Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto (2019) and Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2005), which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the O. Henry Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction, a Whiting Award in Fiction and Nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You (2008) and Mission Kashmir (2000). His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and All Things Considered. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University.
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Maximum CityBombay Lost and Found
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.
Maximum City:Bombay Lost and Found -
Maximum CityBombay Lost and Found
In business, so entrenched has extortion become that the Bombay High Court recently ruled that extortion payments are tax deductible as a legitimate business expense. Extortion is a form of tax. Since there is a parallel justice system, there have to be parallel taxes. It used to be that there was only one gang—Dawood’s. But now that there are multiple gangs operating, as soon as the businessman pays one, all the others line up for their payments, so he finds himself paying four or five gangs at once. He might even be paying freelance extortionists, people who pose no real threat. The implicit or explicit tradeoff in the protection racket—you give me money, I give you protection from myself and others—no longer applies. The gangs are powerless to afford protection against the others. It is less a protection racket now and more like a simple mugging: You give me your money or I’ll kill you.
Maximum City:Bombay Lost and Found -
Maximum CityBombay Lost and Found
The narrative principles that propel the plot are alien to those of, say, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I spent two years. I entertain myself by imagining what would happen if the script were put up in workshop. My contribution to the script is minimal at best. I propose an idea that departs from the standard Hindi film formula. Vinod thinks about it. “We can’t do it because if we put it in the film the audience will burn down the theater. They will rip out the seats and burn down the theater.”
I withdraw the suggestion.
Maximum City:Bombay Lost and Found
“Giving depth and shading to such a complex subject, Maximum City is narrative reporting at its finest, probably the best work of nonfiction to come out of India in recent years . . . Mehta succeeds so brilliantly in taking the pulse of this riotous urban jungle.” —Akash Kapur, The New York Times Book Review
“What Dickens did for London, what Joseph Mitchell did for New York City, Suketu Mehta has done for Bombay . . . A candid, extensive, and wholly entertaining portrait.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune [on Maximum City]
“The ultimate insider’s view of Bombay, a roiling and vigorous account that delivers on a seemingly impossible challenge: how to limn the diversity and sprawl of such a place in a single book.” —The Seattle Times [on Maximum City]
Selected Works
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