In Mehta’s handling, Bombay outstrips the decay of Augustine’s Rome and the decadence of the Bible’s Sodom, the criminality of Dickens’ London and the intrigues of Proust’s Paris. Louder than Tokyo, hungrier than New York, poorer than Mexico City, more pleasure-filled than Amsterdam, Bombay surpasses any modern city imaginable, save perhaps contemporary Baghdad, in its offer of daily opportunities to be kidnapped or to die violently and randomly. Bombay crams 19 million human beings onto one smallish island. Twenty thousand of its buildings have been condemned, its population density reaches one million people per square mile in some areas, and two-thirds live on 5 percent of the land while the wealthy and rent-protected hoard the remainder. As Mehta knowingly observes, “A city this densely packed affords no privacy. Those without a room of their own don’t have space to be alone, to defecate or write poetry or make love.”
Like Bellaigue in Tehran and Goldberg in Prague, Mehta tries to make sense of life in an urban setting that spectacularly fails to correspond to orderly Western notions of what a city should and should not be. Proud and comfortably self-proclaimed “world cities” like Toronto and Sydney, are multicultural jamborees compared to Bombay in its blood-splattered pluralism. In the feral wake of the 1992–93 riots between Muslims and Hindus over the Ayodhya mosque and temple controversy, ethnic gang culture has become so darkly commonplace in the city that extortion payments are now tax-deductible. The city’s infrastructure is more offending: 40 percent of Bombay’s policemen live in slums; the court system—turgid amid a cloud of incompetence, fear, and corruption—receives 40,000 new cases every year, and it would take 350 years to get through the backlog. Meanwhile, the always overworked, malfunctioning sewage system conspires with catastrophic levels of urban poverty, allowing the cleverest of the desperate to extract water from drainage ditches that gurgle and reek of human waste. Unbelievably, this prize lets them grow spinach to feed their families.
“Every day is an assault on the individual’s senses, from the time you get up, to the transport you take to go to work, to the offices you work in, to the forms of entertainment you are subjected to. The exhaust is so thick the air boils like a soup. There are too many people touching you: in the trains, in the elevators, when you go home to sleep. You live in a seaside city, but the only time most people get anywhere near the sea is for an hour on Sunday evening on a filthy beach. It doesn’t stop when you’re asleep either, for nighttime brings the mosquitoes out of the malarial swamps, the thugs of the underworld to your door, and the booming loudspeakers of the parties of the rich and the festivals of the poor. Why would you want to leave your brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the east to come here? “
Bombay, like New York, is a city of talkers, and so Mehta is barraged with answers to that question, which, among others, cite the lucrative clutches of the city’s all-pervading criminal enterprises and the moony hopes of stardom in its ever-present movie industry. There are people who come to Bombay as part of an old story: country youths eager for better prospects and excitements in the big city. And those who come as globalization’s privileged migrants: American-educated, nonresident Indians who return for private gain and personal restoration, deadened by their profitable time in the soulless West and looking to get even richer by putting their Silicon Valley smarts to use in the East.
The Bombay that thunders across Mehta’s pages takes a wrecking ball to tidy divisions of Third and First World. These are always toe-to-toe in the twenty-first century’s pre-eminent version of the universal city, that “locus classicus of incompatible realities,” in Salman Rushdie’s smart phrase. To enter Maximum City is to be cinched up in a bright, screaming, muddy sari and eavesdrop at the overcrowded, gossipy “intersection of everything that makes the city fascinating: money, sex, love, death, and show business.”
Of Bombay’s primal elements, modern Tehran shares one andd a half: it also brims with death, while its perpetual mobs—religious, revolutionary, anti-revolutionary, anti-American, and, always around the corner, thuggish—grow so berserk in their theatre at times that one wonders if the citizenry is collectively employed in some bizarre civic-sponsored show business. If so, then at least they would have jobs, not to mention a rationale for their days in Tehran, because otherwise, these goods are in short supply. If Bombay throbs with life, Tehran coughs and rattles. Much like the wider nation, it is a city sterile with contradiction, as Christopher de Bellaigue reveals in his stark memoir In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs.
Bellaigue, a Tehran resident since 2000 who writes for the Economist and the New York Review of Books among others, traces out the numbing consequences of the 1979 Islamic Revolution on the present-day city. It suffers from many of the problems that plague all metropolises—stagnating infrastructure, a widening gyre of poverty and drug addiction, terrible air pollution, bald mismanagement of public funds, and brittle divisions between districts cut along economic and cultural lines. But Tehran cannot look to a better future; any chance of urban renewal is precluded by Iran’s evermore desperate need to define itself as permanently in revolution and at perpetual war with the outside world. One outcome, Bellaigue explains, is that living in Tehran is like “listening to the sea in a shell”; after being bluntly reinvented, the city has been hermetically sealed to erase any vestige of a past before Khomeini. The streets have been renamed for martyrs; the infamous former US embassy is today officially known as the Nest of Spies; the city’s main southern cemetery, which contains the bodies of 70,000 soldiers, is proudly called Zahra’s Heaven; and colonial Tyburn, west of the city’s uneasy bazaar, is now grimly, if appropriately, designated Execution Square.
Twenty-five years after the expulsion of the Shah and his Persian pleasures, and now that the hoped-for “Tehran Spring” of Khatami’s reform-minded leadership has rotted, Bellaigue moves through the city’s tense population in hopes of clarifying its scores of problems and divining its prospects. His findings can be as absurd as they are depressing. He chats with a recalcitrant editor who has had six consecutive newspapers closed down by judges; he traces out the hyperactive espionage, ridiculous lies, and brutal solutions that the mullahs favour to catch and punish talkative journalists and misbehaving moles; he spends time with an expatriate Iranian artist, Parastu Forouhar, recently returned to Tehran to secure justice for her dead parents, who were efficiently murdered by state agents for purported dissident activities.
In fact, Bellaigue’s time with Forouhar best reveals Tehran in its all-conquering grey, brown, and black swatches. He hears her speak with passion at a rally whose other attendees seem split between nervous, nervy supporters of reform and “informants and agents. . . not bothering to hide their identity—scowling through dank beards, pocketing notes made on a pad.” Outside, another of the regime’s watchmen brazenly videotapes all who leave the building as they form into a chanting mob, only to be silenced by policemen, counted by plainclothes agents, and crushed by the ever-ready thugs.
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