Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

by Suketu Mehta

Werther chased Lotte.

Immigrants hope, ultimately, to be in a position where they have the right to keep out new immigrants,

the Makers, the Rahejas, the Dalamals, the Mittals, and the Tulsianis.

There are forty thousand workers still on the payroll of the mills.

they might be selling vegetables at Dadar market when they get a call to leave their vegetable stall for half an hour and go knock somebody off.

Seventy-three percent of the country’s jail population is on trial or waiting for a trial;

Because, at its core, it is not the gangsters against the police or one gang against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history, personal and political; it is revolution, one murder at a time.

those creatures of light,

Has Honey unknowingly tapped some tremendous current of homosexual desire in the metropolis that needs to lie to itself about its origins, that can only pay to watch a man dance when he is disguised as an exaggeratedly feminine woman?

For the criminals and prostitutes who live these outlaw lives, the movies are close to realistic;

driven by the same hunger for narrative.

An Indian boy in America, singing a Hindi song from an Indian movie imitation of an American comic book; a Ping-Pong game of kitsch.

The Enlightenment hasn’t reached these shores; it carries no weight. Democracy here is a balancing of opposing passions.

Shakumbhari Maa

they are NRIs and therefore sluts.

Here now is a completely new genre: the mythological sex comedy.

In Bombay nobody dies of famine; the city needs not a Vegetable Goddess but a Housing Goddess, a Traffic Goddess, a Good Government Goddess.

Here was the casting couch turned on

its head with a vengeance.

Schoolgirls scratch his initials on their arms with their geometry compasses.