Maximum City (88 page)

Wandering through the villages of Gujarat, Sevantibhai is thinking about the great questions, about the purpose and order of the universe, about the stupidity of nationalism, about the atomic nature of reality. More than anybody else I know, he lives with a daily and nagging realization of the amount of violence our species perpetrates, each hour, each minute, not only on our fellow humans but on all life and upon creation itself. The diamond merchants I have met throughout my life are not, by and large, given to this kind of questioning. Their trade has done well. These questions tend to occur more frequently to people in financial hardship. The Jain diamond merchants of Bombay are pretty happy with their lavish homes and offices, their occasional trips to Antwerp for business, to Disneyworld with their children, and to the hill resort of Lonavla on the weekends. They are almost to a man BJP supporters, and they think the proposed Narmada
dam—a huge project strongly opposed by environmentalists—will be a blessing for Gujarat.

Sevantibhai’s decision puts him in another sphere of thought altogether. He is against the dam, because it will lead to development of the fishing industry; he has heard about the Kashmir conflict but, to him, an Indian and a Pakistani and an American life are equally valuable; nations have no meaning for him. The Jain monks are mostly apolitical, unlike many present-day Hindu gurus, who dabble in right-wing politics. Sevantibhai has decisively rejected every value held dear by the middle classes: western education, consumerism, nationalism, and, most important, family. But the people he rejected come to him now with reverence; merchants with firms considerably larger than his, who would not have socialized with him in the life he has left, now travel great distances to bow before him and touch his feet and those of his teenage sons. His children are studying Sanskrit when other teenagers in their building in Bombay have not grown out of Archie comics. They had not been good students in the city schools, but now they spend several hours a day in study of some of the most sophisticated epistemology that human beings have ever produced. 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.” The Ladhanis are free to study. Within the rigid structures of the monk’s day there is a freedom to live the life of the mind.

And what was that joy I saw on his face, that frequent smile? His children I am less sure about. He had a huge loss once in his business. Was that the real reason he quit the world? What did he get tired of? Did he quarrel with his wife? “My past was very bad,” Sevantibhai said to me. “All of Dhanera knew this.” Sevantibhai admitted that his head had been full of worries for the seven years before he took diksha, worries about money, worries about his family. He had shown me his two red vessels, made out of a gourd, that he now uses for gocari. “I eat, I wash. I don’t worry about whether the servant will come today to wash the dishes. There is no tension. I don’t worry about what to do tomorrow.” His mind is completely free to concentrate on moksha. Whether his family survives or not, whether his business thrives or not, is no longer an issue.

For a long time afterward, in my life in the cities, I think of Sevantibhai,
of the utter final simplicity of his life. In New York I am beset with financial worry. How will I educate my children? Will I be able to buy a home? 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. In response to the possibility of a loss in his business, his answer is: I have nothing, so I can lose nothing. When faced with losing his loved ones through death or illness, his attitude is: They mean nothing to me, so their illness or death doesn’t affect me. Before anything can be taken from him, he has given it away himself. And I continue on my way, always accumulating the things I will eventually lose and always anxious either about not having enough of them or, when I have them, about losing them. Anxious, too, about death.

The greatest violence is your own death—that is, if you fight it. Sevantibhai has even triumphed over death. He has divested himself of everything—family, possessions, pleasure—that is death’s due. All that remains is his body, to which he has renounced title in advance and treats as a borrowed, soiled shirt. He can’t wait to take it off. Sevantibhai has beat death to the end. He has resigned before he could be dismissed.

D
URING
U
TRAN
I take the children to my cousin’s in-laws’ place in Prarthana Samaj, in the central city. I remember this festival well and with pleasure. On this day we flew kites, very simple contraptions made of tissue paper and twigs, and as they rose in the sky we guided them, adjusting them minutely by letting the string run free or taut, feeling the flight far, far above the concrete city. My heart ran free in the sky. When the kites ripped, we repaired the tears with a paste made with mushed leftover boiled rice and water. We got on the roof and dueled with kites from surrounding buildings. The string was studded with glass to cut through the rival’s string; many a boy lost a digit when it ran free and sliced clean through his finger. 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!”

There are many of my cousin’s relatives on the roof, and they adore his new son. They are nice to my kids too, but it is not the same: We are not immediate family. Holding my boys’ hands, I feel the difference keenly. They watch the kite fliers, again from the outside.

“Why do you want to go back to America?” I ask Gautama, as we’re walking back one day from our snack on Pali Hill, after he’s picked up a yellow-and-white champak flower and I’ve shown him how—by folding the petals back and threading them through the stem—he can make a
brooch for his mother; after I’ve shown him the seed pod that makes a good rattle for Akash if you shake it.

He doesn’t answer for a while. I ask him again. I bend down to his level and ask him seriously.

“Because my family there misses me. They say it every time on the phone.”

It’s a good enough reason to go back: because your family misses you. It’s the reason I’ve gone back, been pulled back, again and again. Family is there—not just parents but grandparents, aunts, cousins—and family is what little children need, more than culture, more than country. 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.

My last day in Bombay is a Sunday, the beginning or the end of the week. I have a big lunch at Khichdi Samrat, a dive in Madhavbagh. They serve khichdi of several kinds out of vast vats, and bring it to your table with a little kadhi and pickle. Along with cauliflower parathas, sev tamatar ki sabzi, pappadams, and some cold buttermilk that comes to your table in a beer bottle, it makes for a fine meal. Then I wander around CP Tank buying incense, drinking a masala Coke, and looking for cast-iron vessels to take to New York. Cast-iron vessels aren’t in fashion these days; people prefer stainless steel or aluminum or nonstick. The few people I meet on the road profess not to know about any shop that sells them and tell me that if by some miracle I were to find one, it would be shut anyway. It is a Sunday afternoon, when Bombay exhales. In these parts, they have had their mango pulp and puris and are supine under the fan. Then I inquire at a used-paper seller, and he sends a boy to rouse a man living above a shop with its shutters down. The man comes out in a lungi, and I tell him what I am looking for. He disappears behind the shutters and comes out again with a set of four little cast-iron bowls for tempering. They are 15 rupees each, really nothing, and I buy all four. He has risen from his Sunday-afternoon slumber to sell something that makes him very little profit. I don’t know why he would make an exception to his business hours for me; maybe he appreciates the fact that I am out on this quest in the July heat. But he has done something important, on my last day, for my sense of my place in the city I have grown up in.

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. You will interpret the wagging generously, charitably, and proceed.

We fought with Bombay, fought hard, and it made a place for us. I went home and they opened the door and took me in, and they took in my wife and foreign children and made them feel it could be their home too. They gave me the food I liked to eat, and played for me the music I liked to hear, though I had forgotten how much I liked that music. They asked me to write for them—for their movies, for their newspapers. “As a concerned citizen, we want to know what you feel about Kargil,” the editor of a book of essays on the war asked me. I was given a place here that I’ve never had in the country I’m going back to, a voice in the national debate. “How are you going to go back to New York after this?” actresses, accountants, whores, and murderers ask me. “New York will be boring.”

After two and a half years, I have learnt to see beyond the wreck of the physical city to the incandescent life force of its inhabitants. 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.

B
ECAUSE
I
HAD BEEN AWAY
and then returned, I was alert to what had changed: the way the colors of the buildings had faded, the extent to which the banyan tree shading the bus stop had grown. If it had been cut down altogether, I remembered that there had been one there. I had left as a teenager, spent twenty-one years wandering around the cold countries of the world, and returned to resume an interrupted adolescence. I had the freedom—indeed, the mission—to follow everything that made me curious as a child: cops, gangsters, painted women, movie stars, people who give up the world. Why did I choose to follow these particular people and
not others? They were, for the most part, morally compromised people, each one shaped by the exigencies of city living. What I found in most of my Bombay characters was freedom. The pursuit of a life unencumbered by minutiae. Most of them don’t pay taxes, don’t fill out forms. They don’t stay in one place or in one relationship long enough to build up assets. When I get back I will have to deal with minutiae: send out invoices on time, balance my checkbook, worry about insurance. Surviving in a modern country involves dealing with an immense amount of paper. He who can stay on top of the paper wins.

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. Shouted lives. 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. These are not normal people. They live out the fantasies of normal people. And the kind of work they do affects all other spheres of their lives, till there is no separation between the work and the life. They can never leave behind the work at the bar or the police station or the political party office; in this sense they have all become artists. The attraction, the immense relief, of total breakdown, a renunciation of order in one’s life, of all the effort required to keep it together! Since I couldn’t do it in my own life, I followed others who did and who invited me to watch. I sat right at the edge of the stage, scattering these pieces of paper over them as payment. And in watching them I followed them closer to my own extremity, closer than I had ever been.

Bombay itself is reaching its own extremity: 23 million people by 2015. The city’s population, which should halve, actually doubles. Walking alongside every person in the throng on the streets today will be one more person tomorrow. With every year Bombay is a city growing more and more public, the world outside gradually crowding the world inside. In the mad rush of a Bombay train, each one of the herd needs, as a survival mechanism, to focus on what is most powerfully himself and to hold on to it for dear life. 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. Each person in that train has a sense of style: the way he combs his hair, the talent he has for making sculptures out of seashells, an ability to blow up a hot-water bottle till it bursts. A character quirk or eccentricity, extrapolated into a whole theory of selfhood. I always found it easy to talk to people in a crowd in Bombay because each one had distinct, even eccentric, opinions. They had not yet been programmed.