Authors: Suketu Mehta
The mountain moves, a millimeter at a time. Three-pin plugs are put in. Cable television and American-style phone lines are installed. Soon we will have curtains and then we can move about the house naked, the final test of making a place home. An account with a coconut seller has been established; he will bring fresh coconut water every morning. The elements of a luxurious life are being assembled. In the mornings we will drink coconut water and in the evenings wine. The first night I make the kitchen work I produce from it an Italian dinner: farfalle with mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes and a salad of peppers, spring onions, tomatoes, and cucumbers. We accompany it with a white wine from the Sahyadris, a passable chardonnay. What makes the meal is the Sicilian olive oil I have brought from a pasta shop on East 10th Street, the biggest item in my luggage coming home.
F
OR THE MONTH
after my family arrives, I chase plumbers, electricians, and carpenters like Werther chased Lotte. The electrician attached to the building is an easygoing fellow who comes in the late afternoons, chats with me about the wiring in the flat, which he knows well from multiple previous visits, and patches up things so they work only for a little while, assuring multiple future visits. The one phone line on which I can make international calls stops working. A week ago it was the other one. Most people who can afford it have two lines, because one is always going out. Then the phone department has to be called and the workmen bribed to repair it. It is in their interest to have a lousy phone system.
As for my plumber, I want to assassinate him. He is a low, evil sort of fellow, with misshapen betel-stained teeth. He pits the occupants of the flats against one another, telling the people above and below me that I
should pay to fix the numerous leaks coming into and going out of my bathrooms, then telling me I should convince
them
to pay. The geyser to heat water, the light switches, the taps, the flushes, and the drains all fail. Large drips of brown water start coming down from the ceiling. The president of the building society explains it to me: All the pipes in this building are fucked. The drainage pipes that were meant to be on the outside have been enclosed. The residents make their own alterations, and they don’t let the building plumber in to fix leaks. The pipes in the building don’t run straight; every time people make renovations, which is a continuous process, they get freelance plumbers to move the pipes out of the way when they’re inconvenient. This blocks the natural flow of sewage and clean water, mixing them up. So if you were to follow the progress of drainwater from the twentieth floor to the first, it would make as many zigs and zags and diversions as a crazy mountain road. At each bend, a clump of dirt accumulates, which blocks the flow. The municipality enforces none of the rules about unauthorized alterations. Sewer water is constantly threatening to rise up into my bathroom, as it has in other flats in the building. The arteries of the building are clogged, sclerotic. Its skin is peeling. It is a sick building. Meanwhile, I am paying rent every month to my landlord for the privilege of fixing his flat.
We also have to learn again how to stand in line. In Bombay, people are always waiting in line: to vote, to get a flat, to get a job, to get out of the country; to make a railway reservation, make a phone call, go to the toilet. And when you get to the front of the line, you are always made conscious that you are inconveniencing all the hundreds and thousands and millions of people behind you. Hurry, hurry; get your business over with. And if you’re next in line, you never stand behind the person at the head of the line; you always stand next to him, as if you were really with him, so that you can occupy the place he vacates with just one sideways step.
All this takes most of our waking time. It is a city hostile to outsiders or nostalgia-stuck returnees. We can muscle our way in with our dollars, but even when the city gives in, it resents us for making it do so. The city is groaning under the pressure of the 1 million people per square mile. It doesn’t want me any more than the destitute migrant from Bihar, but it can’t kick either of us out. So it makes life uncomfortable for us by guerrilla warfare, by constant low-level sniping, by creating small crises every day. All these irritations add up to a murderous rage in your mind, especially
when you’ve come from a country where things work better, where institutions are more responsive.
Long before the millennium, Indians such as the late prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, were talking about taking the country into the twenty-first century, as if the twentieth century could just be leapfrogged. India desires modernity; it desires computers, information technology, neural networks, video on demand. But there is no guarantee of a constant supply of electricity in most places in the country. In this as in every other area, the country is convinced it can pole-vault over the basics: develop world-class computer and management institutes without achieving basic literacy; provide advanced cardiac surgery and diagnostic imaging facilities while the most easily avoidable childhood diseases run rampant; sell washing machines that depend on a nonexistent water supply from shops that are dark most hours of the day because of power cuts; support a dozen private and public companies offering mobile phone service, while the basic land telephone network is in terrible shape; drive scores of new cars that go from 0 to 60 in ten seconds without any roads where they might do this without killing everything inside and out, man and beast.
It is an optimistic view of technological progress—that if you reach for the moon, you will somehow, automatically, span the inconvenient steps in between. India has the third largest pool of technical labor in the world, but a third of its 1 billion people can’t read or write. An Indian scientist can design a supercomputer, but it won’t work because the junior technician cannot maintain it properly. The country graduates the best technical brains in the world but neglects to teach my plumber how to fix a toilet so it stays fixed. It is still a Brahmin-oriented system of education; those who work with their hands have to learn for themselves. Education has to do with reading and writing, with abstractions, with higher thought.
As a result, in the Country of the No nothing is fixed the first time around. You don’t just call a repairman, you begin a relationship with him. You can’t bring to his attention too aggressively the fact that he is incompetent or crooked, because you will need him to set right what he has broken the first time around. Indians are craftsmen of genius, but mass production, with its attendant standardization, is not for us. All things modern in Bombay fail regularly: plumbing, telephones, the movement of huge blocks of traffic. Bombay is not the ancient Indian idea of a city. It is an imitation of a western city, maybe Chicago in the twenties. And, like all
other imitations of the West here—the Hindi pop songs, the appliances, the accents people put on, the parties the rich throw—this imitation, too, is neither here nor there.
T
HE NEXT BIG STRUGGLE
in the Country of the No is getting a gas connection. The government has a monopoly over the supply of cooking gas, which is delivered in heavy red cylinders. When I go to the designated office for Malabar Hill and ask for a cylinder, the clerk says, “No quota.” The Five-Year Plans of the country have not provided for enough cooking gas for everybody.
“When will there be quota?”
“Maybe August.”
This is May. We will eat sandwiches till then.
Various people advise me to try the black market. I go driving around with my aunt to try to kidnap a gas delivery man; we see one bicycling along Harkness Road. My aunt jumps out and asks him how much he will take to give me a cylinder. He explains that the cylinder is not a problem but the connector is; he promises to call after he finds a black-market connector.
My friend Manjeet tells me to take her mother to another gas office. She knows the ways of Bombay. We walk in, and I tell the clerk, “I need a gas cylinder, please.” I explain the problem with the other office, their lack of quota.
“Do you know a member in the Rajya Sabha?” the clerk asks, referring to the upper house of parliament.
“No. Why should I?”
“Because if you did, it would be easy. All the Rajya Sabha MPs have a discretionary quota of gas cylinders they can award.”
At this point Manjeet’s mother steps in. “He has two children!” she appeals to the female bureaucrats. “Two small children! They don’t even have gas to boil milk! They are crying for milk! What is he supposed to do without gas to boil milk for his two small children?”
By the next morning we have a gas cylinder in our kitchen. My friend’s mother knew what had to be done to move the bureaucracy. She did not bother with official rules and procedures and forms. She appealed to the hearts of the workers in the office; they have children too. And then they
volunteered the information that there was a loophole: If I ordered a commercial tank of gas, which is bigger and more expensive than the household one, I could get it immediately. No one had told me this before. But once the emotional connection was made, the rest was easy. Once the workers in the gas office were willing to pretend that my household was a business, they delivered the cylinders every couple of months efficiently, spurred on by the vision of my two little children crying for milk.
But the gas cylinder, which is supposed to last for three months, runs out in three weeks. Somewhere in the chain of supply, most of it has been siphoned off and sold on the black market. What this means to us is that it runs out the morning of the day we have invited ten people to dinner. The only way to ensure a continuous supply of cooking gas is to have two cylinders. Everyone runs a scam so they have two cylinders in their name; they transfer one from an earlier address or bribe an official to get a second one. Bombay survives on the scam; we are all complicit. A man who has made his money through a scam is more respected than a man who has made his money through hard work, because the ethic of Bombay is quick upward mobility and a scam is a shortcut. A scam shows good business sense and a quick mind. Anyone can work hard and make money. What’s to admire about that? But a well-executed scam? Now, there’s a thing of beauty!
We debate whether to buy a car. The roads are swarming with cars now, all kinds of cars, not just the Fiat-Ambassador duopoly that reigned in the city when I left. But all those new cars have only the same old roads to use. Cars are able to go faster than ever, but traffic speeds are slower. When you get into your new Suzuki or Honda or BMW, with its fuel-injected engine raring to go, you had better tame it, for the average speed in a Bombay car journey is no more than 12 miles an hour. On Marine Drive, for example, the one road where people can really open up their cars, the average speed declined from a sedate 34 miles per hour in 1962, to 24 in 1979, and to a crawling 15 miles per hour in 1990. Marine Drive in the evenings is filled with cruising youngsters driving all the way up to Nariman Point, their radios blaring pop music out the open windows—and racing each other up and down the strip at 24, even 30, miles an hour.
One happy effect of this is that the number of traffic accidents in the
city has actually decreased, from a 1991 total of 25,477 accidents with 365 deaths to 25,214 accidents with only 319 deaths in 1994. This confirms something I can see for myself in Bombay: In the mad driving, hardly anybody seems to get hurt. They aren’t going fast enough to do serious damage and can brake on a dime.
Modern cities have not made their peace with the automobile. Cities are the way they are because of cars; people who drive them can live farther and farther from the center. A great city grows because of its automobiles; Bombay is now dying from them. For every flat in these three buildings there are two cars. As a result, the building staff is engaged in a constant game of musical chairs: shifting cars in and out of parking spaces. It doesn’t help that the garages have been converted into general stores, doctors’ offices, and copy shops. There wasn’t any provision made for a shopping district when Malabar Hill exploded. The footpaths have disappeared, and young children wandering out on the roads take their lives in their hands. The terrain of my childhood was always a battle between children and cars. We played between the cars and around them. But cars have the same advantage that insects have over human intelligence: fecundity. The automobile won. No children play in the parking lot now. They’re home, watching TV.
Soon after we move in, my friend Manjeet comes visiting. She needs to park her car, but I find that another car has taken my designated parking spot. I go downstairs to find Manjeet, ashen, sitting in her car, surrounded by a threatening circle of guards and servants. I remonstrate with the watchman, who points toward a man in the lobby: a very drunk man in his early forties, short but with a large mustache, who demands to know who I am. I demand to know who he is. “I am a member of the parking committee of the building!” he shouts, leaning very close to me.
Meanwhile, the circle of hoods is throwing bottle caps and little stones at my guest’s car. I finally extract the name of the car owner and go up to his flat on the first floor. He is relaxing in a dhoti and seems to think he has the right to take my space because it hasn’t been used in a long time. “Your flat has been closed for a year, year and a half.” I get him to come downstairs to move his car; I am fuming and tell him I will call the police to haul in the drunk. “Don’t do that,” the man says, staring at me. He pauses, still looking at me without smiling. “You don’t know his capacity.”
He moves his car and I reclaim my spot. The drunk ambles around again and stands outside Manjeet’s car. He is accompanied by a young man who is asking what happened. I get out of the car, take my friend, and go upstairs. Soon after, the young man comes up. “Your guest’s tire has been deflated. He has taken the air out; I saw him. But don’t go down now, he’s still there. I’ll take him upstairs, and then I’ll take you to the petrol pump and we’ll get air.”