Maximum City (6 page)

“I’ll go downstairs and bash his brains out,” I say.

“Don’t do that. You have a family; you have to live here.”

The drunk, the young man tells me, is a doctor. He lives on the eighth floor and is known in the building as a bad character. “Why are you moving in?” the young man asks me. “Everybody’s moving out.” The building is, even by Bombay standards, spectacularly badly run. I lie awake a good part of that night. Something has been brought home to me: Violence in Bombay can strike very close and at any time. And the present dispute, as usual, is about space—in this case, space for a car—the illegal usurpation of space and the defense of that usurpation through muscle power. “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. And they own the guards who are supposed to enforce those privileges for me.

The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over parking places.

O
UR EARLY DAYS
in Bombay are filled with battling our foreign-born children’s illnesses. Gautama has had amebic dysentery for two weeks now; he keeps going all over the floor and when he takes off his T-shirt it is painful to look at him; all his ribs show. The food and the water in Bombay, India’s most modern city, are contaminated with shit. Amebic dysentery is transferred through shit. We have been feeding our son shit. It could have come in the mango we gave him; it could have been in the pool we took him swimming in. It could have come from the taps in our own home, since the drainage pipes in Bombay, laid out during British times, leak into the freshwater pipes that run right alongside. There is no defense possible. Every
thing is recycled in this filthy country, which poisons its children, raising them on a diet of its own shit.

In Bombay, there’s always “something going around.” In other countries, there is a kingdom of the sick and a kingdom of the well. Here, the two are one. We play a continuous round-robin of sickness in our family. Sunita and I both contract something the doctor calls “granular pharyngitis.” If we don’t want to have it, we have to stop breathing in Bombay. It’s caused by pollution, which we get lots of. Even when I am not walking the streets, riding the trains, or talking to anybody, I absorb the city through my pores and inhale it into my throat, causing granules to erupt all over it. We sneeze and sniffle our way through the city. Every morning when the dust is swept a good-sized mound gathers on the broom: dirt, fibers, feathers. My children play in this dirt, breathing air that has ten times the maximum permissible levels of lead in the atmosphere, stunting their mental growth.

Visitors come and I have to strain to explain to them that it was not always thus. Bombay used to be a beautiful city, a breathable city. During a strike by the taxi and auto drivers, the air pollution comes down by a quarter from its usual level. They are marvelous January days, when everybody goes out to breathe luxuriously. It is a long time since Bombay smelled so sweet in the winter. 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. The city of Bombay is divided between the air-conditioned and the non-air-conditioned parts: AC/non-AC. My nose can’t handle the radical difference in the worlds of Bombay. I am continuously sneezing, I have a constantly running nose. I am advised to buy an air-conditioned car. We have no choice but to live rich, if we are to live at all.

Bombay is more expensive for us in the beginning of our stay there than later on. Newcomers find it a city without options—for housing, for education. Everything has been gobbled up by those already here. If you’re going to come to Bombay, come at the bottom. There’s no room at the top. Every nice place has a right to charge a newcomer’s tax, which goes from the new inhabitants to the old patient ones. A city has its secrets: where you go to shop for an ice bucket, for an office chair, for a sari. Newcomers have to pay more because they don’t know these places. We haggle over minuscule amounts that have no value for us: 10 rupees is only 40 cents. If we lost
40 cents in New York we would never notice it; here it becomes a matter of principle. This is because along with getting ripped off for 10 rupees comes an assumption: You are not from here, you are not Indian, so you deserve to be ripped off, to pay more than a native. So we raise our voices and demand to be charged the correct amount, the amount on the meter, because not to do so would imply acceptance of our foreign status. We are Indian, and we will pay Indian rates!

Theft is another form of the newcomers’ tax. There are thieves even outside the house of God. Inside Siddhivinayak Temple, hordes of people pray earnestly for a sick relative to get better, to save their business from bankruptcy, to pass an examination. 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. I walk out onto the filthy street in my sock feet.

A sign I see on the back of a truck says it all:

From all around, people ask us for money. Our driver asks for money. Our maid asks for money. Friends down on their luck ask for money. Strangers ring our doorbell and ask for money. We are, in Bombay, a low-pressure system surrounded by areas of very high pressure; from all around, they zoom in on us.

This fucking city. The sea should rush in over these islands in one great tidal wave and obliterate it, cover it underwater. It should be bombed from the air. 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. Even my CD player in India responds to anger, physical violence; when a gentle press of the
PLAY
button fails to arouse it from its slumber, a hard smack across the side propels it into sound.

Any nostalgia I felt about my childhood has been erased. Given the
chance to live again in the territory of childhood, I am coming to detest it. Why do I put myself through this? I was comfortable and happy and praised in New York; I had two places, one to live and one to work. I have given all that up for this fool’s errand, looking for silhouettes in the mist of the ghost time. Now I can’t wait to go back, to the place I once longed to get away from: New York. I miss cold weather and white people. I see pictures of blizzards on TV and remember the warmth inside when it’s cold outside and you open the window just a crack and the air outside slices in like a solid wedge. How it reaches your nostrils and you take a deep breath. How you go outside on a bad night and the cold clears your head and makes everything better.

My father once, in New York, exasperated by my relentless demands to be sent back to finish high school in Bombay, shouted at me, “When you were there, you wanted to come here. Now that you’re here, you want to go back.” It was when I first realized I had a new nationality: citizen of the country of longing.

S
HORTLY AFTER WE MOVE
to Bombay in 1998, the country explodes five nuclear bombs, including a hydrogen bomb, and there is this great feeling of: We have shown the world, bhenchod! Meanwhile, all the economic indicators of the country plunge downward. The bad news about money hits Bombay hard. It is a population led to believe that every year they will get a little more than they had the previous year, and buy a little more: an electric toaster to begin with, a color television the next year, a fridge the year after that, a washing machine, an imported crystal chandelier for the drawing room, and finally a small car. That is usually the top of the pyramid, unless they get very lucky and are able to buy a flat. The pyramid has topped out. Those who already have a car and a flat are now thinking anxiously about their children. From the top, there is only one way to go—and it is a leap—outside the country altogether, to America, Australia, Dubai. To go from the Maruti to the Mercedes, from the blue jeans to the Armani suit, necessitates a move abroad.

After the nuclear tests, the international financial carpetbaggers start leaving Bombay, not in a group but in twos and threes. For a while, India is no longer a profit center. A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population,
is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving. So it is that the Bombayite might dream of the West, not just for the riches that lie there but also for the excitement of moving somewhere again.

Every summer, waves of Indians living overseas come back. They also send back little pictures: of their son in front of the new fifty-two-inch TV; their daughter sitting on the hood of the new minivan; the wife in the open-plan kitchen, one hand on the microwave; the whole family laughing together in the small backyard pool, their “bungalow” in the background. These pictures plant little time bombs in the minds of the siblings left behind. They hold the pictures and look around their two-room flat in Mahim and suddenly the new sofa and the two-in-one Akai stereo they have invested in with such pride look cheap and shabby in comparison. It used to be that they could reassure themselves: At least my children are growing up with Indian values. But when the children of the exiles come back, it is noticed that there isn’t such a vast gulf between the Bombay kids and their cousins abroad; both wear the same football jerseys and speak in the same peculiar argot of the music video channels, an internationalized American. Often, the kids from the cold countries are interested in going to a temple; they have come back brimming with facts on Hinduism that have been taught to them in the fine schools they attend. The local kids want to take them club-hopping. When we decide to put Gautama in a Gujarati-language school, our decision is met with amazement and sometimes anger. “How could you do that to your son?” demands the lady down the hall. “You’ll ruin his life.” But then she reflects. “It’s all right for you, you’re getting out of here sooner or later. If you were living here permanently you’d put him in Cathedral.”

A whole network of recently met strangers gather themselves to help us find a school for Gautama. Everyone knows a teacher or a principal or an owner at one of the few schools that has a kindergarten, and they energetically make calls on our behalf, even go personally to wheedle and convince. They paint us as innocents abroad, foreigners unsophisticated in the ways of school admissions. The fact that we need a place only for two years counts in our favor; it means that when Gautama leaves, another place will be created, to be bestowed upon someone else in exchange for a favor
or a donation. Each vacant place signifies money and power. There are only seven schools in South Bombay that are considered worth sending a child to.

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. It inherited the tenants years ago, when it bought the building. There is no land on which to build schools; no new ones have appeared in my area since I was a child. But the population of children has exploded. There is no place for all these new learners. They have to be registered at birth. “Is it difficult, getting a place for a child in a school in Bombay?” I ask the principal.

“It’s like climbing Mount Everest.”

I want my son to go to a Gujarati-language school, and the only one that’s any good in Bombay is New Era, a school founded by Gandhians. A trustee writes a letter for us, and after a round of begging and pleading it is done. Going to pick him up after his first day, my heart swells with gladness: I can’t recognize my son. I can’t pick him out from the whole crowd of brown-skinned kids in white uniforms. For the first time in his life, he’s just like all the others.

But not long afterward, I become conscious of a way in which my son is not like the others. In the school bus with him coming back from New Era, little Komal tells me, in Gujarati, that her grandmother is coming to visit. She has stick-on tattoos she wants me to put on the back of her hand. Out of her schoolbag come wonderful treasures: a potato with lots of matches stuck in it, like a porcupine; outlines of drawings to be colored in; a piece of paper cut into strips and held together loosely at the top so you can fold it and something interesting will happen. She instructs me to tell Gautama’s mother where to buy shoes. My son tries to talk to her, to the others on the bus, but nobody can understand his English. “But can’t you speak Gujarati?” I ask him.

“I speak only a little Gujarati,” he explains reasonably. “Pappa, please put me in an English-language school.”

“You broke your father’s heart,” my uncle later tells Gautama.