books discussed in this essay:
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
by Suketu Mehta
Alfred A. Knopf (2004)
542 pp., $40

In The Rose Garden of the Martyrs
by Christopher de Bellaigue
HarperCollins (2005 )
283 pp., $38

Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague
by Myla Goldberg
Crown Journeys (2004)
140 pp., $23

Here is a Bombay story for you: Padma is born in Dharavi, one of the city’s larger slums. Municipal authorities arrive to demolish it for the fifth time. The Hindu mob has decided not to front the money or issue the threats necessary to save it again, waiting instead for the more lucrative kidnapping and bribery opportunities that accompany redevelopment. Watching her fibrous heap of a house crumple, Padma’s mother finally gives up. She grabs her baby by the legs and swings it around her head, preparing to bash it against the piss-heavy, shitcaked ground. A policeman decides to intervene. Padma is saved, sent to an overcrowded state orphanage where she’s a sexual plaything for local politicians who visit frequently to make high-minded inspections. At twelve, she starts dancing in one of the city’s thumping beer bars, withholding her youthful favours for the highest bidder so that she can send the extra money to her newly in-touch mother, who’s now living in faraway Bihar.

If Padma isn’t killed by a gun-packing Gujarati jealous of her smiles at a money-fat Dubai roller, if she isn’t successful in slicing her wrists with a razor when a crafty boyfriend ‘s promise of a Bollywood audition fails to pan out, if she is able to make it to twenty with enough of her looks and wits about her, she might land a position in one of the better brothels in Golpitha, Bombay’s humid red-light district. Getting dressed beside a chatty diamond merchant, she might hear about his colleague who’s decided to become a Jain monk. He’s rejected samsara, worldly life, and will abandon his millions in a ritual parade the next day, marching out of the sinful city to begin his lifelong search for moksha, salvation. If Padma can wake before noon, if she can squeeze into one of the reeking, crammed cars of Bombay’s railway, and if she can jostle through the 35,000 others who have gathered on the street in hopes of catching a coin, she might find enough money to buy groceries for the following week, or, more importantly, the latest celebrity magazines and a new cellphone. Because more than anything, she wants to look like she fits in when next she strolls down posh Marine Drive, her still-young eyes greedy with wonder and longing. This is one story, a reasonably fortunate one, out of the 19 million that careen through contemporary Bombay, the world’s Maximum City.