maximum city lost and found by suketu mehta

Here, Mehta is setting the basis for the work, and he will weave the riots in and out of the rest of the story, occasionally using them to mark passing time, living space, a contact, or an exceptional story.īut the riots are not the whole of the story, nor should they be. He goes into the slums, seeking the history of the horrible riots of the early 90s, trying to discern how and why they happened the way that they did. Like any expatriate who is abroad when tragedy strikes, Mehta spends a good deal of time on the horrors that befell the city while he was gone. In doing so, Mehta pays his way with stories, the currency of writers, and turns some of those stories into this book. So the family made plans to move back to Bombay, now and forever after Mumbai. And when his oldest boy started school, or began to contemplate starting, he was paralyzed – the fact of the matter was that his son was growing up in a place where he would always be the other, and this upset Mehta. He met his wife in this time, and had two children. Mehta left the city when he was 15, moving to New York, and spent quite a few of the intervening years wandering, living all over the world and occasionally feeling like a non-resident Indian. Maximum City is a book of many things, in the same way that Bombay is a city of many places, careers, and people. Suketu Mehta sets out to figure out why the riots in Bombay happened, why neighbors killed each other after being neighbors for so long.”Īfter reading this book, I think I can evaluate these claims. The gangs are a concern in my parents’ lives.” And also, “This was the book I wanted to do for my thesis (in sociology). They’ve had friends with problems, real problems, with these people.

“My parents talk about the gangsters in this book like they’re real people. But on top of that, there was much more going on. “This book will make you afraid of the city,” she warned.

I was prewarned my girlfriend, who recommended the book to me, told me that her feelings on the city, by way of the book, when she made the recommendation. If it does nothing else, Maximum City convinces me of that fact.

Maximum city lost and found by suketu mehta