Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan

Mehta’s cast of characters include the upwardly mobile Shiv Sena activist who plies his cable network and equally profitable politics and protection rackets with panache. The hit man originally from Azamgarh, UP, who receives his orders from gangsters based overseas and has convinced himself that he performs the sacred duty of protecting his quam (community). The zealous police officer working dogmatically within a system corroded by underworld money who has himself become suspect. The bar dancer who dreams of making it as a big model. The Bollywood director who fantasises about making a classy movie in Hollywood. The hero whose ambition is to open a steak house in New York though his meals when Mehta meets him consist largely of boiled spinach.

Rather than a melting pot, Bombay is like as an onion with endless layers, each representing a totally different world. In this densely packed city very few have the luxury of space. Mehta has a polished style combining humour with pathos and vivid imagery. He has spent seven years on this project and the depth of his research and investigations is evident. But it is Mehta’s background — he lived in Bombay till the age of 16 — which gives him the insight and access to capture so memorably the pulse and rhythm of the Maximum City.

One of the funniest chapters deals with the surrealistic Bombay film world inhabited by sleazy distributors, musical directors who steal their tunes shamelessly off the synthesizer, smart English-speaking directors who keep trying to dumb down their films in an endless search for what Mr Average wants. In Bollywood agreements are usually verbal, for how can you put in stark figures which could land in the hands of the income tax or the mafia. There is a curious symbiosis between the underworld and the film world in Bombay.

Mehta chronicles the oscillating fortunes of director Vidhu Vinod Chopra during the making of his film Mission Kashmir to illustrate the mercurial nature of the industry. First Chopra is on a high thinking he has signed up Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan as his stars, then he slides to a low when they wriggle out and he ends up with Sanjay Dutt and an unknown Hrithik Roshan as substitutes. Chopra thinks he has hit the jackpot when Roshan’s first film release, Kaho Naa Pyar Hai, makes him an overnight sensation. But then comes the downside, an extortion threat from gangster Abu Salem, who even forbids two of his stars, Preity Zinta and Roshan, from going abroad to promote the film. Dutt finally uses his good offices to get Chopra removed from the mafia’s hit list.

Mehta marvels at the irony of a world in which on the one hand Dutt appears regularly before the TADA courts since he is accused of conspiring against the state and on the other is invited by President Narayanan to Rashtrapati Bhavan and patted for making a patriotic film like Mission Kashmir.

The driving force of Bombay has always been dhanda—only the occupations keep changing. Two leading lights, Bal Thackeray, the spelling of whose name was inspired by the author of Vanity Fair, and underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, both gained a major stake in the city by channeling the violent energies of the city’s youth.

Thackeray keeps inventing new causes for his followers. He started four decades back by demanding that the local Maharashtrians get a major chunk of the jobs which were being usurped by industrious migrants from the south. He moved on to champion Hindutva, fighting the underworld and providing protection at a price. The gangsters meanwhile progressed from smuggling and pickpocketing to extortion, film financing and abetting terrorism. The outcome of such divisive forces at work was the catalytic communal riots and subsequent bomb blasts of 1993, a major watershed in the city’s history and chilling evidence of Bombay’s altered psyche.

The Bombay of my childhood, a beautiful, tolerant, cosmopolitan city by the sea whose business interest were controlled largely by Parsis and Gujaratis—the native Maharashtrians were generally confined to the more routine jobs—has vanished. The have-nots and the carpetbaggers have taken over. Perhaps inevitable in a city where two-thirds are crowded into just 5 per cent of the total area, while the rich or protected old tenants monopolise the remaining 95 per cent.