, just outside the municipal limits of Bombay. The family is thinking about the move with exultation and dread. They will find it difficult leaving Jogeshwari, they say, because of the “community” here. But for the first time in Girish’s life, he will be living under a roof not made of tin and tarp.

  Coming out of the train at Mira Road, we hear three office girls conversing in English. They attract a sound from a group of idle men, not a whistle but a sucking of the lips, somewhat like the chirruping of birds. It is a startlingly obscene sound, air being sucked in, suggestive of great sexual menace. As we walk across the skeleton of an overpass spanning the tracks, we can see a huge sign on a school near the station: ENRICH ACADEMY. The people who’ve flocked to the new city know the true purpose of education: not to lift the spirit toward a higher god but to enrich yourself. The shops outside the station are all real estate offices; Mira Road is a city whose sole business is selling itself. There is still possibility here. It is a city inventing itself, separate from Bombay.

  We walk toward Girish’s house, through a vast half-empty city of kitsch. A freestanding pair of columns supporting a huge Greek pediment adorns the side of the road, rising out of the mud and leading to no other structure. It is so incongruous it looks like a movie prop, something so bizarrely out of place in the northern suburbs of Bombay that I have to look at it again to make sure I’m not dreaming. The buildings are postmodern on the cheap: randomly placed pediments, Chippendale tops, finials, and facades done up in various pastels, at least until the first rain, which washes away the thin paint and leaves everything looking the same dull yellow shade of streaked mud. The buildings of Mira Road want to be in Europe. Accordingly, they are given misspelt European names: TANWAR HIGHTS, CHANDRESH REVEARA. Hundreds of them are placed anyhow all around the landscape, and others lie half constructed, waiting for real estate prices to go up. At the moment they are low; Girish’s family bought the flat for three and a half lakhs and now it is worth two-thirds of that. A slum room in Jogeshwari fetches more.

  The reason for the ornate facades is that the builders want to give the owners the impression of luxury, which is defined as living in a foreign country: another time, another place. A Bombaywallah will do without functioning appliances or running water, he will do without good roads, but he won’t do without style, shaan. The Mira Road residential blocks are mostly facade; the rooms behind the Palladian columns, under the Chippendale tops, have no substance. The walls, newly built, already leak. Many of the multistory buildings have only a shaft for a lift, no machinery inside. This is all that the slum dweller can afford in his first move. He can’t afford practicality, so he might as well have the glitz and the flash, because that is cheaper than to build something solid. The bombastic entrances also fit with the Bombay idea of shaan: The outside should lead you to believe that the inside is bigger than it is. Even in central Bombay, a chawl might have several imposing arches leading to its matchboxes.

  Young couples stroll up and down the one main street, enjoying the evening breeze. It feels cooler here than in the city, and when you get off the train there is a pleasant impression of green space to the west, where there are no buildings, only salt pans and marshes. The suburb is being built to the east, a reversal of the pattern farther down the line toward Bombay, where the western side, the one near the sea, is more desirable. The nights here, though mosquito-infested, are quiet; most of the people living here are taking their first step out of the slums and cannot afford cars. Besides, there are no roads worth driving on; they are all rutted. As we get closer to Girish’s building, there is a large undrained swamp from which issue clouds of mosquitoes that attack all of us. I see a street vendor bang a dark streetlight. It responds to his blow and flickers on.

  The buildings are all grouped in enormous complexes named after the builder or one of his dearly departed relatives. All the buildings around Girish have the first name Chandresh, Chandresh Darshan, Chandresh Mandir, Chandresh Heights, Chandresh Accord. Girish lives in Chandresh Chhaya—the Shade of Chandresh. “Who built this place?” I ask Girish.

  “Mangal Prabhat Lodha.”

  During the elections, I had been trekking around Malabar Hill with this same Mangal Prabhat Lodha, a BJP member of the legislative assembly, watching the campaigning. Chandresh was his father. And I myself had lived in Mangal Chhaya, since Mangal Prabhat Lodha turns out, much to Girish’s amazement, to be living two floors above the flat I rented in Dariya Mahal.

  On the Thakkars’ front door is this sticker, U R NOBODY IF YOU AIN’T AN INDIAN, sponsored by Proline, an importer of foreign sports equipment. Whenever Mr. Thakkar hears the national anthem played on the TV, he makes everybody in the household stand. “If we are sleeping, he wakes us up and makes us stand up. If we are sick, we can sit up,” says Dharmendra.

  His faith in the nation has at last been realized. Years ago, in the Jogeshwari slum, Girish’s mother saw a vision of the future in the pages of a Gujarati magazine. It showed the window of a house, fringed by curtains and with a lamp hanging from the ceiling next to the window. She asked of her God, When will I have something like this? Now the family point to the window of the living room of the flat. It has curtains, and a lamp hangs from the ceiling.

  There is a nonstop party in the Thakkar household. People will be coming and going for weeks, mostly their former neighbors from Jogeshwari, but also relatives, Dharmendra’s and Girish’s coworkers, Raju’s students, Paresh’s dancer friends. The Thakkars, after two generations, have just stepped into a pukka house, into the middle class. The progress of the Thakkar family is the story of the growth of Bombay. They moved from Fort, where Girish’s father lived in a large house with his extended family, to the Jogeshwari shanty and now to the Mira Road flat. Girish wants to move on to America, the peak of that trajectory.

  For the first time in their lives, the children don’t have to sleep with their parents. The luxurious sleeping arrangements were chalked out when they moved in. In the bedroom: Dharmendra (the man on whose salary the family runs and the flat was bought) and Paresh, Girish’s younger brother, on the bed. The other brother, Sailesh, is working as a salesman in interior Maharashtra but visits often. In the living room: the mother on the divan, the father on the lower daybed, Girish near him, separated by a small gap, and Raju on the mattress by the kitchen. The two rooms, small to my eyes, are cavernous to the Thakkars. “One day it was actually uncomfortable for me,” Dharmendra says. “I couldn’t sleep.” So most nights they all sleep in the living room, watching the new TV, whose sleep timer shuts it off after thirty minutes. They like being lulled to sleep by the sound of familiar human voices. Having grown up in one room, they don’t know what to do with the extra room when at long last they get it.

  The living room has hand-painted flower vases. There is nice light coming from the plant-fringed window but also a lot of mosquitoes, to which the family seems immune. Paresh’s drawings—one of the Eiffel Tower, another of the Statue of Liberty, and a third of a man shrugging off his clothes and what appears to be his skin too—prominently adorn the showcase. One whole wall of the Thakkars’ living room is covered with dark brown stone tiles. It is vastly out of place with the other three whitewashed walls. Two spotlights on the top, near the ceiling, struggle to bring some light to the hard stone surface. “People think the stone is for decoration,” explains Dharmendra. “It is actually there because there is leakage in that wall.” In the brand-new building, water invades the structure from all sides and seeps through the walls. However, when visitors to his flat comment on how nice the stone looks, Dharmendra doesn’t correct them.

  He shows me the brochure that enticed him and his family and all the other occupants to
Chandresh Chhaya. It is extravagantly colored in a 1950s style—all bright reds, yellows, blues—and the kind of broad gaudy typefaces that American land companies used to attract migrants to sunny California. The misspelt text reads:

  In 1980, a group of dynamic young entrepreneurs had a dream. A dream of creating an oasis of beauty and peace amidst the barren monotony of city apartments. Under guidance of Founder Late Sh. Chandresh Lodha Group has a dream to bring a lush green environment of the harrassed house-hunters of Bombay. . . . Today, Lodha Group symbolize home radiant with beauty, warm with comfort, bright with happiness and shining with prosperity. Today, a Lodha home means happiness forever.

  The illustrations in the brochure show a silhouetted skyline of skyscrapers and a pair of drawings of low buildings surrounded by palm trees, strolling couples, limousines gliding by on uncluttered roads, a children’s playground, and a blue sea wave about to break. A host of “special amenities” ranging from a bus service to the station to a tennis court, clubhouse, and library are promised, none of which have materialized. But if you were sitting in your shack in Jogeshwari, with the open gutter flowing outside, the shouts of the drunks and taporis at battle coming in with the giant mosquitoes through your one window, and examining this brightly colored brochure, your heart too would strain to believe it, would lend its promises the necessary credence. Perhaps your sleep that night would be illuminated with a dream of your children playing in that lush green playground, your wife preparing food on that marble kitchen counter, and yourself walking back from the station toward your own flat on a Saturday night on the hundred-foot road, breathing the country air.

  Chandresh Chayya is in terrible condition. The walls are uneven, gaping holes in the wall exist where electric fittings are meant to be placed, and as usual there is no lift in the elevator shaft. The stairs are also unfinished. The builder had promised amenities such as a garden, and an “ISI Mark geyser” for hot water. The garden became another building next door, and there was no geyser in Chandresh Chayya. So Dharmendra complained and a geyser was installed. It is a ridiculous little thing. “It won’t heat up water to wash a rat.” But it is, within the definition of the agreement, a geyser, and it has a good sense about how much water is available for it to heat up. Water for bathing comes into the taps here only every alternate day. The Thakkars have built water tanks in the loft to store it.