Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Author: Suketu Mehta

• URBS PRIMA IN INDIS reads the plaque outside the Gateway of India.

• I left Bombay in 1977 and came back twenty-one years later, when it had grown up to become Mumbai. Twenty-one years: enough time for a human being to be born, get an education, be eligible to drink, get married, drive, vote, go to war, and kill a man. In all that time, I hadn’t lost my accent.

• “Where’re you from?” Searching for an answer—in Paris, in London, in Manhattan—I always fall back on “Bombay.”

• “It’s just like Bombay.” Thus is New York explained to people in India.

• I missed saying “bhenchod” to people who understood it. It does not mean “sister fucker.” That is too literal, too crude. It is, rather, punctuation, or emphasis, as innocuous a word as “shit” or “damn.”

• Home is where your credit is good at the corner store.

• It was called Heptanesia—the city of seven islands—by Ptolemy in A.D. 150. The Portuguese called it Bom Bahia, Buon Bahia, or Bombaim—Portuguese for “good bay.” In 1538, they also called it Boa-Vida, the island of good life, because of its beautiful groves, its game, and its abundance of food.

• The visual shock of Bombay is the shock of this juxtaposition. And it is soon followed by violent shocks to the other four senses: the continuous din of the traffic coming in through open windows in a hot country; the stench of bombil fish drying on stilts in the open air; the inescapable humid touch of many brown bodies in the street; the searing heat of the garlic chutney on your vadapav sandwich early on your first jet-lagged morning.

• When the American Civil War stopped the supply of cotton to England, Bombay stepped into the breach and earned in five years, from 1861 to 1865, £81 million more than the city would normally have received for its cotton. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which cut travel time to the Empire in half, Bombay truly became the gateway to India, supplanting Calcutta as the richest city in the Indian Empire.

• The Gateway of India, a domed arch of yellow basalt surrounded by four turrets, was built in Bombay in 1927 to commemorate the arrival, sixteen years earlier, of the British king, George V; instead, it marked his permanent exit.

• “Can I get a gas connection?” “No.” “Can I get a phone?” “No.” “Can I get a school for my child?” “I’m afraid it is not possible.” “Have my parcels arrived from America?” “I don’t know.” “Can you find out?” “No.” “Can I get a railway reservation?” “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.

• 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.

• The landlord is a Palanpuri Jain and a strict vegetarian. He asks my uncle if we are too. “Arre, his wife is a Brahmin! Even more than us!” my uncle replies. And this is where we get our vegetarian discount: 20 percent off the asking rent. But in my uncle’s words is evident the subtle contempt with which the Vaisyas—the merchant castes—regard the Brahmins. The Brahmins are the pantujis, the professors, the straight people. Not good in business. Eager to come home at funerals for food. Whatever the reasons for my ancestors’ change of caste centuries ago—from Nagar Brahmin to Vaisya—it has served us well.

• My father has one rule for selecting a flat to live in: You should be able to change your clothes without having to draw the curtains. This simple rule, if followed, ensures two things: privacy and a sufficient flow of air and light.

• “When you took down the chandelier I didn’t say anything, but when you removed the statue, that I didn’t like.” I hasten to assure him that it is not his taste I am questioning; rather, I am protecting the masterpiece from the evil designs of my young children.

• We also have to learn again how to stand in line.

• We also have to learn again how to stand in line. In Bombay, people are always waiting in line: to vote, to get a flat, to get a job, to get out of the country; to make a railway reservation, make a phone call, go to the toilet. And when you get to the front of the line, you are always made conscious that you are inconveniencing all the hundreds and thousands and millions of people behind you. Hurry, hurry; get your business over with.

• We also have to learn again how to stand in line. In Bombay, people are always waiting in line: to vote, to get a flat, to get a job, to get out of the country; to make a railway reservation, make a phone call, go to the toilet. And when you get to the front of the line, you are always made conscious that you are inconveniencing all the hundreds and thousands and millions of people behind you.

• And if you’re next in line, you never stand behind the person at the head of the line; you always stand next to him, as if you were really with him, so that you can occupy the place he vacates with just one sideways step.

• As a result, in the Country of the No nothing is fixed the first time around. You don’t just call a repairman, you begin a relationship with him. You can’t bring to his attention too aggressively the fact that he is incompetent or crooked, because you will need him to set right what he has broken the first time around.

• At this point Manjeet’s mother steps in. “He has two children!” she appeals to the female bureaucrats. “Two small children! They don’t even have gas to boil milk! They are crying for milk! What is he supposed to do without gas to boil milk for his two small children?” By the next morning we have a gas cylinder in our kitchen. My friend’s mother knew what had to be done to move the bureaucracy. She did not bother with official rules and procedures and forms. She appealed to the hearts of the workers in the office; they have children too. And then they volunteered the information that there was a loophole: If I ordered a commercial tank of gas, which is bigger and more expensive than the household one, I could get it immediately. No one had told me this before. But once the emotional connection was made, the rest was easy.

• A man who has made his money through a scam is more respected than a man who has made his money through hard work, because the ethic of Bombay is quick upward mobility and a scam is a shortcut. A scam shows good business sense and a quick mind. Anyone can work hard and make money. What’s to admire about that? But a well-executed scam? Now, there’s a thing of beauty!

• “How long have you lived here?” the doctor had roared at me, again and again. The

• “How long have you lived here?” the doctor had roared at me, again and again. The man on the first floor, who got used to parking his car there, asked me the same question. This is a community of insiders, people who have lived in this building for a long time; they were asking the newcomer what right he had to claim his legal privileges.

• Breathing the air in Bombay now is the equivalent of smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day. The sun used to set into the sea. Now it sets into the smog.

• On one visit, I find that my shoes have been stolen. This God couldn’t even protect my shoes; inside, people were praying to him to perform miracles.

• Every morning I get angry. It is the only way to get anything done; people here respond to anger, are afraid of it. In the absence of money or connections, anger will do. I begin to understand the uses of anger as theater—with taxi drivers, doormen, plumbers, government bureaucrats.

• One of them is the Bombay International School, which has eight families living in the school building. They are long-term tenants, protected by the Rent Act. The door next to the library is someone’s flat. The school is in desperate need of space for classrooms but cannot force the residents out.

• MY SON COMES BACK from Head Start, his new English-language school, and for the first time in this country he can describe his day in detail. He painted on a piece of paper using a capsicum as a brush; then he made a house and a sun; then he played puzzles; and he ate a “square idli,” which is later explained to him as a dhokla,

• There might have been a hundred kids there; the hosts would have spent not less than 100,000 rupees—about $4,000—on that party. But it is a good investment in this world, in Bombay High. It is training for their children in a lifetime of parties. The question that never leaves the minds of the charmed set in Bombay, however old they are, is: Who will invite me to their party? Who will come to mine?

• I see something new this time in India: single people in their thirties, even forties, unmarried by choice. One of the rakes uses the old line to explain why he won’t get married: “If you can get milk every day, why buy the cow?”

• Bombay is built on envy: the married envy the single, the single long to be married, the middle class envy the truly rich, the rich envy those without tax problems.

• The third page of the Bombay Times and the back pages of the Indian Express and the columns of the Sunday edition of Mid-Day and the metro sections of the newsmagazines are the envy pages, all designed to make the reader feel poorer, uglier, smaller, and most of all, socially outcast.

• You would think that to go from South Bombay to the rest of the city—the area demarcated by the Mahim flyover, from the taxi zone to the auto-rickshaw zone—you would need a visa.

• remember what a French friend had told me about her mother, a social worker in Paris. The first time she came to India, she stepped outside the airport

• I remember what a French friend had told me about her mother, a social worker in Paris. The first time she came to India, she stepped outside the airport with her bags to have a horde of street children come up to her, little babies being carried by only slightly older ones. Overcome by their destitution, their youth, their beauty, she opened up both her bags on the sidewalk and started handing out gifts. Within minutes her bags were picked clean. Thus unburdened, she stood up and walked forth into India.

• The riots were a tragedy in three acts. First, there was a spontaneous upheaval between the largely Hindu police and Muslims. This was followed, in January 1993, by a second wave of more serious rioting—instigated by the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray—in which Muslims were systematically identified and massacred, their houses and shops burnt and looted. The third stage was the revenge of the Muslims: on Friday, March 12, when every good Muslim was reading his namaaz prayers, ten powerful bombs planted by the Muslim underworld went off all over the city.

• Most of Jogeshwari, the Hindu and especially the Muslim area, is a slum. On January 8, 1993, a Hindu family of millworkers was sleeping in a room in Radhabai Chawl, in the middle of the Muslim part of the slum. Someone locked their door from the outside; someone threw a petrol bomb in through the window.

• Sunil saw no irony in the fact that when his daughter was sick he went to the same Muslim community that he massacred and burnt during the riots.

• Sunil also runs the cable TV for Jogeshwari and surrounding areas. He has Muslim clients, and he often eats at their houses “to keep relations.” The riots also didn’t stop Sunil from doing business with the Muslims.

• What he wanted was something beyond the happiness of his immediate family. He wanted the nation to be great.

• Sunil told me how one of them took a cylinder of cooking gas, opened the valve, lit a match, and rolled it inside the mosque. The bomber then enrolled in the police force, where he is still employed.

• “But what if he was innocent?” Raghav looked at me. “His biggest crime was that he was Muslim.”

• During the riots, the printing presses were running overtime. They were printing visiting cards, two sets for each person, one with a Muslim name and one with a Hindu name.

• After Gandhi was assassinated, in 1948, the Muslims were scared, because people thought at first it must have been a Muslim who killed him. But nothing happened. No riots.

• Durriya’s business was discriminated against because it was a Muslim company.

• Durriya’s business was discriminated against because it was a Muslim company. Payments would come late; bigger deposits were now required from them than from Hindu suppliers.

• “There’s no justification for the blasts,” Durriya emphasized. “An eye for an eye is a terrible thing.” At the same time, when the Muslims in her office traveled on the trains, they felt the Hindus were looking at them with new fear. They could raise their heads. “Their self-respect had been restored.”

• THE RIOTS HAD ONE CONSEQUENCE their planners couldn’t have foreseen: They became a recruitment bonanza for the Muslim underworld.

• Between January 10 and January 18, 1993, the activist Teesta Setalvad taped conversations off the police frequency as police squads on the road coordinated activities with the control room.

• If you want to make sure that the money you send to a poor place will be spent properly, give it to the women who live there.

• We lived in Bombay and never had much to do with Mumbai. Maharashtra to us was our servants, the banana lady downstairs, the textbooks we were force-fed in school.

• We had a term for them: ghatis—literally, the people from the ghats, or hills. It was also the word we used, generically, for “servant.”

• My uncle looked past me, out the window at the darkening sky. He had a good Muslim friend in Calcutta, he told me, a friend who was in school with him in the tenth standard; they would then have been about fifteen. He went with this friend to see a movie, and before the main show, a newsreel came on. There was a scene with many Muslims bowing in prayer, doing their namaaz.

• My uncle looked past me, out the window at the darkening sky. He had a good Muslim friend in Calcutta, he told me, a friend who was in school with him in the tenth standard; they would then have been about fifteen. He went with this friend to see a movie, and before the main show, a newsreel came on. There was a scene with many Muslims bowing in prayer, doing their namaaz. Without thinking, my uncle said out aloud in the darkened theater, perhaps to his friend, perhaps to himself, “One

• My uncle looked past me, out the window at the darkening sky. He had a good Muslim friend in Calcutta, he told me, a friend who was in school with him in the tenth standard; they would then have been about fifteen. He went with this friend to see a movie, and before the main show, a newsreel came on. There was a scene with many Muslims bowing in prayer, doing their namaaz. Without thinking, my uncle said out aloud in the darkened theater, perhaps to his friend, perhaps to himself, “One bomb would take care of them.” Then my uncle realized what he had just said and remembered that the friend who was sitting next to him was also Muslim. But the friend said nothing, pretending he had not heard. “But I know he did,” said my uncle, the pain evident on his face, sitting in this flat in Bombay thirty-five years later.

• Powertoni: a power that does not originate in yourself; a power that you are holding on somebody else’s behalf. It is the only kind of power that a politician has; a power of attorney ceded to him by the voter.

• Thackeray’s father considered himself a social reformer and anglicized his surname after William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian author of Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s

• Thackeray’s father considered himself a social reformer and anglicized his surname after William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian author of Vanity Fair.

• When Sanjay Dutt, son of the principled MP Sunil Dutt who resigned in disgust after the riots, was newly released from jail, his first stop, even before he went home, was to go to the Saheb and touch his feet.

• The Shiv Sena’s notions of what is culturally acceptable in India show a distinct bias toward kitsch: Michael Jackson, for example. In November 1996, Thackeray announced that the first performance of the pop star in India would proceed with his blessings. This may or may not have had to do with the fact that the singer had promised to donate the profits from his concert—which eventually ran to more than a million dollars—to a Shiv Sena—run youth employment project.

• The planned concert offended a number of people in the city, including Thackeray’s own brother, who saw something alien in the values the singer represented. “Who is Michael Jackson and how on earth is he linked to Hindu culture, which the Shiv Sena and its boss Thackeray talk about so proudly?” The Shiv Sena Supremo responded, “Jackson is a great artist, and we must accept him as an artist. His movements are terrific. Not many people can move that way. You will end up breaking your bones.” Then

• The planned concert offended a number of people in the city, including Thackeray’s own brother, who saw something alien in the values the singer represented. “Who is Michael Jackson and how on earth is he linked to Hindu culture, which the Shiv Sena and its boss Thackeray talk about so proudly?” The Shiv Sena Supremo responded, “Jackson is a great artist, and we must accept him as an artist. His movements are terrific. Not many people can move that way. You will end up breaking your bones.” Then the Saheb got to the heart of the matter. “And, well, what is culture? He represents certain values in America which India should not have any qualms in accepting.

• The Sena-controlled unions are much more dependable than the left-controlled ones. The party’s money comes not from the rank and file but from the city’s leading businessmen: a car dealer, an airline owner, a diamond merchant.

• The writer U. R. Ananthamurthy tells me about a Dalit IAS officer who explained to him why he had no option but to be corrupt. He was the first one in the history of his community, he said, to matriculate and go to Delhi, fabled seat of power. Each time he returns to his village, he is expected to come back bearing the goods and spoils of office, not just for his family but for his entire impoverished community. “I am a lump of sugar,” the officer said, “in an anthill.”

• All day long, Jayawantiben goes through the fourteen slum colonies around Malabar Hill, meets people, listens to their complaints. But not once does she go into any of the posh buildings surrounding the slums. “Why?” I ask a campaign worker. “The rich don’t come down from their buildings to vote,” he responds.

• This is the biggest difference between the world’s two largest democracies: In India, the poor vote.

• The city is full of people for whom it isn’t this simple, people who come to the booth and look up their name and address only to find a small red mark on the list; someone has already voted in their name. Someone has stolen their right to make the only meaningful choice available in a democracy. At that point, it doesn’t matter if you can prove to be who you are.

• The city is full of people for whom it isn’t this simple, people who come to the booth and look up their name and address only to find a small red mark on the list; someone has already voted in their name. Someone has stolen their right to make the only meaningful choice available in a democracy. At that point, it doesn’t matter if you can prove to be who you are. You arrived second.

• The campaign workers at the booths outside the polling station, who look up people’s identification numbers for them and give them the registration chits, are paid by the political parties: 50 rupees if they are with the Sena—BJP and 100 rupees if they are with the Congress, plus puris, vegetables, and sheera, a sweet. Right then I know the Sena—BJP will win; you have to be paid more to support a loser.

• He offers me a novel reason why people should vote for his party, the incumbents: “The Congress has already eaten. Its stomach is full. The Sena hasn’t eaten. Everybody’s a thief, but the Congress won’t eat any more.”

• The people I meet who are seeking position or money in Bombay often use this one hotel, this one citadel of Empire, as a mark or measure of their progress upward through the strata of Bombay. The Taj was born out of a slight; because a man was turned away from a fancy hotel.

• When the prominent Parsi industrialist Jamshetji Tata was refused entrance into Watson’s Hotel in the nineteenth century because he was a native, he swore revenge and built the massive Taj in 1903, which outshone Watson’s in every department. It is less a hotel than a proving ground for the ego.

• It is an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, and your sister will stay home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations

• It is an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, and your sister will stay home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations at your back.

• It is an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, and your sister will stay home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations at your back. You dare not turn around.

• SUNIL WILL INHERIT BOMBAY, I now see. The consequences of his burning the bread seller alive: When the Sena government came in two years later, he got appointed a Special Executive Officer; he became, officially, a person in whom public trust is reposed.

• The fact that a murderer like Sunil could become successful in Bombay through engagement in local politics is both a triumph and a failure of democracy.

• The Bombay I have grown up in is suffering from a profound sadness: the sadness of lost ownership, the transfer of the keys to the city. No longer is the political life of the city controlled by the Parsis, the Gujaratis, the Punjabis, the Marwaris. This passage was marked by the candidacy of Naval Tata in 1971. The powerful industrialist ran as an independent from the Mumbai South constituency, the richest and smallest in the country, and still he lost. In

• The Bombay I have grown up in is suffering from a profound sadness: the sadness of lost ownership, the transfer of the keys to the city. No longer is the political life of the city controlled by the Parsis, the Gujaratis, the Punjabis, the Marwaris. This passage was marked by the candidacy of Naval Tata in 1971. The powerful industrialist ran as an independent from the Mumbai South constituency, the richest and smallest in the country, and still he lost.

• Politics, too, has become yet another of those menial tasks that is assigned to servants or subordinates, something you drop as soon as you acquire the financial means to do so, like cleaning the toilet, doing the accounts, answering the phone, or standing in line at a government office. “Send your man,” I am told again and again, when I need service for my mobile phone or money picked up from the bank. “I have no man,” I respond. “I’m my own man.” They do not understand.

• Politics, too, has become yet another of those menial tasks that is assigned to servants or subordinates, something you drop as soon as you acquire the financial means to do so, like cleaning the toilet, doing the accounts, answering the phone, or standing in line at a government office. “Send your man,” I am told again and again, when I need service for my mobile phone or money picked up from the bank. “I have no man,” I respond. “I’m my own man.” They do not understand. In business, in politics, in government, those who can afford it never go in person.

• Politics, too, has become yet another of those menial tasks that is assigned to servants or subordinates, something you drop as soon as you acquire the financial means to do so, like cleaning the toilet, doing the accounts, answering the phone, or standing in line at a government office. “Send your man,” I am told again and again, when I need service for my mobile phone or money picked up from the bank. “I have no man,” I respond. “I’m my own man.” They do not understand. In business, in politics, in government, those who can afford it never go in person. They send their man.

• But it is also these rich who create wealth, who create the conditions that will allow the mother on the streets to find a home for her children. They must be allowed their penthouses, their brandy, so the poor may be allowed their simple clean room, their rice and dal. In the post-Marxist age, we can no longer believe that redistribution solves anything, that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer.

• I have to visit G. R. Khairnar, known as the Demolition Man, to fully grasp Sunil’s potential as a slumlord.

• He returned to work and took on the godfather of Bombay himself, Dawood Ibrahim, who owned an illegal building, Mehejebin, under his wife’s name. The day before the demolition, the police roamed through the building with dogs to check for explosives. The next day, Khairnar went in with an army of four hundred policemen, including paramilitaries from the Border Security Force, and destroyed the building with a three-ton wrecking ball. From 1992 onward, he demolished twenty-nine more buildings belonging to Dawood.

• The municipal commissioner asked Khairnar to desist from his denunciations and finally, in 1994, suspended him on the basis of insubordination. For a few years, Khairnar sat in his official bungalow, beneath a bust of Vive-kananda, without any work to do and plenty of time to talk. He started an NGO for prostitutes; he raided brothels and “rescued” underage girls. In 2000, he was returned to service and went energetically back to the demolitions and the front pages of the newspapers, a hero once again of the middle class, those who already had homes.

• In his report, Judge Srikrishna names thirty-one policemen who committed atrocities—who shot people dead or actively directed the Sena mobs. But in the end, nothing that the good judge has written will ever directly cost any individual a single minute’s time behind bars. According to the terms of the act under which the commission was formed, none of the testimony given before the commission can be used to prosecute anybody. So, after five hundred depositions and close to ten thousand pages of recorded testimony, if a single one of the policemen or political leaders or street thugs who participated in the riots has to be prosecuted, the work that the Srikrishna Commission did has to begin over, in a court of law.

• In response to the Srikrishna Commission Report, the Times of India prints an editorial titled “The Healing Touch,” which calls for healing but not for justice. A Times reporter tells me that instructions have been issued to all the paper’s reporters to soft-pedal stories on the report; all articles dealing with it—even profiles of the judge—have to be personally cleared through the resident editor.

• “We’ll take an hour going to the masjid, and then to pass in front of the masjid it will take three hours. Fifty feet after we pass the masjid almost everybody will go home,” Amol tells me.

• Amol gets down from the truck, but the slogans are still ringing out. The other two icons—Saibaba and Tilak—are forgotten in front of the mosque. Only Shivaji the warrior is invoked. A few Muslims are watching silently, from behind the ranks of policemen lining the road. It is an infernal din. As the drums pound, as the fireworks burst, as the flags wave, as the bullhorns blare, I realize what this is: It is a victory march.

• At the end of the block, true to Amol’s prediction, the crowd disperses, and the trucks speed on toward the swift sea to immerse their idols. The strutting past the masjid was the high point, the purpose, of the Ganapati procession: to show the Muslims that the Sena had won. This is where most riots in the country begin, in these aggressively public celebrations of a tribal, exclusive God rubbed in the face of those who would follow his rivals.

• It was not always this fraught. Before the 1993 riots, Arfin Banu, a member of the Mohalla Ekta Committee, remembers that the procession would stop making noise and bursting crackers on the block in front of the masjid and pass by quickly and silently, in deference to Muslim sentiments. This noisy display had only started in the years after the riots; some years it got very bad. Stones were thrown at the procession by the Muslims, and the possibility of a new riot was always looming.

• The taxi driver carrying me home has a little shrine of Saibaba of Shirdi enclosed in an illuminated arch, next to a verse from the Koran in Arabic script. “What is that?” I ask, pointing, as I’m about to leave the cab. “This?” he asks, touching the arch. He thinks I want to ask about the colored lights. “That.” I point to the Arabic text. “This is Muslim.” “And you have Saibaba also?” “Yes.” He has turned around. He is smiling. I am joyous. There is still hope.

• The Bombay word for strife is lafda (which can also mean an affair or romantic entanglement). People flock wherever there is a lafda; you’ll notice a large group of men, watching intently, unblinking, as near as possible to the lafda, so as not to miss a single second of it.

• “People don’t have jobs. The boys have no work, nothing to do all day. And everything’s expensive. Now if a young man wants to go to a ladies’ bar and have a couple of drinks, he won’t have money to give to his people at home. You can get boys used to going to ladies’ bars, to the lifestyle, and then they’ll do anything for money.” “What will be the effect of this?” I ask Amol. “Murders will cost two hundred rupees.” “How can a man kill?” I ask Amol. “How can he bring himself to do it?” “You are a writer. After drinking you will say to yourself, now I must write a story. If you are a dancer, after drinking you will feel like dancing. If you are a killer, after drinking you will think, Now I must kill somebody.” Amol flexes his arms. It’s what you do; it’s in your nature.

• But in January 1999, the Sena makes a big mistake: It takes on Sachin Tendulkar, the country’s most idolized cricketer. A mob of Sainiks storms into the offices of the Board of Cricket Control of India, angered by the board’s invitation to the Pakistani cricket team to tour India. They destroy the office, including the World Cup that had been brought home to India in 1983. Tendulkar is put under police protection, and the party’s leaders speedily distance themselves from the incident. By this point it has just become mob frenzy; the tiger Thackeray rides is now out of his control.

• The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve-hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train, they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweat and farts. When they get home to the slum, their mothers and their fathers and their grandmothers will ask them what income they have brought home. Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob, part of a contingent of seventy patriots fighting for the country’s honor, walking unmolested into movie theaters, posh apartments, and the offices of the cricket lords of the country, smashing trophies, beating up important people who drive fine cars.

• The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve-hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train, they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweat and farts. When they get home to the slum, their mothers and their fathers and their grandmothers will ask them what income they have brought home. Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob, part of a contingent of seventy patriots fighting for the country’s honor, walking unmolested into movie theaters, posh apartments, and the offices of the cricket lords of the country, smashing trophies, beating up important people who drive fine cars. All the accumulated insults, rebukes, and disappointments of life in a decaying megalopolis come out in a cathartic release of anger. It’s okay to be angry in a crowd; the crowd feeds on your anger, digests it, nourishes your rage as your rage nourishes it. All of a sudden you feel powerful. You can take on anybody. It is not their city anymore, it is your city. You own this city by right of your anger.

• A barometer of the city’s fortunes is the alcoholic strength of the liquor it imbibes. “Prices are very high, so man will struggle a lot, and from that tension he will drink a lot. The boys from the share market are drinking sixers.” A sixer is just one step above country liquor. It costs 5 rupees a bottle. It starts raining heavily, out of season. “Because of our sins,” reasons Sunil. “Even God doesn’t accept Bombay. God made the world, but he doesn’t accept Bombay.” And Sunil certainly knows about sin. On Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, Sunil will broadcast a pornographic film on his cable network. The requests for porn often come from his female subscribers. When he goes to I.C. College, the women tell him, “Sunil-bhai, you are

• A barometer of the city’s fortunes is the alcoholic strength of the liquor it imbibes. “Prices are very high, so man will struggle a lot, and from that tension he will drink a lot. The boys from the share market are drinking sixers.” A sixer is just one step above country liquor. It costs 5 rupees a bottle.

• A barometer of the city’s fortunes is the alcoholic strength of the liquor it imbibes. “Prices are very high, so man will struggle a lot, and from that tension he will drink a lot. The boys from the share market are drinking sixers.” A sixer is just one step above country liquor. It costs 5 rupees a bottle. It starts raining heavily, out of season. “Because of our sins,” reasons Sunil. “Even God doesn’t accept Bombay. God made the world, but he doesn’t accept Bombay.” And Sunil certainly knows about sin. On Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, Sunil will broadcast a pornographic film on his cable network. The requests for porn often come from his female subscribers. When

• A barometer of the city’s fortunes is the alcoholic strength of the liquor it imbibes. “Prices are very high, so man will struggle a lot, and from that tension he will drink a lot. The boys from the share market are drinking sixers.” A sixer is just one step above country liquor.

• On Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, Sunil will broadcast a pornographic film on his cable network. The requests for porn often come from his female subscribers. When he goes to I.C. College, the women tell him, “Sunil-bhai, you are not taking care of us.”

• Early on the evening that he decides to “take care” of his subscribers, a little symbol, a star, for example, is displayed on a corner of the screen, or a message scrolls with a time across the bottom all evening—“BBC channel is changed”—and the initiates understand that a blue movie will show on a particular channel at a particular time. Such a film is shown on the nights that the people of Bombay drink: not on Tuesday, because that is the night for the worship of Ganapati; not on Thursday, for that is for Saibaba; not, usually, on Saturday, because many people observe it as Hanuman’s day; and not on Monday, “when people don’t drink so much because they’ve been drunk all weekend.” Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays are drinkers’ nights, blue-film nights, in Sunil’s Bombay.

• Early on the evening that he decides to “take care” of his subscribers, a little symbol, a star, for example, is displayed on a corner of the screen, or a message scrolls with a time across the bottom all evening—“BBC channel is changed”—and the initiates understand that a blue movie will show on a particular channel at a particular time. Such a film is shown on the nights that the people of Bombay drink: not on Tuesday, because that is the night for the worship of Ganapati; not on Thursday, for that is for Saibaba; not, usually, on Saturday, because many people observe it as Hanuman’s day; and not on Monday, “when people don’t drink so much because they’ve been drunk all weekend.” Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays are drinkers’ nights, blue-film nights, in Sunil’s Bombay. The latter is best enjoyed after an evening of the former.

• I ask them why there is more unity, more fellow feeling, in the chawl. Common toilets, explains Sunil. “When you go to the toilet, you have to see everyone’s face. You say ‘Hi, hello, haven’t seen you for two days.’ Then there is water. The women fill buckets with water together at the tap, and they converse: ‘My grandfather is ill.’ ‘I have one son in the village; he is an alcoholic.’”

• During the Kargil conflict, the Indian government banned Pakistan TV from the country’s cable networks. For all his patriotism, Sunil opposed this decision. Why should he be prevented from broadcasting Pakistan TV, he asks, if the customer accepts it? “The thing that someone pays for, you should give them.” Here again, his business instincts are winning over his distaste for Muslims, over his political convictions. The color of someone’s money is becoming more important than that of the religious flag he carries in a procession. Bombay is seducing him away from hate, through the even more powerful attraction of greed.

• There is a strange silence in all the slum rooms, and I realize it’s because none of the televisions are on, with the exception of one or two playing Doordarshan, the government broadcaster. Sunil has turned off his cable network for Election Day. “Sunil, put the cable back on!” an old man pleads. “After you vote,” he responds.

• There is a mass of security guards outside the bungalow. He has a small army guarding him: a total of 179 police officers, including a battalion of 154 constables, 19 subinspectors, 3 police inspectors, and 3 assistant commissioners of police. The state government, Sena or Congress, gives him police vehicles and a bulletproof automobile to travel in; his mansion in Bandra is fortified and guarded round the clock at state expense. The Tiger roars only from behind the safety of his guards.

• In 1998, the Maharashtra government turned down an affiliate of the Wharton School that wanted to set up in New Bombay, because the school refused to reserve 10 percent of the seats for Maharashtrian students.

• The Sena is trying to expand its base, to include Hindus generally, because it knows it can no longer stay in power just on the basis of the Maharashtrian vote.

• He says that an article of the constitution defines us all as Hindustanis: “Nineteen-a. The funniest thing: They only take advantage of first line, what about other lines, a b c d e f g h? There again it is very clearly stated that even though people migrate from one state to another state they should see one thing: that they should not disturb peace of the locals there.

• He says that an article of the constitution defines us all as Hindustanis: “Nineteen-a. The funniest thing: They only take advantage of first line, what about other lines, a b c d e f g h? There again it is very clearly stated that even though people migrate from one state to another state they should see one thing: that they should not disturb peace of the locals there. Why don’t you also

• He says that an article of the constitution defines us all as Hindustanis: “Nineteen-a. The funniest thing: They only take advantage of first line, what about other lines, a b c d e f g h? There again it is very clearly stated that even though people migrate from one state to another state they should see one thing: that they should not disturb peace of the locals there. Why don’t you also take that?

• He says that an article of the constitution defines us all as Hindustanis: “Nineteen-a. The funniest thing: They only take advantage of first line, what about other lines, a b c d e f g h? There again it is very clearly stated that even though people migrate from one state to another state they should see one thing: that they should not disturb peace of the locals there. Why don’t you also take that? Why show me only first lines and not other lines?”

• The editor had told me that Thackeray didn’t give a damn about politicians from Delhi; if Vajpayee came to see him, he would not be overwhelmed. But if Amitabh Bacchan came to see him, he would make time and would be filled with pride. It is a typical Bombayite’s sense of priorities: entertainment first, politics second.

• The Sena would do the unpleasant work that my Gujaratis are too cowardly to do; they would fight the battle of Panipat against the Afghans all over again.

• After taking Bombay from us during the Samyukta Maharashtra movement—when they walked the streets looking for Gujaratis to beat up, shouting, “Kem chhe? Saru chhe! Danda leke maru chhe!”—they would now magnanimously protect us against the Muslim hordes.

• Thackeray has never read a book, the editor tells me. Indeed, I don’t spot a single book in what I see of Thackeray’s bungalow. His points of reference are movies and cartoons.

• What the editor had pointed out, and what strikes me now, is the mismatch of scale: this small-minded man controlling this very big city. “He lacks what George Bush called ‘the vision thing,’” the editor had observed.

• In 1984, Thackeray invited a veteran Communist leader, S. A. Dange, to address a Sena meeting. Although Dange was a bitter enemy of the Sena, the men had respect for each other because they both saw themselves fighting for labor rights and had participated in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement.

• Dange got up and told the Sena what he thought of them: “The Shiv Sena does not have a theory, and it is impossible for an organization to survive sans a theory.”

• The next day, Thackeray responded. “He merely displayed arrogance by suggesting that the Shiv Sena didn’t have a theory and said an organization can’t survive without a theory. Then how has our organization survived for the last eighteen years?” Then he added, knife blade plunging for the final thrust, deadly because so true for the old Communist, “And how is it that, despite a theory, your organization is finished?”

• The majority of the rioters were charged under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act, usually preceded in the press by the adjective “draconian.”

• What finally occurs is not civil war but farce. The Saheb declares he will voluntarily present himself in front of the court. He does so—escorted by an army of five hundred policemen, which maintains the facade of an arrest for Bhujbal—and the magistrate dismisses the case, saying it should have been prosecuted within three years of the offense. Thackeray is in and out of court in under forty-five minutes. Bombay starts breathing again. But the view from Cuffe Parade is different. The new Miss Universe is returning triumphant to the country. During this time, “all Bombay cares about,” declares the socialite columnist Shobha De, “is who’s coming to Lara Datta’s homecoming.”

• THE HISTORY OF EACH CITY is marked by a catalytic event, just as each life has a central event around which it is organized. For New York, it is now the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. For the Bombay of my time, it is the riots and the blasts of 1993.

• But there was an earlier trauma in the psychic life of the city, which marked the before and after for old-timers: the explosion on the Fort Stikine, on April 14, 1944.

• The ammunition had caught fire, and the ship exploded at dockside, which was then full of dock laborers and firefighters. Two hundred ninety-eight people died immediately. Then the rain started. The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market.

• The disaster of the Fort Stikine is with us still. Bars of gold from the ship were being found as late as the 1970s, during dredging operations at the docks.

• But there was a mountain of more base debris from the explosion, and the British municipal authorities chose to create land out of it. They started filling in the Back Bay, where the mangroves used to be, in what is now Nariman Point, leading in time to the worst-planned office district in modern India, the prime villain in the condition of modern Bombay.

• When World War II ended, another catastrophe struck Bombay in the form of the Bombay Rents, Hotel Rates, and Lodging House Rates Control Act of 1947—popularly known as the Rent Act. Bombay is still recovering from that legislative blast. Enacted in 1948, the act froze the rents on all buildings leased at the time at their 1940 levels.

• The relative income levels of landlord and tenant make no difference as far as the law is concerned. The provisions of the Rent Act also apply to commercial buildings, benefiting multinational corporations and large government enterprises, which pay a pittance for their offices. Some of the richest people in the city live in rent-controlled bungalows all around Malabar Hill, inherited from their grandparents and great-grandparents.

• After the Rent Act came in, the “pugree,” or key money, system started. A tenant would be bribed by the owner to vacate a rent-controlled flat; in effect, he’d be paying the tenant a sizable sum for his own property. Once a criminal offense, the practice is so prevalent that in 1999 the state was forced to legalize it.

• In India, the framework of existing laws—the Rent Act; the Urban Land Ceiling Act, which essentially transfers ownership of large tracts of land in Bombay to the state—creates a situation of continuous doubt in the mind of the property owner: Does this land really belong to me? This is the question that keeps 60 percent of the people homeless. Builders don’t build anywhere near the amount of new housing needed because at any moment they could be told, This land doesn’t belong to you.

• 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 Rent Act leads to peculiar constructions of “home,” unique to Bombay. Each April 1, a parade of taxis and tempos will take the residents of the F. D. Petit Parsi Sanitarium at Kemps Corner to the Bhabha Sanitarium at Bandra. Four months later, they will all move to the Jehangir Bagh Sanitarium in Juhu. Four months after that, they will all come back to Kemps Corner. The mass migrations back and forth to the same place, often the same room, happen because the Parsi Panchayat, which owns the sanatoria, knows that tenants who are allowed to stay on become de facto owners.

• The Rent Act was an institutionalized expropriation of private property. Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books. This allows the perpetual continuation of the most absurd, unreasonable practices.

• There is no professional body that certifies civil engineers in India; they are badly trained. The sand used in the concrete comes from the creeks around Bombay, which contains salt, silt, and shit, so new buildings look weather-beaten, moth-eaten.

• Once Bombay was composed of seven hilly islands, which were leveled, and the soil dumped into the sea, to make one big island; as the city lost height, it gained area.

• Water takes its revenge on our buildings; it corrodes the exteriors, makes the potato chips and the pappadams soggy, enters our walls, and leaks through our ceilings. Every monsoon is an assault on Bombay. The furious rain is a severe, pitiless arbiter of basic engineering principles. What the municipality can’t do, the rain does: It demolishes unsound structures.

• Bombay depends on the hinterland for this most basic resource. It is the only city in India in which water has to be brought in from lakes as distant as sixty miles away. The reason for this was the great plague of 1896. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the city depended on well water and tanks. After the plague, the city closed the wells and tanks.

• There are two ways for a crowded city to sustain itself, by creating new land or by thinking up new uses for existing land. New Bombay is an example of the first kind of approach, in which agricultural land is improved with adequate water supply, sewage, and transportation services to create new extensions to the city. The second approach, which Rahul implies has been insufficiently investigated, is to take existing serviced land, such as the Parel mill areas or the areas around the docks, and convert them to new uses, more suited to today’s needs.

• Another large block of already serviced urban land is owned by the railways: the vast tracts on either side of the tracks. As it is, railway land gets converted for de facto public use anyway, when the slums—Sunil’s railway shanties, for example—advance upon it.

• But the greatest possibility for opening up land in Bombay is the mill areas, four-hundred-odd acres of prime Bombay land occupied by fifty-two mills, very few of them running.

• There are forty thousand workers still on the payroll of the mills. The owners are trying to wait out the workers, waiting for them to die or retire. Land was given to the owners by the government, say the workers, to create employment, so it is not theirs to decide to dispose of. The millworkers who have accepted voluntary retirement take their one or two lakhs, run through the money quickly, and end up as rickshaw wallahs or drunks or in the underworld. It is, along with the Rent Act, the most potent issue in Bombay’s politics and the saddest: How do you provide a measure of justice to those who built the city, once the city has no further use for them?

• A flyover is just a little vehicular bridge over a traffic signal, but it sounds so grand: “Fly over!” It is debatable whether the bridges make traffic any better. Most of them are in the suburbs; the central city has no new roads. As far as I can see, the flyovers just get you to your traffic jam faster.

• Every morning, out of the window of my study, I see men easing themselves on the rocks by the sea. Twice a day, when the tide washes out, an awful stench rises from these rocks and sweeps over the half-million-dollar flats to the east.

• Indians do not have the same kind of civic sense as, say, Scandinavians. The boundary of the space you keep clean is marked at the end of the space you call your own. The flats in my building are spotlessly clean inside; they are swept and mopped every day, or twice every day. The public spaces—hallways, stairs, lobby, the building compound—are stained with betel spit; the ground is littered with congealed wet garbage, plastic bags, and dirt of human and animal origin.

• This absence of civic sense is something that everyone from the British to the Hindu nationalists of the RSS have drawn attention to, the national defect in the Indian character. It

• This absence of civic sense is something that everyone from the British to the Hindu nationalists of the RSS have drawn attention to, the national defect in the Indian character.

• The city is in the grip of a mass renaming frenzy. Over 50 road-renaming proposals are put before the municipal corporation each month.

• The roads committee of the municipal corporation spends 90 percent of its time renaming, receiving money from influential local residents in return for naming a street or chowk after their relatives. It’s a perverse way to honor your ancestors, with bribery. There are only so many roads in the city that can be renamed. But there are still a host of fathers, leaders, and patrons who need their names attached to the roads.

• The names of the real city are, like the sacred Vedas, orally transmitted. Many of the neighborhoods of Bombay are named after the trees and groves that flourished there. The kambal-grove gave its name to Cumballa Hill; an acacia—babul—grove to Babulnath; a plantation of bhendi, or umbrella trees, to Bhendi Bazaar; a tamarind tree to Tamarind Lane. Tad palms below the kambala trees gave the name to Tardeo; Vad trees to Worli. A tamarind (chinch) valley became Chinchpokli.

• Many of the neighborhoods of Bombay are named after the trees and groves that flourished there.

• It is nonsense to say that Mumbai was the original name. Bombay was created by the Portuguese and the British from a cluster of malarial islands, and to them should go the baptismal rights. The Gujaratis and Maharashtrians always called it Mumbai when speaking Gujarati or Marathi, and Bombay when speaking English. There was no need to choose. In 1995, the Sena demanded that we choose, in all our languages, Mumbai. This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city. If they couldn’t afford to live on our roads, they could at least occupy the road signs.

• One last method: Give the suspect one kilo—more than two pounds—of jalebis. Then you don’t give him water. This sounds like an unusually enticing form of torture, I say. “Have you ever had sweets and not had water? If you have one kilo of sweets you must have water.” A man will do anything for water after so many sweets.

• Organized crime in the city of Bombay is controlled by two exiles, or nonresident Indians (NRIs). One is in Karachi and one in Malaysia—or Bangkok, or Luxembourg, depending on which night you ask.

• Dawood started out as a small-time hood in Nagpada, in central Bombay. At that time the city was dominated by Haji Mastan, a gold smuggler who started his career when somebody gave him a sackful of gold coins for safekeeping. He helped the poor and drifted off into politics and social service. Mastan was replaced by the Pathan gang, immigrants from Afghanistan led by Karim Lala. Dawood’s

• Dawood started out as a small-time hood in Nagpada, in central Bombay. At that time the city was dominated by Haji Mastan, a gold smuggler who started his career when somebody gave him a sackful of gold coins for safekeeping. He helped the poor and drifted off into politics and social service. Mastan was replaced by the Pathan gang, immigrants from Afghanistan led by Karim Lala.

• He took advantage of the fact that gold, the supply of which was controlled by the Indian government, cost much more than in the Middle East. At the height of the business, in 1991, some two hundred tons of gold were being smuggled into the country every year. But in 1992, gold imports were liberalized and prices decreased substantially.

• In 1989, he was joined in Dubai by his top lieutenant in Bombay, the thirty-one-year-old Chotta Shakeel—also a Nagpada boy—who had jumped bail. Shakeel’s place at the head of the gang in Bombay was taken by a small-time black marketeer of cinema tickets, Rajendra Sadashiv Nilkhalje. He was born in 1960 and was known as Chotta Rajan—Small Rajan—to distinguish him from his mentor, Bada Rajan. (Chotta Shakeel is so called because he is—well, short.)

• Now he had Memon’s house searched intensively. They found a pair of chappals—sandals—with a sticky black claylike powder on them. They didn’t know it then, but the powder was RDX, “black soap.”

• Ajay’s team seized 2,074 kilograms—almost two and a half tons—of RDX,

• In 1994, Chotta Rajan made his break with his Muslim boss, Dawood—he fled Dubai for Kuala Lumpur, taking a chunk of the gang’s top Hindus away with him. He announced publicly that he did so because he could not work with a traitor to the nation, and he swore to eliminate the bombers himself. Dawood and Shakeel sent out a group of men to kill Rajan, and Rajan sent hit squads to Karachi, where the D-Company was now headquartered, to kill Dawood.

• Dawood and his gang moved from Dubai to Karachi in the mid-nineties because the ruling Maktoum family was under pressure from the Indian government to extradite him. The gang’s activities are run by Chotta Shakeel from Pakistan.

• There is also a third and smaller gang, led by Arun Gawli, an ex-Dawood man. Gawli floats in and out of jail, holding court from his fortress in Dagdi Chawl.

• In 1997, Gawli floated a political party that, when it became a threat to the Sena, led Thackeray to bring the police down hard on Gawli.

• The barbiturate Mandrax is the only drug that is produced extensively in India, where many loss-making pharmaceutical units manufacture the tablets. The price of one tablet of Mandrax, which includes the costs of manufacturing, bribes, and transport to Mauritius—close to the shores of South Africa, which is its eventual destination—is 99 paise, or 2½ cents. The moment it reaches South Africa, that tablet’s value is $2.50, a hundredfold increase. One container holds up to two tons of these tablets. “If you have one container reaching the shores of South Africa, you’re made for life,” observes Ajay.

• My uncle shows me the invitations that he’s been getting from his fellow diamond merchants for the December wedding season. They are the usual lavish cards, each costing 50 or 100 rupees, each one a small chap-book decorated with little Ganeshas, wrapped in silk, containing individual cards for the different modules that make up such a wedding: Hasta-Milap (the religious ceremony), Dandiya-Raas (the dance), Bollywood Nite, Gala Dinner. He opens one. The main venue is written on a patch of paper that has been pasted over the main card, like an afterthought. It is at a small hall I haven’t heard of. My uncle peels back the patch: Underneath is the original venue, the Racecourse. The wedding has been moved so as not to attract attention from the gangs.

• A wedding caterer of my uncle’s acquaintance was asked by the gangs for his client list for the coming season. “I had no choice. I had to hand over the list,” the caterer said. How does the underworld get information on who has money? It is through all the intermediaries: the contractors, the domestics, the interior designers.

• A family has dinner at a five-star restaurant and is presented with the bill. It is in five figures, and they protest. The waiter tells them the bill includes payment for the dinner of the six men sitting over there in the corner. They have a choice: They can either foot this bill or say good-bye to the new Ford car they drove to the hotel in.

• When the caller from Karachi calls again to demand the money, the friend’s father asks for the extortionist’s fax number. He then faxes the caller his income-tax returns for the past four years, which demonstrate that he is making no money at all. It is like applying for financial aid at an American college. Poverty is a virtue.

• The gangsters have the same effect on Bombay society that the Bolsheviks had on the Russian nobility. What all the protest marches by the left couldn’t do, a few phone calls from the bhais have managed: They have forced the Bombay rich to stop flaunting their wealth.

• In business, so entrenched has extortion become that the Bombay High Court recently ruled that extortion payments are tax deductible as a legitimate business expense. Extortion is a form of tax.

• Naeem Husain, the crime reporter for one of the leading Bombay dailies, is to meet with Assistant Police Inspector Vijay Salaskar, the top “encounter specialist” of the Bombay Police. He takes me along.

• I ask Salaskar if he has ever felt bad after an encounter, after taking a human life. “They are not humans,” he replies immediately. “They are animals. Waste.” To take a human life, you first of all have to deny that the victim is human. You have to reclassify him.

• The favorite comparison of the Bombay Police is with Scotland Yard. “Best in the world after Scotland Yard” was something I’d grown up with, probably a misquote of some survey carried out in the West.

• When Ajay catches a gangster and releases him into the judicial system, the chances of securing a conviction are, at the best of times, 10 percent. The conviction rate for criminal offenses, which was 18 to 25 percent a decade earlier, fell to an all-time low of 4 percent in 2000. But before the case comes up for trial, it lolls around for several years in the courts. This is the only time that a criminal might see the inside of a jail—but only if he is too poor to make bail or afford a good lawyer. Seventy-three percent of the country’s jail population is on trial or waiting for a trial; only a quarter of them are actually serving out a sentence.

• At a party in Cuffe Parade, I meet a woman who is in the middle of a property dispute with her landlord: She’s an educated woman who travels abroad extensively. She has engaged a consultant to help her get back a large amount of money from the landlord. “We’ll have his daughter abducted,” the consultant tells her. She is taken aback. Will it be that easy? “If I have my back to the wall I’m not sure I wouldn’t do that.” You

• At a party in Cuffe Parade, I meet a woman who is in the middle of a property dispute with her landlord: She’s an educated woman who travels abroad extensively. She has engaged a consultant to help her get back a large amount of money from the landlord. “We’ll have his daughter abducted,” the consultant tells her. She is taken aback. Will it be that easy? “If I have my back to the wall

• At a party in Cuffe Parade, I meet a woman who is in the middle of a property dispute with her landlord: She’s an educated woman who travels abroad extensively. She has engaged a consultant to help her get back a large amount of money from the landlord. “We’ll have his daughter abducted,” the consultant tells her. She is taken aback. Will it be that easy? “If I have my back to the wall I’m not sure I wouldn’t do that.”

• You have to break the law to survive. I break the law often and casually. I dislike giving bribes, I dislike buying movie tickets in the black. But since the legal option is so ridiculously arduous—in getting a driver’s license, in buying a movie ticket—I take the easy way out.

• Like an area of low pressure in the atmosphere, the underworld enters the areas that the state has withdrawn from: the judiciary, personal protection, the channeling of capital. The men in the gangwar see themselves as hardworking men. As Chotta Shakeel explained it to a journalist friend of mine, “There are blue-collar workers and white-collar workers. We are black-collar workers.”

• On the main street of Madanpura, you see a bonesetter next to a hotel next to a chemist next to an eatery making kababs on coals next to Ishaq’s STD booth, where people can make long-distance calls.

• in the Muslim area and vice versa. After 1993, the minority community on each side started selling out and leaving. The segregation is almost complete. “Mini-Pakistan,” people in the city call Madanpura.

• After 1993, the minority community on each side started selling out and leaving. The segregation is almost complete. “Mini-Pakistan,” people in the city call Madanpura.

• The segregation is almost complete. “Mini-Pakistan,” people in the city call Madanpura.

• There is involuntary movement all over the animal’s body; the head is jerking, the feet are twitching. “The meat will keep trembling at home,” one of the men says to another. The muscle movements might continue for over an hour, during which time the meat will be dressed and put on the table, ready to be cooked. On the kitchen counter it may suddenly spasm, especially the outer muscles.

• According to the laws, cattle are supposed to be slaughtered only in the Deonar abattoir. A truckful of policemen looks on as the bulls are slaughtered in front of their eyes. The cattle that I see are all bullocks, though the doctor says that, since the cow is cheaper and more delicate, they prefer that meat, and some are smuggled in against the laws and slaughtered here.

• “In any crime anywhere in the world, if investigated thoroughly, the name of Azamgarh will come in somewhere,” declares the doctor.

• In Azamgarh, says Ishaq, the panwallahs do a side trade in guns. You can buy an AK-47, smuggled from Nepal, from a pan stand for 65,000 rupees. “Why do people keep AK-47s?” I ask him. “Just. As a hobby,” he explains.

• There is a party of young English girls at a booth behind us, travelers from the station next door. They may be waiting for a night train out of Bombay. They are not molested in this café, or even commented upon. This is not Delhi.

• I am careful to refer to these guys in the formal “aap” rather than the familiar “tu,” which everybody in Bombay uses. It confirms my outsider status and also gives them a certain measure of respect from a man of the other Bombay.

• Mohsin has three enemies: Chotta Rajan’s men, the police, and the informants.

• Mohsin is a seasoned shooter, and he has developed a maxim for his work: “You should know a man’s hobbies if you want to kill him.” A man can stop work, but he cannot stop pursuing his hobbies.

• For the half murder in 1991, Mohsin used a khanjar, a short dagger. I ask him if he needs strength to use a knife to stab through muscle and bone. “Have you ever cut a watermelon?” Mohsin asks of me. “It’s the same. A man’s flesh is so delicate.”

• As he was pissing, Mohsin came up behind him in the bathroom and raised his hand with the gun. It would have been an easy shot, but Mohsin was suddenly struck with a scruple: A man, he thought, should not be shot while he was pissing. He would wait for him to finish.

• The police will have a good amount to drink while they’re beating their prisoners. When someone is being beaten, everyone in the police station clusters around. “It’s like when a goat is being killed, how people come around to see.”

• One trick they use with simple men is to bring out a lemon and a knife. Then they tell the suspect, We will cut a lemon on your head and it will affect your brain, and you will tell us everything. This works with the superstitious; as they see the cop approach their skull with the lemon and begin to cut it over them, the juice spurting out over their exposed head, they might babble out everything.

• He had already appeared in court, so he couldn’t be killed in an encounter, he informed his tormentors. This is one of the rules governing encounters, recognized and followed by cops and criminals alike. If a judge is aware that a man is alive and in police custody, he stays alive.

• The riots, and the political party that instigated them, are always on Mohsin’s mind. He refers to Thackeray as “the main wicket.”

• My technique for getting the gangwar boys to tell me their stories is simple: I am going to put their lives in the movies. This is no lie on my part; I am in touch with directors who want me to work with them on films about the underworld.

• The boys tell me that, for authenticity in my picture, my characters must use the proper bhai language. There is one word for work, sex, and death in the Bombay underworld: kaam. “Uska kaam kiya” can mean “I killed him,” “I fucked her,” or “I worked for him.”

• Many of the terms are borrowed from cricket, as I have seen in Ajay’s interrogation sessions: The lookouts are called fielding; they watch for the police while the shooters “play the game” of the victim or “take a wicket.”

• Many of the terms are borrowed from cricket, as I have seen in Ajay’s interrogation sessions: The lookouts are called fielding; they watch for the police while the shooters “play the game” of the victim or “take a wicket.” The gang lords love cricket; they spend a lot of time watching it and bring cricketers over to the countries where they are hiding.

• When a shooter goes overseas, whether it is to Dubai, Malaysia, or Toronto, he goes upar—up—to the gaon—the village. Once you leave Bombay, the rest of the world is a village.

• I make the mistake of telling one person about my day and soon the room is abuzz; everyone wants to hear about my afternoon with the hit men. The people at this party are as fascinated by my account of Madanpura as, a couple of nights ago, Ishaq and Girish and Shahbuddin were fascinated by my account of a party of industrialists at the Library Bar: “What are they like? How do they talk? How do they dress?”

• the stories I have been hearing all day. I have not yet developed

• When Kamal spent a couple of weeks in Dubai with Chotta Shakeel, he noticed that the tape of the song “I Love My India” had been worn out from playing.

• Zameer tells me that the stewards, dancers, and owners of the beer bars are the main information networks for the gangs. Also, barbers.

• Satish marks his life not by the people he meets but by the particular gun he used at the time. For each stage of his adult life, he remembers the gun in his waistband like other men remember the woman they were with.

• The gangsters refer to the police as gande log,

• The gangsters refer to the police as gande log, “dirty folk.”

• But there is one politician whom they sincerely admire. “If we were to choose one man to support for the country,” says Satish, “we would support Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He is a genuine person. If he can bring about a revolution we will support him. He is a bachelor. He has made politics his mistress. There is no scam in which his name figures. All parties respect him.” What impresses them most about Vajpayee is his decision to test the nuclear bomb. “Now the whole world looks at India. There is now a power,” exults Mickey. “He took the decision to go to war over Kargil,” points out Satish. “No other PM would have been able to do this.” They admire his ability to make powerful decisions, warlike decisions. “Nowadays who remembers Gandhiji?” asks Satish. But he still uses the respectful suffix.

• When a man touches his killer’s feet and begs for his life, saying, “Please don’t kill me. I have young children,” it is the worst argument he can offer. Thinking the killer will let you off because you have kids assumes that you can locate a hidden source of sympathy in your killer based on something shared, something in common. But very few killers are fathers. Very few of them have had good experiences with their own fathers.

• By now he has been in three companies, and they know he has no permanent allegiances. He is not working for his faith, as the Muslims in the Company profess to, or for the nation, as the Hindus in the Rajan Company claim. He is in it strictly for the gold.

• Before he goes out on a job, Satish blesses himself ceremoniously. “I give myself blessings. I don’t take anybody else’s blessing. For all good and evil, I give myself blessings, because I alone am responsible for everything in this world. I don’t believe in good or evil; I believe in karma.”

• “Only weak persons believe in sin and virtue. My father works a lot, suffers in the trains. Now there is me. I don’t work a lot. I sit, I get a phone call, I go and put a bullet in someone and get a lakh of rupees. It is no big thing for me, but my father won’t be able to do that work. So he will give his fear a name: sin. He will call it principles or whatever.”

• “In Bombay there is something in the air. In Bombay you see death all the time.” Even on the trains. “Have you traveled on the Virar train? Just traveling on it will make you strong. I feel more tension hanging from the Virar train than from a shooting.”

• A gangster must not be offended, however inconsequentially. A slight which for normal people would be merely annoying, soon forgotten, is for someone like Satish a huge ego wound. That sense of being slighted can lead to homicide. There is no proportionality to his response. A hit man’s character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.

• I go with Sunita into the city to meet an old friend, to take in a movie, to have dinner. But the rest of the world seems trivial. Their conversations revolve around trivialities: careers, taxes, shopping. Nobody in that Bombay talks about God, or sin and virtue, or death except when it is imminent, looming over a near relative, and then it is dealt with in a quick, frightened fashion, as if to get it out of the way as quickly as possible.

• Now, ordinary conversations bore me. “How much more do you need?” my wife, my friends keep asking me, concerned about my safety. They are asking the question based on the wrong premise. They think I keep meeting the gangsters for material for my book.

• Kamal tells me that because Zameer was with me during my meetings in the hotel, I was safe. Otherwise the shooters are a bit mad. “If you had asked the wrong question they would have shot you and then said sorry. A gun is such a thing that if it is in a eunuch’s hand he will think himself a man.”

• Even the language the bhais use in settling disputes is borrowed from the courts. 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 for his assistance in recovering forty lakhs that he was owed in a “chit fund,” an informal savings scheme.

• At the telephone office, they might be waiting in a long line of Indians and Pakistanis, and a man in Arab dress will go straight to the window and his payment will be taken first.

• But there was a technical problem: Chotta Shakeel had given his word to the Bombay Police that not a single bullet would be fired by his gang during the elections. So Satish took a large knife and cut Salim open. “It takes huge guts to be able to do that, when blood is spouting at you,” observes Zameer. He slit him so that his kidneys came out. Half an hour after he died, Satish phoned Zameer again; the work had been done. The body lay for three days, from Monday to Wednesday, on the terrace of a building in Mira Road.

• “In Dubai everyone knows I work for Shakeel Bhai. It is open. In Bombay there will be one or two Crime Branch people in every bar. If I were sitting like this in Bombay I would have four or five bodyguards standing behind me.” Here, in this strange country, Zameer is anonymous, sad, and safe.

• He dreams of taking the train at Mira Road and praises the fifty-five flyovers of Bombay to his friends, in between phone calls in which he orders the destruction of the city he longs for.

• “In some departments there are people who do things according to religion. They’ve been killing Muslim boys for the last four months, saying this boy belongs to the D-Company. Seventy-five percent of those boys aren’t mine, and I don’t know them.” This is a fair estimate, according to what I’ve seen in Bombay. “The police bring them in and kill them, saying this man is of the D-Company, or with Chotta Shakeel.” Then he adds, “Which is one and the same thing.”

• Since he is residing in enemy country, I ask him what he feels about the recent war in Kashmir. “Suketubhai, war is a very bad thing these days. Because people’s lives are lost, the economy gets ruined. The whole nation goes back a hundred years. Who benefited after the war? So many weapons and missiles are being made, millions of dollars. These same monies, if they are spent on the poor, then every country, not just Hindustan, would be very happy.”

• “Suketubhai, war is a very bad thing these days. Because people’s lives are lost, the economy gets ruined. The whole nation goes back a hundred

• The mastermind of the largest criminal syndicate in the subcontinent now comes out with a line from JFK. “My intention is, What can I do for my country? Not, What has the country done for me?” Then he adds, “Think about that.”

• There is a difference between criminals and politicians, whom he compares using the standard Bombay metaphor of the movies. “The difference is that all the criminals do their work on the screen, which people can see. Politicians work behind the screen, which the public can’t see. It is the same, whether you work from behind or in front of the screen. Politicians are bigger criminals than us. We fight among ourselves, but these people are ruining the whole world.”

• “My record is that I have never done anything to any innocent man. I don’t kill anyone for extortion.” He claims, further: “I don’t ask for extortion money. I have so many businesses that I have no need.” Since the whole work of extortion is done over the phone, he points out, there are many people who extort in his name.

• At the end, he asks me, “Now you tell me, what did you think of me?” It is a strange question. Is he anxious about my opinion, anxious to be liked, or is he trying to suss out what I will be writing about him, so it can be stopped in time? As I am talking to their boss, the boys are leaning over my computer, watching what I am typing. I have to tread carefully. “You speak like a poet,” I reply, knowing my countrymen. The don is pleased by this response. He offers me a gift. “Any kind of work that you need from me, at any time, you call me. Leave your phone numbers with these people or contact me through them.”

• The government might give a house; companies would provide a junket; the mob boss throws in a death to my enemies. He is offering me something from the Company store. I thank him and tell him I have no such need at the present moment. “Very few people understand me,” he says, at the end of our conversation. He says it with some pride.

• My childhood was filled not so much with violence as the constant fear of violence. I longed for a defender against the bullies in my school, in my building. Now at last I have my protectors: Ajay Lal, Kamal, Shakeel himself. They will lay waste to my enemies. The tough guys, the Lords of the Last Bench in my school, have grown up and they are my friends. I now walk around the world with a different status, a different sense of security. The don has offered me one free hit.

• The women are more interested in using such a gift than the men. If men dream about killing someone, they want to do it themselves, squeezing the trigger, plunging the knife.

• I hold on to my favor like a rabbit’s foot in my pocket; it makes me feel secure, walking around Bombay, and I am calmer with people who threaten me, more tolerant. I know what I can do if I am really provoked.

• I hold on to my favor like a rabbit’s foot in my pocket; it makes me feel secure, walking around Bombay, and I am calmer with people who threaten me, more tolerant. I know what I can do if I am really provoked. That knowledge makes me magnanimous, forgiving of slights. I become a better human being because I know I can get the

• I hold on to my favor like a rabbit’s foot in my pocket; it makes me feel secure, walking around Bombay, and I am calmer with people who threaten me, more tolerant. I know what I can do if I am really provoked. That knowledge makes me magnanimous, forgiving of slights. I become a better human being because I know I can get the person of my choice murdered.

• Once again, I am in possession of dangerous information. I know the two assassins that the entire police force is looking for; even Ajay has misidentified the man who did the work of the shakha pramukhs as Nilesh Kokam, who was subsequently shot dead. The police, hunting high and low for Satish, had killed a number of people who had nothing to do with the shooting; in one twenty-four-hour period, four men are killed in three separate encounters. But I know their real names, what they like to eat, how they love, what their precise relationship is with God. I know who controls them in faraway countries. And I know exactly who, when tortured, will give up their hiding places.

• At this point, I quit my researches into the underworld. But the gangwar will never end. Because, at its core, it is not the gangsters against the police or one gang against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history, personal and political; it is revolution, one murder at a time.

• The only Catholics I knew were my teachers at school, and my knowledge of their lifestyle was gleaned from the Hindi movies, where the Christian women always wore short skirts and the men always drank excessively.

• The only Catholics I knew were my teachers at school, and my knowledge of their lifestyle was gleaned from the Hindi movies, where the Christian women always wore short skirts and the men always drank excessively. I liked them for this reason.

• The only Catholics I knew were my teachers at school, and my knowledge of their lifestyle was gleaned from the Hindi movies, where the Christian women always wore short skirts and the men always drank excessively. I liked them for this reason. As I got older, I felt more comfortable among them than the Gujaratis I grew up with, where if you went to someone’s house for dinner you got very good vegetarian food but no liquor to build up an appetite with.

• One night I cheat a taxi driver. He brings us home just at midnight, when the fares go up, but my watch is slow and I show him the time on it: 11:57. He takes the lower fare. I get out, and Sunita rebukes me. I realize that I have become vicious.

• We learn the uses of “influence.” The WIAA club, when I phone to ask for a reservation for an out-of-town visitor, says there are no rooms available. Then my uncle calls a friend, who uses his influence, and a room miraculously materializes, like the universe manifesting itself from nothing. I had forgotten the crucial difference. There’s very little you can do anonymously, as a member of the vast masses. You have to go through someone.

• When you want to book a hotel in Matheran or a movie ticket at Metro, you ask around: “Who has influence?” This is why people stay on in Bombay, in spite of everything. They have built a network here; they have influence.

• The two most elusive qualities in a metropolis are intimacy and silence. Both exist here, within the Sunday afternoon.

• Sunday afternoon is what stands between the city and a general insurrection. The rest of the week people get home too late to do anything but eat and sleep, like animals, driven by animal needs. Sundays we become human again.

• Bombay is the vadapav eaters’ city, Mama of the Rajan Company had said to me.

• The Iranis came to Bombay around the turn of the twentieth century. They were Zoroastrians who came from the smaller villages of Persia, such as Yezd, not from the cities, and were not well off in their home country. The Iranis were very hard workers but were persecuted for their religion in Iran.

• The Iranis came to Bombay around the turn of the twentieth century. They were Zoroastrians who came from the smaller villages of Persia, such as Yezd, not from the cities, and were not well off in their home country. The Iranis were very hard workers but were persecuted for their religion in Iran. They were distinct from the Parsis, who were Iranian Zoroastrians who came to India from the eighth century onward.

• The Iranis began as dealers in provisions and branched out into bakeries and eateries. They benefited from a superstition among their Hindu business competitors: It is unlucky to place a shop on a street corner. For the Iranis it was lucky; their establishments are visible on two sides and have lots of light and air because they are wide open to the intersection.

• One of those is, along with the Naaz, my favorite Irani, the Brabourne, which has been around since 1934. It used to be a stable. It is named after Lord Brabourne, the governor of Bombay at the time.

• CITIES LIKE BOMBAY live at night. The day is a gathering-up of forces for the night.

• Many girls in the bar line now live in Mira Road; the Foras Road girls are rapidly shifting to the new city. The 12:30 train to Mira Road gets filled up at Grant Road with the bar girls, shouting and talking on their mobiles. The expensive Sterling School in the suburb is filled with the children of these girls. Mira Road is an instant city, where nobody asks questions because everyone is a newcomer.

• When they ask me, “What is your business?” I reply, “I’m a writer.” It is an effective conversation-stopper.

• Madan, a street photographer, asks me to walk with him through Golpitha, the collective name for the red-light district. So much of Bombay is a red-light district that the Dalit poets call the entire city Golpitha.

• “Put some brown on your nose,” Manoj responds. They are only going to work, but if you listen to their laughter and their jokes you would think they were going to a party. I feel a longing, watching them. Men never have this, this time among their own sex, this mutual boosting of self-esteem in the hours before a party. “Oh, you look lovely.” “Wow, look at that dress! Watch out, Bombay!” This time that is so often more fun than the actual party.

• When she speaks to BK or Pervez, they never say no outright to her. It is always: Wait. Wait till after the elections. Wait till after the third hall opens. Wait till the hours are extended. Wait till this inconvenient DCP is transferred. It is the established strategy of avoidance in the Country of the No, and by this time in Bombay I am well familiar with it.

• Minesh coached her, including the inflections of voice and the pauses. She sounds like a scheduled-caste receptionist now.

• Whether they’re making art films or masala films solidly in the mainstream, the people in the movie industry are all the same: big dreamers. In India, their dreams have to be bigger than everybody else’s. In India they’re making collective dreams; when they go to sleep at night they have to dream for a billion people. This distorts their personalities. It also accounts for their egos: the demands of scale.

• The Lumiere Brothers brought their cinématographe to Bombay in 1896, only a few months after the wondrous invention debuted in Paris.

• The suspension of disbelief in India is prompt and generous, beginning before the audience enters the theater itself. Disbelief is easy to suspend in a land where belief is so rampant and vigorous.

• One day in the summer of 1998 I found myself in distant Arunachal Pradesh, which even Indians need a permit to enter. There, a woman at a tea shop on the highway told me about the sacred geography of the area. “And here, near the water tank in this village, the shooting for Koyla happened. Shahrukh Khan was here.” This is where the new myths come from. The old tribal gods have been replaced by the Bombay gods.

• In the Hindi films I’ve seen being made, most of the directing—the development of the story, the instructions to the actors, the barked commands to the crew—is done in English.

• The constraints we operate under are peculiar to the country. Vinod can’t have fade-to-black in his movies. He had five of them in one of his early films, after he came out of the Film Institute, and the audience started jeering and whistling. They thought the arc light was going. In the interiors the projectionists cut fade-outs out of the reels to keep the audience from wrecking the theater.

• “Too late. The lights will come on and the doors open before they even get into the helicopter.” In theaters all across India, audiences have a built-in sense about when a movie is ending. This sense is aided by the doors opening and the dimmer lights coming on, five minutes before the actual ending. People with small children need to leave early, to get a taxi or rickshaw outside. So the last five minutes of any Hindi film are inevitably lost even if you stay in the theater, because most people in front of you are standing up.

• “Too late. The lights will come on and the doors open before they even get into the helicopter.” In theaters all across India, audiences have a built-in sense about when a movie is ending. This sense is aided by the doors opening and the dimmer lights coming on, five minutes before the actual ending. People with small children need to leave early, to get a taxi or rickshaw outside. So the last five minutes of any Hindi film are inevitably lost even if you stay in the theater, because most people in front of you are standing up. This is why most movies end with a song or a rapid reprise of the film’s highlights, like the life of a dying man flashing before his eyes. It stretches out the end. Thus, Mission Kashmir ends with a pointless dream sequence of playing cricket in the snow and a reprise of a song.

• I ask Vinod his opinion of the art films made in India. It is not high. “I think the art film in India is like speaking Greek or Latin to an average Indian. This is our colonial hang-up. The art cinema is made for the West, except Ghatak, who made films in Bengali for Bengalis. Ray’s power came from the West, after Pather Panchali, not from Bengal.”

• After we narrate the story to him, the superstar has a suggestion. “Can we make the system the villain?” asks Bacchan. “The common man is disinformed,” he begins. He saw Oliver Stone’s JFK, and it changed the way he looked at the world. In India, although the common man is intelligent, he has been lied to by the politicians and by the movies. But now the common man is waking up and realizing that the system is responsible for his travails.

• After we narrate the story to him, the superstar has a suggestion. “Can we make the system the villain?” asks Bacchan. “The common man is disinformed,” he begins. He saw Oliver Stone’s JFK, and it changed the way he looked at the world. In India, although the common man is intelligent, he has been lied to by the politicians and by the movies. But now the common man is waking up and realizing that the system is responsible for his travails. So now the common man will not accept a cliché ending in which the hero wins and everybody can go home.

• Stardom is not intrinsic; stars acquire their light through reflection, on the faces of their fans.

• Another role to be swallowed up by the lead is the comedy routine: Asrani, Paintal, Johnny Walker, the sidekick or fool who used to throw in a few accidental punches in the climactic fight sequence. Bacchan destroyed the comedy roles; he incorporated them into his own. He was the only actor with enough stature to be able to do that and still look heroic.

• Shahrukh was initially offered thirty lakhs for appearing in Vinod’s film, for which he would have had to travel and work for months. For three days’ work in a Pepsi ad, he’ll get ten times that money. But without the films, Shahrukh’s face in commercials would be unrecognizable. The advertising industry subsidizes the movies by funding the lifestyles of the stars. In return, the movies move product.

• Bollywood is essentially a Punjabi-and Sindhi-dominated industry, founded by Partition refugees who took up a business that the established Bombay elites of the forties looked down on. In this, it parallels the story of Hollywood and the Jews.

• But the 1993 riots toppled the pyramids of power in the film industry. The lower-level technicians became newly bold and demanded favors, questioned authority. The Sena men were making the rounds of the studios to check for Muslim employees. Hindus higher up in the industry, not knowing that Mahesh’s mother was a Muslim, would abuse Muslims in front of him.

• Vinod and Tanuja Chandra take me along to the meeting on Saturday evening, in an enormous conference room of the State Guest House, Sahyadri. No one asks me for identification as I walk in. In Bombay, you get past doormen if you look like you’re not going to tolerate questions.

• And if the first rain is early, you will sleep especially well tonight, because you still have fifteen days left till the beginning of school.

• The rope leads across the yard to the other school building, to a thick brass bell whose ringing could be a glad sound, signifying release from a day of torment, or a dread sound, bringing on Mrs. Qureshi’s period. Period means “class,” but so cranky was the Hindi teacher that it could equally well have meant the other thing.

• The children streaming from school in the late afternoon are now darker and worse dressed, their haircuts more unfashionable, than when I studied here.

• Outside, in the passage, I dare not turn around, because a boy might come running up to me out of those classrooms, anxious to get outside forrecess, bump into me, and say, “Sorry, sir,” and look up at me and see himself.

• I ask Girish why Ramswamy hasn’t bought himself a better flat, out of the slum. “He will only live where he can rule,” Girish explains.

• 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.

• 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.

• The buildings of Mira Road want to be in Europe. Accordingly, they are given misspelt European names: TANWAR HIGHTS, CHANDRESH REVEARA.

• 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.

• 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.

• The tanker operators are the most powerful political lobby in Mira Road. They have divided up the tanker routes among themselves and prevent the municipality from laying new pipes, which would eliminate their business.

• So the residents of Mira Road spend a major portion of their income paying for the most basic of municipal services: water, sewage, and transportation. Mira Road is just outside the limits of the Bombay Municipal Corporation.

• “Les très riches heures du Due de Berry.”

• Ishaq’s immediate reaction to the possibility of hiring Babbanji: “All Biharis are thieves.” This from a man himself from Azamgarh, crime capital of Uttar Pradesh, the state next to Bihar.

• One evening at 11 p.m., Sevantibhai was reading a book written by a Jain swami titled I Should at Least Be Human. In the book, Sevantibhai came across a sentence that electrified him. “Are you going to be dismissed or will you resign?” He thought about it and then woke up his wife and told her he had decided to take diksha. He had decided to resign before he could be dismissed.

• “This has now become our culture: Have more! Have more!”

• The anxiety of the city dweller is the anxiety of transience; he does not know where he will be next year or where his children will be. He cannot form lasting friendships, because sooner or later his friends will be scattered.

• A long time ago, a man was conducting a wedding. A cat was running around the marriage hall, disturbing things. So he tied it to a pillar. Afterward, generations of the man’s family, whenever they had a wedding, found a cat and tied it to one pillar of the hall, believing it to be a required wedding custom.

• Technology leads to surplus production, which leads to competition, to the death of the village and its barter economy, and to consumption for its own sake. It is a Jain version of Marxism.

• Where Aristotelian logic admits only two possible states of being for a proposition, that it is true or false—there is no middle ground—Jain logic expands these to no fewer than seven possibilities. The name given to this predicated conception of truth is syadvada, “the doctrine of maybeness.”

• Approaching the middle of my life, I feel poorer every day compared to my friends who went to school with me, who are making money in technology and on the stock market, and who are buying up apartments and cars and raising their prices beyond my reach. I am earning more than I ever have before, and I am also feeling poorer than ever before. Each time it feels like I almost have it within reach at last—financial security (if not wealth), a working family, a career—it slips out of my grasp like the frogs in the pond of Walshingham House School. We would catch these frogs with our hands and clutch them so tight it seemed impossible or miraculous when they jumped out of our fists. Sevantibhai has just bypassed all this. He has taken a leap over his worries, outdistancing them, outfoxing them.

• Sevantibhai has beat death to the end. He has resigned before he could be dismissed.

• When we won a kite fight, a mighty shout went up, “Kaaayyypooo che!”

• The boys these days install powerful loudspeakers on the terraces of their buildings during Utran. When a duel is won, the speakers boom out all over the victorious skies the voice of that lost Bombay boy Freddie Mercury: “We are the champions!”

• So just when we finally get comfortable in Bombay, we prepare to move again—back to New York. But it’s all right, because, after two and a half years, my question has been answered. You can go home again, and you can also leave again. Once more, with confidence, into the world.

• The Country of the No has become, in that one small gesture, the Country of the Yes. I now realize that if you refuse to understand the No, pretend it doesn’t exist, was never said, then, slain by your incomprehension, it will transform itself abruptly into its opposite. Or it might never become a Yes but will turn into a wagging of the head, which can mean either No or Yes, depending on your interpretation.

• People associate Bombay with death too easily. When five hundred new people come in every day to live, Bombay is certainly not a dying city. A killing city, maybe; but not a dying city. When I first came here I thought I was here in the city’s final stages. Then I moved to a nicer apartment. A city is only as thriving or sickly as your place in it. Each Bombayite inhabits his own Bombay.

• What I found in most of my Bombay characters was freedom.

• Each of us has an inner extremity. Most of us live guarded lives and resist any pull that takes us too far toward this extremity. We watch other people push the limits, follow them up to a point, but are then pulled back, by fear, by family. In Bombay I met people who lived closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known.

• Ajay and Satish and Sunil live on the extreme of violence; Monalisa and Vinod live on the extreme of spectacle; Honey is on the extreme of gender; the Jains go beyond the extreme of abandonment.

• A solitary human being here has two choices: He can be subsumed within the crowd, reduce himself to a cell of a larger organism (which is essential to the makeup of a riot), or he can retain a stubborn, almost obdurate sense of his own individuality.