Archive for July 9th, 2009
Maximum City..
“I had left as a teenager, spent twenty-one years wandering around cold countries and returned to resume my interrupted adolescence”
— Suketu Mehta (from Maximum City)
Suketu, I think I know him a lot about him now. Enough to be at a first name basis with him (or so as I think). I know about his wife, his friends, his contacts in the company, his friends from the bar, his friend from Bihar…and lot more. Never have I been allowed to see Mumbai through another man’s eyes.
As he reminisces about Bombay, layer by layer, taking you deeper into the slums, making you intrude into the lives of bar dancers, and gangsters and cross dressers and sex workers and rioters…
Suketu tells me his stories , Bombay then and when he returned in the late 90s. Of Parsis who are still adamant about their regular table, of lavatories or the lack of them.
The Bombay basks naked in the sunshine, the sun refuses to set as city prospers despite of the vices. Occasional strikes and blasts..and then catch the last local at night.
The land of lust, wrath and gluttony, survives. Here the salesman helps a salesman, a shooter helps another. But not when it comes to faith. They lose faith in camaraderie, the thin slivers of loose imbecile skin demarcate the teams. “Skins and no skins”
Where encounters would not entirely be pleasant, for chances are you will end up dead..shot at from a close range. The vada paw eating masses, bequeath the power to dominate.
The city stinks of sewage, the city dwells on extremities, the city suffers a recurring hangover of celluloid stunners…yet it dreams. It works…and dreams..and achieves.
Bombay is conscious, alive, living.
It is indeed one good Indian…truely Indian masterpiece. Its our slums and our dogs..and Suketu is the Millionaire !
