Nilanjana S Roy: The poets of the mean streets

SPEAKING VOLUMES

To people for whom books are living things, not dry objects to be consulted, dusted and put aside, your memories of cities and places will be inextricably tangled with memories of reading.

Just as to a gourmet, Provence conjures up the taste of certain dishes, or to a dreamer, a perfume can bring back remembrances of an adolescent crush, to the avid reader a place is captured in the pages of certain books.

I like it best when these memories overlap, bringing together books of different periods and styles: so that Cairo belongs equally to Naguib Mahfouz and to the comic book world of Tintin, so that Sicily is both the gangster's landscape from Mario Puzo and the sensual, overripe, corrupt world described by Lampedusa.

Some cities like Calcutta or London demand to be loved by more than one writer, so that no single book captures their essence. You cannot walk around Calcutta without sensing the long line of writers who fell in love with the city, were captured by it, were absorbed in its folds, were disgusted with it: Tagore, Saratchandra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Ruchir Joshi, Amit Chaudhuri, Alka Saraogi, Gunter Grass and a hundred others, describing bridges, insurrections, romances, shit and desecration, crumbling houses, communities.

Sometimes it works the other way round. Visiting Bombay for the first time many years ago, I saw it through the eyes of friends, through poetry, through the lens of a thousand Bollywood movies and cricket matches, but most of all, I saw it through Salman Rushdie's eyes.

Lines from Midnight's Children rearranged themselves in my head as I wandered through the city; inevitably, Rushdie's Bombay was gone, no longer to be located in specifics, but equally inevitably, it was still there.

You felt you only had to turn your head to catch a glimpse of Saleem Sinai; and though I've never visited Karachi, I know, again thanks to Saleem and Salman, what it will smell like.

Some writers tower over the cities they described, until the line between real and fictional is blurred beyond all measure. I can no more imagine Los Angeles without the help of Raymond Chandler's prose and James Ellroy's brutal paeans than I can imagine San Fransisco without the Golden Gate Bridge. And though a thousand writers since Charles Dickens have described London, it remains for many his city.

In his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd writes: "...[There] were certain streets or areas which seemed to have been imaginatively colonised by Dickens""people would look for 'Fagin's walks', George Gissing walked in a dream down Bevis Marks, and Henry James talked of Craven Street which 'absolutely reeked to my fond fancy with associations of the particular ancient piety embodied in one's private altar to Dickens ... the inscrutable riverward street packed to blackness with accumulations of suffered experience.'"

"In that last phrase resides something of the mystery of Dickens and of the London he created in his fiction""he had seen in London what few of his contemporaries or predecessors had seen.

He had seen the horror and the filth of London as somehow integral to its being, the shadow which it must necessarily cast, and he had populated that darkness with figures which seemed to emerge and return to it naturally."

Dickens' response to London was to create a Dickensian London, populated by characters drawn from his outsize imagination""caricature was one way to capture the world he found before him, more real than real.

Many years later, George Orwell would look for London and find it in the lives of waiters, the lives of its strugglers, in its sewers and in the meanest of its mean streets, an experience he captured in Down and Out of Paris and London.

But it's those lines about Dickens"""He had seen the horror and the filth of London as somehow integral to its being ..."""that came back to me when I read Suketu Mehta's Maximum City.

His theme is Bombay, the city that was "just a way station, between paradise and hell", the city that "is all about transaction""dhandha", "a city hostile to outsiders or nostalgia-struck returnees", "the biggest, fastest, richest city in India". In order to uncover Bombay, Suketu transforms himself into the perfect listener, the man who will explore a city through its extremes.

In order to capture Dublin, James Joyce listened to the stories of those who struggled in the city, who were overwhelmed by it, who lived on its margins, and this is what Suketu does as he seeks out bar dancers, gunmen, police encounter specialists, migrants, dreamers, killers.

Maximum City is billed as non-fiction, but it has the intensity and vividness of fiction; Suketu belongs in the ranks of Rohinton Mistry, of Vikram Chandra, of Arun Kolatkar and Salman Rushdie in a way that makes the dividing line between fiction and non-fiction irrelevant. In an excerpt that was already well-known before the book came out, he found the perfect metaphor for Bombay.

In its crowded local trains, you can "run up to the packed compartments and find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outwards from the train like petals ... And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning ... All they know is that you're trying to get to the city of gold, and that's enough. Come on board, they say. We'll adjust."

Years ago, in his classic essay on the detective novel, Raymond Chandler wrote with Los Angeles in his mind: "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."

He was describing a detective, but he may as well have described the writer who is the perfect chronicler of a sense of place. Orwell was one of these, so was Garcia Marquez; Dickens was the complete and the common and the unusual man, and so was Chandler himself.

You can now add Suketu Mehta's name to that list. As the author of one of the truly great debut books to come out of India, and as a man who's walked the mean streets of Bombay in a way that invites future readers, of his book and of the city, to join him.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com