Suketa Mehta: Maximum City - Bombay lost and found

Halfway into Maximum City, the author fetches up at that inimitable Bombay institution, the beer bar, where young girls wearing more clothes "than the average Bombay secretary does on the broad public street" dance in front of a packed house to recorded Hindi film music. They earn, on a good night, "twice as much as a high-class stripper in a New York bar".

"That world," Suketu Mehta writes as he introduces the characters that people these places, "which the dancers and the patrons call the bar line, is unique to Bombay and, for me, it is the intersection of everything that makes the city fascinating: money, sex, love, death and show business."

This sentence can be read as a coda to this book; it captures the themes that collide with as well as elide into one another in this rich, eclectic portrait of a city.

In 1998, 21 years after he left Bombay at the age of 14, Mehta returned to the city which he had always, regardless of living in New York, Iowa, London or Paris, thought of as home. He stayed in Bombay for 2 1/2 years to research this book —"There are many Bombays; through the writing of a book, I wanted to find mine" — and he arrived "with a simple question: can you go home again?"

The answer, as this compelling, funny, poignant debut suggests, is not simple. Because Bombay — and Mehta always calls it by this old name rather than Mumbai — is not quite so simple a city: it is fraught with staggering contradictions; it thrives on monstrous disparities.

Bombay, "the biggest, fastest, richest city in India", is the country's commercial, financial and entertainment hub but a lot of its inhabitants would rather that it were a nation state. In some parts of central Bombay, Mehta finds, one million people live in a square mile; one-third of the city's population occupies 95 per cent of its space. A hired assassin kills for 50 rupees ($1.60) and the rich often spend 100,000 rupees on a child's birthday party. Bombay has the latest cars but traffic snarls limit the average driving speed to less than 16km/h.

With his eyes unblinking and his ears cocked, Mehta plunges into this city, which is as intriguing as it is beguiling. Like Bombay, Maximum City swarms with a jostling, heaving crowd of narratives, each story as riveting as it is emblematic of the city in which it is rooted.

The most heartwarming of Mehta's stories is the one of Babbanji, poet of the street and of street life. Babbanji is 16 years old, speaks little English and, having run away from his home in Bihar in the northeast of India, has come to Bombay with nothing but a sheaf of poems. He wants to write, write as long as he is awake, and believes that if only he had the time, he could have written a book in a day. He works at a bookstore and is paid 50 rupees a day. He sleeps on the pavement and buys books from old pavement stalls. Babbanji's is a tale of uplifting optimism and Mehta does well never to let it become mawkish in the telling.

In the end, Mehta finds some sort of an answer to the original question he had posed himself. He finds that "a city is only as thriving or sickly as your place in it. Each Bombayite inhabits his own Bombay". Amid its oppositions and chaos, repulsion and embrace, Mehta finds his.

* Soumya Bhattacharya is a writer based in Kolkata.
* Review, $45