Compassionate Voyeur

Pulitzer-finalist author of the best-selling Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found Knopf 2004, freelance journalist and a father of two young children, Mehta lives for the most part in Brooklyn. But he also simultaneously inhabits many other cities, thanks to his laptop and his Blackberry 8211; Mumbai, where he spent his boyhood, Paris, where he spent some of his writing life, and of course the quartet of literary capitals that all South Asian writers must frequent: New York, London, Delhi, Kolkata. 8220;I don8217;t like to travel,8217; he says, much to my surprise, 8217;but of course I end up travelling a great deal.8221; Only part of this reluctant mobility comes from being a reporter at large. Some of his recent travels are the result of his newfound status as a celebrity writer, who has to be on the road to receive awards, read from his book, deliver academic lectures, and work the complicated trans-continental machinery of top-tier English language authorship and publishing. Mehta is cosmopolitan, vegetarian, and trim. Whatever his disavowal of the travel bug, and his complaining about jet-lag, he seems no worse for the wear.

This October Mehta is in Delhi for a scholarly conference on Asian Cities at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. He has been roped in to a gathering of academics by maverick social scientist and public intellectual Ashis Nandy, but soon discovers that in Delhi all kinds of encounters are possible: meeting Umberto Eco, for example, who has brought so unlikely a gig as his semiotics road-show to the capital for a week-long Italian cultural festival, and finds himself the target of the fawning but clueless attentions of Page Three denizens. Mehta, invited to drinks with Eco at the Italian embassy by his friend William Dalrymple, obliges me with some funny imitations of what a party looks like when different worlds collide, and drown in mutual incomprehension and imported wine. Maximum City is all about the surreal possibilities of Bombay; Delhi is hardly less bizarre a place, even by the subcontinent8217;s Rushdie-esque standards.

8220;Salman and I are drinking buddies,8221; says Mehta of Rushdie, with whom he shares growing up in Bombay, living in New York, a passion for Bollywood, a love for Kashmir, and authorial stardom. But they weren8217;t always friends. Mehta recalls a time when Rushdie was inaccessible to him, separated, naturally, by the distance between a struggling writer and a literary giant. All that changed when Rushdie read and reviewed Maximum City, and anointed it a book that matched the urban colossus it was about, 8220;that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his.8221; Mehta now speaks longingly about trying to get a place in Mumbai, something that Rushdie too would like to do, rejoining the umbilical cord that was never quite broken. How does one leave Bombay? Perhaps the answer, for writers like Rushdie and Mehta, is that one doesn8217;t, in life or in literature.

As luck would have it, I spend an entire day, more or less, with Mehta, and find that he regales me with many tales of days he has spent talking intensively with all manner of interesting and quirky people who have been at the centre of his work as a writer. So I hear about conversations with Shah Rukh Khan, Tina Turner, the late Agha Shahid Ali, Mohsin Hamid, Ismail Merchant, and with Mumbai mafiosi, politicos, heroines and film-makers who have been, at different points in time, subjects, informants, friends, facilitators or enemies to Mehta. After contributing to the script of the successful Hindi movie Mission Kashmir 2000, Mehta has for the time being fallen out with its producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra. But their quarrel too seems part of a saga that befits the complicated relationship between two major contemporary story-tellers with a cinematic imagination, both addressing a particularly painful aspect of South Asian politics, namely Kashmir.

As we drive around Delhi, Mehta doesn8217;t just tell stories about famous folk. He also talks of the anonymous bar-dancers of Mumbai, of ordinary New Yorkers, mostly immigrants, about whom he is writing his next book, of the little people he meets in the underbelly of every metropolis he traverses as a chronicler. The gamut of the man8217;s engagement with human beings is breathtaking. Survivors of every kind, big or small, fascinate him. No wonder he has been compared with the great English and European novelists of the 19th century, who watched men and women on the make in the cities of the industrial revolution, and left behind a vision of urban life that was as gritty as it was grand, as detailed as it was panoramic, as bleak as it was brilliant.

Mehta has an activist side to him too. He wrote about the terrible 1984 gas leak in Bhopal and about 9/11 in New York, he raised money for tsunami victims, and now he is setting up a fund that would provide legal aid to children in India. I sensed his increasing resolve to help with earthquake relief and the larger peace-process in Kashmir. He writes op-ed pieces in leading American newspapers about communal violence, intellectual property and globalisation, all issues that are vital to contemporary Indian debate. In remaining thus alert and responsive to difficult social realities and to humanitarian crises, Mehta is of a piece with his peers Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy. What struck me, in his accounts of both his writing and his politics, was not just the wide range, but also the sheer intensity of the author8217;s interests and commitments. He has spoken of himself as a 8220;voyeur8221;, testing the limits of how far he can see into the murky heart of Bombay without crossing an invisible line from which there is no turning back. But if Suketu Mehta is indeed a voyeur, he is a deeply compassionate one.

Such fine writing, such riveting talk, such masterful capture of both the real and the surreal is not possible without compassion for all things human.

Suketu Mehta8217;s Maximum City will be available in India in paperback from December 2005