‘Mill land verdict is a colossal disaster for the city’

DNA SPECIAL

HONG KONG: Writer Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City, spoke to DNA in Hong Kong of his love of Mumbai and his initiative to establish a legal defence fund for children. His book is a frontrunner for the Hutch Crossword Book Awards to be announced in Mumbai on Tuesday.

You say that between New York and Mumbai, you can’t decide which is wife and which is mistress 

I move like a pendulum between these two cities. But I think it’s very important to go back to where one has grown up and try to live there for a while. That’s always the dream of the exile. And once you’ve established that you can go back any time you want, then you can pretty much get about in other places. You know, I was walking around Hong Kong today, and I thought: I could live here as easily as anywhere else.

But can it be ‘home’? 

Sure, why not? If you were to take people from Malabar Hill and transplant them to HK, they might get nostalgic for a while. But what is ‘exile’, when a round-trip ticket home is $800? I know of many people — myself included — who go back to Mumbai  three or four times a year from New York. 

What does Mumbai offer you that New York doesn’t? 

Well, much better bhel puri, for one (laughs)

But you also complain that it offers contaminated water…

Well, that too. I’ve grown up on contaminated water. In fact, 70 per cent of my body weight isn’t blood, but pani puri. 

But, seriously, what also draws me is, obviously, the pleasures of the Bambaiyya language. And it doesn’t matter to me how much Mumbai  goes to hell, because it’s the place that I grew up, so if I grew up in hell, then that’s the place I’ll have to keep going back to. Certainly, many parts of Mumbai  have become much, much worse. Every time I go back, it’s a new shock to me how badly the physical infrastructure of the city has fallen apart, and how little really is being done. Take this verdict about mill lands: it’s going to be a colossal disaster for the city. The last thing Mumbai needs is another 800 flats and corporate buildings. It needs parks, it needs public spaces. It’s a city choking because it doesn’t have public spaces… Walk around Hong Kong and you look at the un-belie-vable investments in public spaces and public transport, and you get an idea why the city is flourishing. Mumbai wants to be the new Shanghai by 2020. Well, it must first try just to become a better Mumbai, leave alone the new Shanghai. 

If you see so much of Mumbai’s faults, what do you find in it to love?

I love it because of the people of Mumbai. I haven’t seen impossible dreamers like this anywhere else on the planet. Every person comes to Mumbai with a dream, and their dreams are completely unrealistic…

Isn’t that an overly romanticised notion?

Yes it is, but I’m very romantic about the city. A dream is the distance between your physical space and your dream space; nowhere on earth have I seen that psychic distance greater than in Mumbai. A person may be living in a jhopadpatti in Mumbai, but it doesn’t stop him from dreaming that he’s living in a great place. He thinks that he’s living in a place where Shah Rukh Khan will come walking by anyday. This is what keeps attracting people. If you speak to people in the slums, they’re much more optimistic about the city than the people who live on Malabar Hill.  

How do you respond to the criticism of your book that you have overdramatised Mumbai’s relationship with the underworld? 

Well, in the late 1990s, Mumbai was in the grip of a crime wave. And there was no doubt that it was “a city that imagined itself more violent than it was” — this is a phrase from my book. I’m only dealing with the conception of itself…  And in my last chapter of my book, I also confess that I’m drawn to extreme people, that I go to a city to seek out its extremes. And Mumbai is an extreme city, reeling under extreme pressures. 

Are you too a habitual complainer?

Well, I am doing something about it. I’m donating all of the Indian royalties of my book to set up a legal defence fund that will litigate on behalf of all the children in India. There are Acts of Parliament in India to protect children’s rights, and there are international covenants that India is a signatory to. Under these, every Indian child has the basic right to food, clothing, shelter and education. But you step off the plane in Mumbai, and immediately there are 1 million violations right there. 

The leading public interest lawyer, MC Mehta, has agreed to take on the responsibility. I’m really encouraged by that. There are some good people in government too who want some kind of outside pressure. 

What we’ll do is to first look at what’s happening with children on the streets and in prisons, we’ll prepare a report, and we’ll prepare a legal note of what the government is committed to and is not delivering. ‘MC’ will then take it to the Supreme Court, and hopefully the government can be persuaded to act.