You can’t go home again

Bombay, the biggest city on the planet, is built on a combination of palm fronds, fish entrails and the dreams of 14 million people. Originally comprising seven islands off the west coast of India, large areas of the city were reclaimed from the Arabian Sea during the 19th and 20th centuries. Nowadays, 500 people arrive in Bombay every day, filling every available square foot of land and adding to the agglomeration of dreams that sustains it. Maximum City relates some of these dreams: from Bollywood moguls to Hindu nationalists, from gang members to bar dancers.

The central theme of the book is one of nostalgia. It is a theme that characterises a great deal of the writing on Bombay available to the West, perhaps unsurprisingly given that most of this writing is produced by non-resident Indians, self-styled ‘exiles’ such as Salman Rushdie and, now, Suketu Mehta. One of the dangers of this nostalgic approach is that it risks conflating the writer’s romantic idea of home with the barbarous reality of the megalopolis, producing the sort of distorted image on which Bombay is founded and thrives. It is a danger that Mehta does not always avoid.

Like many Bombayites, Mehta is not originally from Bombay. Born in Calcutta to Gujarati parents, he spent nine years living in Bombay before moving to the USA in 1977. His profound longing for the city is, it seems, closely bound to his fear of not belonging to it. Indeed, returning to Bombay in 1998, he finds himself an outsider there, cut off from its mystifying networks of influence and subject to its pathological habits of exploitation. Finding a place to live is the first test of his character: estate agents fleece him, plumbers cheat him, and a fellow resident menaces him over the use of a parking space.