Maximum City by Suketu Mehta (1 star)

After reading the epic that is Shantaram, I was drawn to books about Mumbai, and encouraged by some glowing reviews.  Chandra and Mehta have both produced massive epic tomes, and I didn't particularly enjoy either of them, although Maximum City is much, much better than Sacred Games.

Mehta starts out very strongly, with fascinating insight into what it is like to live in the 'Country of the No'.

India is the Country of the No.  That 'no' is your test.  You have to get past it.  It is India's Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders.  Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge.

Mehta is experiencing reverse culture shock by moving his family back to Mumbai after a number of years living in New York (note this is $US!!).

Coming from New York, I am a pauper in Bombay.  The going rate for a nice apartment in the part of south Bombay where I grew up in is $3,000 a month, plus $200,000 as a deposit, interest-free and returnable in rupees.

Mehta also reinforced the impression I got from Shantaram of the slums:

We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery.  What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, the people have formed a community...A greater horror than open gutters and filthy toilets, to the people of Jogeshwari, is an empty room in the big city.

There are some brilliant insights into Indian life and politics, like when Mehta follows a local politician on the campaign trail.  The politician visits only the slums, because the rich don't vote:

From the wealthy section of Malabar Hill, the legal residents of the district, the turnout is twelve per cent; from the squatters in the slum colonies, for whom the issue of who comes into power means the difference between living in four walls or on the street, it's eighty-eight per cent...This is the biggest difference between the world's two largest democracies: in India, the poor vote.

Mehta's description of the systemic problems caused by the Rent Act is fascinating.  The Rent Act was introduced immediately after World War II to provide affordable housing and prevent price gouging by fixing rent at a court appointed rate.  As long as the tenant pays rent, they cannot be evicted, and the lease can be transferred to the tenants' heirs.  This law is now politically impossible to repeal, because there will always be more tenants than landlords, and the 2.5 million tenants in Bombay are the most powerful political lobby in the city.  The result is:

Some of the richest people in the city live in rent-controlled bungalows all around Malabar Hill, inherited from their grandparents and great-grandparents...The Greater Bombay region has an annual deficit of 45,000 homes a year...There are also 400,000 empty residences in the city, empty because the owners are afraid of losing them to tenants if they rent them out.

The section of the book that follows senior police officer Ajay Lal is also interesting and scary.  The justice system is broken and corruption is a way of life.  The courts are useless; there are no costs associated with filing lawsuits so the majority are frivolous and have created a huge backlog, which at the current rate will take 350 years to clear.  In this climate, the police kill criminals in 'encounters' as a fast form of justice.

For ordinary Mumbaikers, the only form of real justice available is from the gangsters, the bhais themselves:

The sense that justice can be obtained from the underworld is so pervasive that the phenomenon has reached its logical conclusion: in November 1999, a senior judge in Bombay himself approached Shakeel [a bhai] for his assistance in recovering forty lakhs that he was owed in a 'chit fund', an informal savings scheme.

As Mehta continues his fascination with the gangster 'shooters' and police 'encounter specialists' I began to lose interest.  Mehta seems to want to romanticize these dangerous characters and maintains a huge amount of reverence for them.  However, I do need to concede that a large part of that reverence would have been motivated by fear of what his words could mean for his family's safety, and I respect Mehta has been very brave in writing this book.

The introduction to the dancer 'Monalisa' is brilliant:

On a good night a dancer in a Bombay bar can make twice as much as a high class stripper in a New York bar.  The difference is that the dancer in Bombay doesn't have to sleep with the customers, is forbidden to touch them in the bar, and wears more clothes on her body than the average Bombay secretary does on the broad public street.

Unfortunately, this is the point the book really falls apart.  The 'Pleasure' chapter begins well, but soon starts to drag.  There is little interesting development, and the story degenerates into a boring verbose journalistic description of Monalisa's life.

Mehta goes on to treat interesting subjects (such as Bollywood) but just drags each subject out for too long.  The final chapter is the least connected to the others, and should have been dropped.

Overall, there are some brilliant sections in this book, and I learned a lot about Mumbai.  However, it is a horrendous read, and should have been at least 200 pages shorter.  What is it with unedited rambles about Mumbai?

1 star