While we love sharing the wondrous and joyful experiences that have filled
our trip, we’re keenly aware of what we haven’t talked about: poverty,
environmental destruction, the ugly evidence of corruption, residues of violent
conflict. Partly that's because, as tourists, our meaningful exposure to these
things is limited. We are directed away from the dirtiest corners. Partly it's
because we choose not to look too closely: it's just too hard. We are used to
our own evils. These are new and so more liable to shock.
Even in our protected tourist corridor, sometimes the world beneath and
around brushes up against ours in startling ways. Here in Sri Lanka, echoes of the
recently ended war between the Sri
Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers are everywhere. Many of the
beggars here are missing legs. A sign for a local preschool showed a woman with
two children holding an umbrella to fend off the rain: "Harmony Preschool:
Providing safety and protection." In India, on the way to the station in
Jodphur to catch an 11pm train, we drove by blocks of men sleeping in cots on
the sidewalk: migrant workers from the villages, they rent a bed for 20 cents, sleeping under a roof only when they return
to their villages for a visit. Had we not happened to be going to the
train at that unusually late hour, we’d never have known that the city’s
streets sleep hundreds every evening, in orderly rows.
It was in India's glittering city, Mumbai, where worlds collided most
forcefully. The privileged A/C corridors of the international airport open into
air clogged with the stench of the massive slums that hug the runways. At a
back table in a small Parsi restaurant where lunch costs 60 rupees (about $1),
we watched as a man pulled a huge wad
of 500 rupee bills out of his pocket and handed half of them to the man
across from him: a bribe? Possibly. Certainly one transaction among the
millions that constitute India's parallel economy.
We wanted to gain some understanding of the worlds we'd gotten glimpses into,
so we turned to books. One in particular has stuck with us. If you are
interested in learning more about Mumbai and India's underworld, read Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found, Suketu Mehta's account of moving back to his
hometown after living in America for fifteen years. Combination exposé and memoir, it delves into the Hindu/Muslim antagonisms that exploded in
riots and bombings, the infrastructure challenges in a city that absorbs
thousands of destitute migrants every day, and the alternate economic and
justice systems that have sprung up in the void left by institutional
dysfunction. If that sounds terrifying, it is. But Mehta balances horror and
love. He writes about raising his children, about working on a Bollywood
screenplay, about everyone's search for meaning, from the wealthiest diamond
merchant to the street-sleeping poet. The writing is brilliant and the research
it took to write this book? Let's just say that one of the scenes involves him
interviewing a hit man in a hotel room with a bunch of the hit man's killer-for-hire buddies. They are armed. He
is not.
Mehta's book changed the way we saw the
city, for better and for worse. We learned about the young migrant who
slept around the block from our hotel and the public toilet in a nearby alley
at which he waited in line every morning for his chance to relieve himself. We
know more about Bombay’s (and India’s) ugliness now. But we can also conjure
some of the individual lives being lived in the sea of tin-roofed homes by the runway, their dignity and dreams. This book did
what the best ones do: it awakened us to the humanity of all those whose
stories he told and to the ways in which their longings aren’t so different
from our own.
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