My Take: It might be living life once removed, but when I travel I like to read deeply about the places I go to while I’m there. An outsider’s appreciation of a place is unavoidably limited by ignorance – without a bit of context it’s impossible to even know what to look for. So with this objective I picked up the Pulitzer Prize short-listed “Maximum City” to digest over a week’s worth of beer and curry at Café Leopold during a recent trip to Mumbai.

Before reading this book and visiting the city my knowledge of Mumbai was scant and stereotypical. The home of Sachin Tendulker, slums and street food; my impressions of Mumbai were two dimensional at best. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly at the top of my list of places to head to for a city escape – I’d only ended up there as a result of the quirks of discount travel. However, after reading “Maximum City” I knew that I’d have a life-long fascination with this eternally complex, seething mass of humanity.

It’s been said in many past reviews of this book, but it’s worth saying again here: Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City” is a genuine tour de force. To produce such a masterful, detailed and sprawling biography of a city of such economic, religious, political and cultural extremes is truly an extraordinary achievement.

As, Mehta notes when introducing the book, Mumbai is truly a colossus of a city:

“There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia. Urbs Prima in Indis reads the plaque outside the Gateway of India. It is also the Urbs Prima in Mundis, at least in one area, the first test of the vitality of a city: the number of people living in it. With 14 million people, Bombay is the biggest city on the planet of a race of city dwellers. Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us.”

Mehta skilfully explores the energy and conflict that teems throughout the city through a series of detailed portraits of the daily lives of some of its more interesting characters. What gives these portraits a real sense of immediacy is that Mehta immerses himself in the lives of his subjects and tells their story from the perspective of a participant in their lives. Mehta describes the process of writing the book as being:

..like a kid in a candy store. People opened up to me on incredibly personal, private matters. It was the kind of access I couldn’t dream of getting in New York, like meeting a killer who liked the Backstreet Boys and the sound of a Mauser firing. His friend, another hitman, said that he always kept strictly vegetarian, for it kept his mind calm while he was working. The police invited me to watch them torture suspects; the biggest Bollywood film stars were telling me about their sex lives. They thought I was writing a novel, but I always said I wasn’t.

Over the seven years he spent writing the book, Mehta befriends and socialises with subjects as diverse as a slum dwelling gangster, a Bollywood director, a murderous police officer, a cross-dressing ‘bar girl’, a homeless poet and a Jain monk. Mehta’s subjects come and go from the narrative and overlap with his own life giving the book itself the feeling of a crowded and bustling city street.

This approach puts Mehta into some quite extraordinary (and I’m sure dangerous) situations. Some of the most interesting sections of “Maximum City” are the portraits of those involved in the religious/political conflicts in the city’s slums and parliament. Mehta’s interactions with many of the protagonists in the 1993 Bombay bombings and resultant riots are fascinating (and horrifying) to the uninitiated. His conversations with the malevolent Hindu extremist Hindu party Shiv Sena and its puppet-master Bal Thackeray are a revealing insight into the corrupt underbelly of the city.

One particularly memorable encounter involved Mehta’s gangster friend setting up a meeting for him with Chotta Shakeel, a Mumbai mafia don and close associate of Dawood Ibrahim, the gangster widely believed to be behind this year’s Mumbai terrorist attacks. At the conclusion of Mehta’s discussion, his gangster friend offers him the ultimate in fringe benefits:

Any trouble you have in Bombay. One work [murder] free. Bhai [brother] said so.

Similarly, in one of the saddest stories in the book, (the married with children) Mehta becomes very close to a damaged Mumbai ‘bar girl’ named Monalisa. It’s a testament to Mehta’s intimacy with his subjects that he felt compelled to justify his relationship with her in an interview promoting the book as such:

I became involved with her in a way that was more intimate than sex. I never did sleep with her. I realized if I had slept with her, all the stories would have been cut off. Then I would have been just another customer. I was at once a voyeur and her best friend.

While his relationship with Monalisa was probably closer than his relationship with any of his other subjects, the level of intimacy described above is fairly representative of the access he had to each of his subjects. The fact that Mehta left Mumbai after the book was published is hardly surprising.

Highlight:

My favourite portrait in “Maximum City” was also one of the shortest – the story of the teenaged, street dwelling poet, Babbanji. As the Financial Times review of the book describes him:

He has migrated to the city and lives on its footpaths simply because he believes Mumbai has the best stories of all. Babbanji encounters people singing on the train and follows them home to their shanty town by a sewer. “The sewer was overflowing with all kinds of plastic – plastic bags, plastic bottles – and Babbanji thought of his school science project,” of turning plastic into petrol. “And I thought, this is a treasury,” says the poet, whom it is hard not to see as an alter-ego of Mehta

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]]> http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/06/17/maximum-city-bombay-lost-and-found-suketu-mehta/feed/ 1 http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/06/09/sharks-fin-and-sichuan-pepper-a-sweet-sour-memoir-of-eating-in-china-fuchsia-dunlop/ http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/06/09/sharks-fin-and-sichuan-pepper-a-sweet-sour-memoir-of-eating-in-china-fuchsia-dunlop/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:00:40 +0000 Tim http://bloggingthebookshelf.wordpress.com/?p=616 Synopsis: Englishwoman moves to Chengdu, China for post-graduate study only to end up as the first Westerner to train at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. The author’s following 14 years of Chinese culinary exploration is recounted in this memoir/travelogue/cookbook.

My Take: While I love Chinese food, I’ve always approached it from a the perspective of an ignorant gweilo – happily eating what more culturally enriched friends recommend, but not really understanding what to look for myself. Usefully, in this book Fuchsia Dunlop manages to explain the nuances of the different Chinese cuisines and the markers of high quality dishes without forcing the reader to digest an entire book about nothing but food. By mixing in elements of travelogue, memoir, culinary appreciation and social commentary on the development of China from the early 90s through to today, Dunlop is able to hold the reader’s attention with a diverse smorgasbord of interesting tidbits while also providing an in-depth explanation of the unique characteristics of Chinese cuisine. I found concepts like ‘mouthfeel’, ‘complex flavours’ and the myriad specialised  ways of cutting ingredients for the wok particularly fascinating.

Highlight: Other that learning that chillies were only introduced into Sichuan cooking in the 16th century by Portuguese traders, the most surprising thing I learnt from this book was the many intricate and highly specialised ways various ingredients could be cut to create different flavours in a wok:

“Every student would be casually carrying around a lethally-sharp cleaver, which took some getting used to. To begin with I retained my European view of the cleaver as a bloody, murderous knife – it was only later that I began to appreciate it as the subtle, versatile instrument that it really is. (The cleaver is usually the only knife in a Chinese kitchen, and it is used for every kind of cutting, from peeling ginger and garlic cloves to chopping through meat and bone; the flat of the blade is also used for crushing pieces of ginger to release their juices, and for scooping up cut foods and transferring them from chopping board to wok.)

….

The art of cutting is fundamental to Chinese cooking. We had to learn all the different knife techniques, and the myriad of different shapes into which food can be cut. There were ‘horse-ear’ slices of pickled chilli; slivers, cubes and chunks of meat and poultry, ‘fish-eye’ slices of spring onion, wafer-thin ‘ox-tongue’ slices of radish and lettuce stem.

Also fascinating was the amount of thought that goes into developing the ‘complex flavours’ for your dish:

A well balanced Sichuan meal ‘will awaken your tastebuds through the judicious use of chilli oil, stimulate your tongue and lips with tingly Sichuan pepper, caress your palate with a spicy sweetness, electrify you with dry fried chillies, soothe you with sweet and sour, calm your spirits with a tonic soup’.

Sounds great!

My Take: Framed around the shooting of rent-boy Danny Hansford in the ostentatious mansion of prominent antiques dealer and local socialite Jim Williams, this novel provides a canvas for a cavalcade of unique ‘Southern’ characters and their bizarre lives.

Largely because this book is narrated in the first person and the subject matter is so rich and plot driven, it wasn’t until I was half finished and happened to read the back cover synopsis that I realised that this was a true story told by a carpet bagging journalist (though I learn from Wikipedia that contrary to the book’s narrative, the author only came to Savannah a year after hearing of the incident that formed the basis of the book). The fact that this non-fiction book felt totally plausible as a murder mystery set in an exotic locale is a testament to both the author’s story telling ability and peculiar locals that he chronicles.

Highlight:

For me, the highlight of this book was the eerie/disturbing vibe that underpinned much of this story and was perfectly symbolised by its cover art. The now iconic photograph by Savannah local Jack Leigh of the Bird Girl statue in the atmospheric Bonaventure Cemetery, the “Garden of Good and Evil” referred to in the book’s title perfectly encapsulates the otherworldly hoodoo vibe that pervades the book.