Map of the World
Time Out Mumbai, February 23, 2007

"In this city, the rich had some room, the middle class had less, and the poor had none." This sociological sentiment about Mumbai appears in the mind of Sartaj Singh, the cop in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, while he makes his way through the narrow lanes of Navnagar's slums.

Ganesh Gaitonde, the gangster who serves as Sartaj's foil in the novel, is also rooted in the city's geography: "I took the land between NC Road and the hill which overlooks it. You know Gopalmath basti, from NC Road all the way up the hill and four miles wide, from Sindh Chowk to G.T. Junction? All that was empty land then, nothing but a wasteland of weeds and bushes - it was municipal land. The government owned it, and so nobody owned it. I took it." 

Even the minor characters carry the city's layout in their heads. A female acquaintance of Sartaj's, parodying a man's view of how members of the opposite sex behave, says: "You women, to get from Churchgate to Bandra you go to Thane." 

Sacred Games is only the most recent literary map of Mumbai. I am a part of the planet's unlucky - even if rather large - population that was born neither in Mumbai nor in Manhattan. Although I have now visited Mumbai several times, my richest relationship with it has been formed only through books. 

But over the past few years, while writing my novel, which is set partly in Mumbai, I didn't have the courage to stay away. I went to the places that interested me, like the chawls in Goregaon cheek-by-jowl with new office complexes, and heard stories from the people I met. End digression here.
When I was in college in the eighties, my family took the train to what was then called Bombay. In the glow of the night-light in the compartment, I read Paul Theroux's description of his visit to the city where I was headed.

The book was The Great Railway Bazaar. Coming out of his hotel, Theroux had counted 73 people sleeping on the streets. Near the sea-wall, there were hundreds more. Theroux was reminded of Mark Twain's trip to Bombay in 1896. Confronted by the sight of the bodies wrapped in blankets, Twain had written, "Their attitude and rigidity counterfeited death." Those bodies on the streets have served as a dutiful metaphor in the prose of visiting writers. David Hare's fine play A Map of the World opens in a hotel lounge in Bombay, site of an international conference on world poverty. The conversation turns quickly to the pavement sleepers, "some of whom have failed to wake."

The city I myself saw during that visit didn't resemble Theroux's, or Twain's. We stayed in a tall building in Cuffe Parade, my first real experience of a high-rise. There was a lift. Another novelty, I ate soft, milky scrambled eggs. Years later, I'd be reminded of those eggs, and the city where I had eaten them, while reading Ardashir Vakil's Beach Boy. And still later, I'd remember the high-rise we had inhabited when Granta published Amit Chaudhuri's White Lies, a sublime short-story about the poor music teacher who gave lessons to rich, middle-aged housewives in Cuffe Parade, Colaba, and Malabar Hill.

But none of the Bombay writers themselves were of help during that trip. Nissim Ezekiel's poem Night of the Scorpion, the one piece by a writer from that city included in our English textbook, seemed to belong more to the places from my childhood. They were towns with names like Dumka and Chaibasa. All I knew of Bombay during those early years were the Juhu hotels and drunken Goans shown in Hindi films - and the beginning chapter of VS Naipaul's An Area of Darkness: "As soon as our quarantine flag came down and the last of the barefooted, blue-uniformed policemen of the Bombay Port Health Authority had left the ship, Coelho the Goan came aboard and, luring me with a long beckoning finger into the saloon, whispered, "You have any cheez?" 

A few more years, and everything would change. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children evoked, with a migrant's ardent recall, the Bombay suburbs of his childhood. The novel began with the declaration: "I was born in the city of Bombay once upon a time." In Saleem Sinai's fevered imagination, Shivaji's equestrian statue came to life at night and the horse's "grey, stone hooves" galloped past Bombay's landmarks, their names faithfully recorded in the pages of the novel. Saleem's home was located in Methwold's Estate - and he described, with a lump in his throat, the road turning off Warden Road between a bus-stop and a little row of shops.That turn of the narrow road past small shops and the confectioner's, leading to large and crumbling, overpopulated villas - this was a turn also in the world of Indian writing in English. That same road from Midnight's Children ran past Rohinton Mistry's Firozsha Baag, and Au Revoir Exports, and Pleasant Villa. And the Central Works Department No 17 chawl in which Kiran Nagakar's Ravan and Eddie lived. It went past the apartment building, where under the curving stairway, Manil Suri's Vishnu lay dying. And young Altaf Tyrewala's Flat 1203, 1302, 1401, and Flat 1602, 1503, 1404.These writers had mapped an urban world of familiar places and people, or perhaps a world made familiar only by being thus named. What also made this city real was that, starting with Rushdie, writers had begun making use of Bambaiyya English, a mixed-up argot, street-smart and as infectious as conjunctivitis. But in the time that has passed since the publication of Midnight's Children more decisive changes were to occur in Mumbai's literary landscape.
 
That narrow road from Rushdie's childhood would join a busier street and, with suitable special effects, explode into the teeming pages of Suketu MehtaÕs Maximum City. Like Naipaul in an extended part of A Million Mutinies Now, Mehta would show that a city is more than a sum of its parts because of its individual inhabitants and their unappeasable energies. Naipaul, Mehta, and even Chandra - unlike Rushdie, their writing about Mumbai has been based on a diligent search for material. These are works of reportage. It is crucial to grasp this break from Rushdie's magical realism. The map that these writers unfold for us is not so much of a remembered place as of real people in real places.
 
Many years before the publication of Sacred Games, Chandra had written an essay in which he described his own locality in Andheri as a place populated with cosmopolitans who were always in motion. That description applies not only to the people or their localities, but also to the literature that the city has spawned. It is a literature born out of travel and mixing; outsiders have had an important role to play in it; whereas some jostle for prime real estate, others are struggling for space just to be able to breathe. This is that place described for us by Chandra:
 
"There are the Gujarati diamond merchants who spend three weeks out of every four travelling from Africa to Belgium to Holland; flight attendants who fly to Beijing; businessmen who sell textiles in Australia; mechanics and welders and engineers who keep Saudi Arabia running; merchant navy sailors who carry cargo to Brazil; nurses who give care and nurture in Sharjah; and gangsters who shuttle between Bombay and Indonesia and Dubai as part of their everyday trade. But there are many other cosmopolitans in my regions. I mean the men who have left their homes in Muzzafarnagar and Patna to drive cabs in Bombay; the chauffeurs who send money home to Trivandrum; the road-labourers from Madhya Pradesh; the maids from the Konkan coast; the cooks from Sylhet in Bangladesh; the Tamil bakers; the struggling actresses from Ludhiana; the security guards from Bihar; the painters from Nashik who stand on roped lengths of bamboo three hundred feet in the air to colour Bombay's lofty skylines."

Amitava Kumar's novel, Home Products, will be published this month by Picador.