MAXIMUM CITY
by Kumkum Ramchandani

While penning his magnum opus on Bombay, Maximum City, New York-based Suketu Mehta rented an apartment in Dariya Mahal, the building he left twenty one years ago at the age of 14 when his family moved to the United States. However, he was uncomfortable with the ‘extravagant décor’ and the ‘urban ghetto’ ambience of the place and after one year moved to a “more suitable” apartment in Bandra.

But it was in an office in the suburban housewives’ mecca of Elco Market where he met the gangsters, hit men and bar girls who poured out their hearts to him while he worked furiously at his laptop. “Not one word in my book is made-up. I could easily have done that as I am also a writer of fiction but I decided not to go that way,” Mehta said during a phone interview from his room in a Toronto hotel. He was here in November as part of an exhaustive world tour for his bestselling book, which after just one month had already gone into a second edition.

After moving back to Brooklyn in 2000, Mehta rented a small studio away from home to finish Maximum City. He felt it was easier to work if he had a place to go to every morning to create the illusion of having a ‘regular’ job.

Mehta loves Toronto. “I could live here,” he says. “I could live anywhere in the world. I’m comfortable in any global city once I have paid the price of re-entry, the ‘newcomer’s tax’. We (desis who live abroad) are true global citizens, ‘rootless cosmopolites” as Hitler called the Jews! Writing my book over two and a half years in Bombay taught me one thing. We can go home again but we can also leave.”

While here in Toronto, Mehta had the ‘great privelege’ of meeting gifted writer Rohinton Mistry at a small dinner party organized by David Davidar, head of Penguin Canada and the author’s editor for the book’s Indian edition. He acknowledged that Mistry has been an inspiration. “After all, we both loved the same woman, the maddening mistress called Bombay,” he joked.

Mehta does not believe that it’s paradoxical that most desi writers who have written evocative books about their country have lived outside. “It is written from the perspective of nostalgia, the necessity to recreate the loved one and the longing, whether it’s Vikram Chandra, Salman Rushdie, Naipaul or Mistry. Why only desi writers? The greatest example is James Joyce and others like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, all of whom lived outside their countries.”

“I could never have written this book if I was living in Bombay because I would be too immersed in it to notice the changes. I guess I am in the “once I leave” category of writer because while I was in India I missed New York all the time. I will probably write about it once I live away…..” the author mused.

New York is where the new breed of desi authors are now flourishing after the long and arduous battle for recognition by earlier writers like Anita Desai. Brooklyn even hosts an informal desi writers’ adda where every Tuesday scribes like Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali (now deceased), Mehta and Salman Rushdie get together to discuss their work and shoot the bull.

Toronto has been good to Suketu Mehta. He has attended a lunch where 300 people talked about his work and had their books signed, he went to a party hosted by the World Literacy Union and he was to meet Bollywood/Hollywood director Deepa Mehta whose work he admires greatly.

Bollywood has been one of the greatest influences in the author’s life. In fact most of the gangsters and mob bosses he interviewed for his book co-operated fully because in reality they base their lives on the Hindi filmi world and were aware of his links to directors and actors. “They believed that by talking to me freely they would be better portrayed in films and this would enhance their prestige,” he said.

A true romantic at heart, Mehta says that the film that truly blew his mind was Guru Dutt’s classic, Pyaasa, while Woody Allen’s Annie Hall would be his favourite Hollywood flick. In real life, he has co-scripted the potboiler Mission Kashmir starring Sunjay Dutt and Hritik Roshan. The irony? In reality, Maximum City’s larger than life cop, Ajay Lal, was the person who arrested Sunjay Dutt for possession of arms and Lal actually gave valuable advice during Mission Kashmir on how to shoot scenes depicting police and criminals.

Besides the runaway success of Maximum City, the most exciting project on hand is Mehta’s collaboration with Merchant-Ivory for the Tina Turner film, The Goddess. “How this came about is that Ismail Merchant likes my work and called me up to invite me for lunch during which he asked me if I would like to work on a film with Tina Turner. So I am currently writing the story which is based on an old Sanskrit tale where Turner plays Shakti, the universal symbol for female strength. She also sings four songs. It’s a story of love and reincarnation set in ancient India which has been updated to modern times. The role is tailormade for Tina who is the perfect embodiment of woman, is in incredible shape and can play any role whether it’s a thirty year old woman or an eighty year old.”

Mehta was in Bombay for a week in September for his book launch but anticipating law suits (the book is definitely controversial) did not want to linger. After Toronto, he was to complete his North American book tour in US cities followed by Europe in February 2005. But the journey is not over. It will be spread over two years once the paperback edition is launched. For this author Maximum City has led the way to Maximum Exposure.