Maximum City (20 page)

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
Fort Stikine
was a ship supposedly carrying bales of cotton and, like the hundred-odd boats that were then as now waiting in the harbor to get a berth in port, was anchored offshore. The intense pressure that cotton bales are stored under, along with the temperature on that very hot day, caused the cotton bales to catch fire. This by itself would not have been very serious, at least not to people who were not on the ship. But the
Fort Stikine
had a secret cargo. It was carrying explosives—this was wartime—and it was also carrying a secret cargo of gold and silver, worth £2 million, brought from London to stabilize the sagging Indian rupee. Then the fire department did the worst thing they possibly could; they towed the burning
ship into the harbor rather than scuttling it in the bay. At a quarter to four, there was a terrific bang, a pall of smoke, and the windows of houses in the Fort area rattled. Twenty-five minutes later, there was another explosion, and the windowpanes shattered. 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. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.

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.

At the entrance to Cama Chamber, Building Number 23, hangs this prominent notice:

If you go up the narrow wooden steps, you can see the signboards of the offices in the unsafe building. They are law firms, accountants, merchant bankers. The offices themselves are sleek, modern, air-conditioned, with computers blinking and flashing. Only the building’s public areas are
decrepit. Gaping holes mark the first floor where windows should be. The same notice is posted by the owners on the first floor. They are getting, by force of law, almost nothing in rent for their land. So they will put nothing into repairs of the building; all they can do is put up these cautionary signs, which they hope will frighten away the clients of the businesses within.

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. In the case of other buildings, the courts were empowered to affix a “standard rent,” which, once determined, could never be raised. The act also provided for transfer of the right to lease the property at the fixed rent to the legal heirs of the tenant. As long as the tenant kept paying the rent, he could not be evicted; he would not need to renew his lease. This was originally intended as an emergency wartime measure, a five-year provision to protect tenants from inflation and speculation after World War II. Bombay was full of troops early in the war. Accommodations were at a premium; Bombay was bustling. And the newcomers were rich; those who owned property in the city were not blind to this fact. So they hiked rents to whatever the market would bear. Outsiders who came in—Indians—found themselves frozen out of the city. The short-term visitors during the war were in danger of dispossessing the old-timers: thus the Rent Act.

But the act, once enacted, proved politically impossible to repeal, since there will always be more tenants than landlords. There are 2.5 million tenants in Bombay, the most powerful political lobby in the city. All the political parties are unified in warlike support of the tenants; the Rent Act has been extended more than twenty times. The tenants have proposed a solution to the landlords: sell their rented properties en masse to the tenants living in them, for a hundred times the fixed rent on each property. This would end the rent disputes once and for all, because the tenants would become owners. It would also mean that properties in the poshest areas of the city would be given over for an amount that would not buy a slum room on the open market. The landlords can do nothing but refuse to repair their properties. So there’s no possibility of the housing stock of the island city improving or expanding anytime soon, and more of the island city falls down every year. There are twenty thousand buildings that are officially
classified as dilapidated and need to be renovated by the public agencies; fewer than a thousand a year are actually improved.

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. The reason Bombay is choking is the Rent Act. It hits the newcomer, the young, and the poor; it’s the reason lovers in Bombay can’t find a place to be alone. Those who come in from outside can’t find a room to rent because the middle class and the rich already have a lock on all the best properties. It is the most extreme version of a Newcomers’ Tax. But it doesn’t keep the newcomers out; it merely condemns them to live squalidly.

In the 1930s, Bombay was full of signs saying
FLATS TO LET.
Very few people bought flats then; there were no mortgages. To buy a flat with a mortgage is still relatively rare in Bombay. Most people buy the property outright, with a fixed “white-black” percentage: the amount on which taxes have been paid is given in the form of a check; and shopping bags full of cash for the other color. 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. The court battles over the Rent Act take on the dimensions of a war. While the state was recently considering revising the act, the head of the Property Owners’ Association had to stay home for a month under armed guard. There will never be a solution to the rent mess because then all the professional activists would be out of business, one of them tells me.

Either you believe in individual property rights or you don’t; either a citizen can never have any permanent claim to a piece of land or he can, and if he does it should be backed up by the full weight of the law. An owner of a flat should have the right to repossess it after the lease expires. If a piece of land has been set aside for use as a public park, the municipality should have the right to demolish any structure that invades the park. But in 1979 the government of India removed from the constitution the right to property as a “fundamental right,” along with the right to be compensated
when the state expropriates property. 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.

The Greater Bombay region has an annual deficit of 45,000 houses a year. The amount of new construction every year comes up to less than half the number needed. Thus these 45,000 households every year add to the ranks of the slums. In the words of the planners, their shelter needs “are satisfied in the informal market.” This slum population doubles every decade. 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. Assuming each apartment can house a family of five people, on average, that’s 2 million people—one-fourth of the homeless—who could immediately find shelter if the laws were to be amended.

But the anxiety of the tenants can also be understood. The greatest fear of the Bombayite is to end up on the footpath. In New York I volunteered for an organization for the homeless, and over three years I got to know them. Homelessness is a condition; the material fact of not having a home of one’s own invades one’s consciousness till it becomes a person’s entire self-definition. Before you are an out-of-work clerk or your father’s son or your wife’s husband or a Bombayite or a human being, you are homeless. There isn’t that much difference, really, between living in a shack built of rags or on the footpath over which it perches. If anything, the air is better in the open, although during the rains the illusion of a barrier between you and the water goes a long way in comforting you. As very young boys we used to make these little huts in the construction ground behind the building I lived in on Ridge Road; put up three walls and a roof with any odd building material, cardboard, rags, bricks. Then we would cluster inside it, five or six little boys, while the older children mocked us. “This is Suketu, architect. And that’s Dilip, engineer.” The world felt different, safer, inside the little shack. In school we would likewise demarcate territory on the two-person benches we occupied. Even as children in Bombay, we were constantly trying to claim space. The important thing was not to get crowded
off the space you happened to possess at the moment. The moment you left, it was up for grabs.

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. So they keep their tenants constantly on the move, even as they provide them shelter. Some of the families have been doing this merry-go-round for over half a century. Every time they move, they must reapply, coming up with a health certificate, to prove they need the salubrious quarters of a sanatorium. They are allowed to keep their bags and some furniture—but not a refrigerator. Installing a fridge is claiming home, so the residents must subsist on powdered milk.

Another cancerous outgrowth of the Bombay Rent Act is the “paying guest.” In looking for an office, I am referred to the “PG rooms,” which are rooms in someone else’s flat. The city has a whole tribe of “paying guests,” usually young professionals from other cities, suffering the daily humiliations imposed on them by their landlords—what time you can come in and who you can bring with you, how much ice you’re entitled to from the fridge, how loud you can play your music. There are three personal gods that every Hindu is supposed to revere: mother, father, guest. There is no category for “paying guest.”

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. In America I can walk into a gun show and buy a handgun for less than the price of a good dinner for two, even if I am insane or a convicted criminal. In Bombay I can walk into a flat I’ve rented for a year and stay there for the rest of my life, pass it on to my sons after me, and defy the lawful proprietor’s efforts to get my ass off his property. In both instances, I have the law behind me.

The city is full of people claiming what’s not theirs. Tenants claim
ownership by virtue of having squatted on the property. Millworkers demand that mills be kept open at a loss to provide them with employment. Slum dwellers demand water and power connections for illegal constructions on public land. Government employees demand the right to keep working long past when they’re needed, at taxpayer expense. Commuters demand further subsidies for train fares, which are already the lowest in the world. Moviegoers demand that the government freeze ticket prices. The Indian government has long believed in the unreality of supply and demand; what you pay for an item, for a food or for a service, has no relation to what it costs the producer.

O
N A VISIT
to the caves of Elephanta Island, I come out to a courtyard just off the main cave. From here, I can look at two sets of pillars: on my right, the pillars commissioned by the Rashtrakuta kings in the eighth century; in front of me, the new pillars built by the Archaeological Survey of India. In one panoramic sweep you can see the whole decline of culture in India. The original pillars, built a thousand years ago, are delicately fluted and in proportion, curving gently outward like an infant’s belly. The ASI pillars are stolid blocks of stone, each unmatched in shape and color and size with the others; at a glance you can tell they are wonky. They are devoid of ornamentation, which is probably just as well, since God knows what monstrosities their house sculptors would carve on the pillars if they were allowed to. What we could do so exquisitely in this country a thousand years ago we can’t even attempt today. We were making some of the greatest art of the ancient world. Shattered by invasion and colonialism and an uneasy accommodation with modernity, we now can’t construct five pillars of equal proportions.