The Enigma of Return (Page 2)

When Mehta went back to Bombay in 1998 with his wife and kids, twenty-one years after he had left, his foreign-born children began to suffer from a variety of illnesses. One of his sons contracted amebic dysentery. "The food and the water in Bombay, India's most modern city, are contaminated with shit. Amebic dysentery is transferred through shit. We have been feeding our son shit."

The hysterical realism of this passage, its mix of panic and exaggerated irony, is not unselfconscious. It doesn't simply reflect the tourist's nervous response to the sight of a man defecating in public in India. Rather, Mehta notes the obvious--he has seen men relieving themselves on the rocks by the sea every morning, and twice a day, when the tide washes out, he can smell from his window the stench that rises from those rocks and sweeps over the half-million-dollar flats that spread toward the east--and as a good journalist he goes and talks to people who can tell him more.

One of Mehta's informants is Prahlad Kakkar, who made Bumbay, "a film about shitting in the metropolis." Kakkar explains, "Half the population doesn't have a toilet to shit in, so they shit outside. That's five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that's two and a half million kilos of shit each and every day. The real story is what you don't see in the film. There are no shots of women shitting. They have to shit between two and five each morning, because it's the only time they get privacy."

One can reasonably expect someone to ask if the writer proposes any solutions. He doesn't. Mehta dismisses as absurd the World Bank's proposal that the government build 100,000 public toilets. "I have seen public latrines in the slums," he writes. "None of them work. People defecate all around the toilets, because the pits have been clogged for months or years."

According to Mehta, the problem is that the Indians lack "civic sense." The private spaces are immaculate, the public ones intolerably dirty. As the government cannot make the physical city any better, it resorts to frequent changes in the names of its streets and crossroads. Perhaps the most notable change in the city's nomenclature was the decision by the right-wing Shiv Sena government that Bombay be called only by its Marathi name, "Mumbai." Mehta protests these changes as expressive of a desire "to go back not just to a past but to an idealized past, in all cases a Hindu past." The Shiv Sena leaders saw the name Bombay as a colonial imposition. But even the way in which the name of the Shiv Sena chief is spelled--Bal Thackeray ("Thakre" in Marathi)--has its origins in colonialism! Thackeray's father admired the English novelist who wrote Vanity Fair.

Mehta knows this too, but he seeks to complicate the picture further. He sees in the renaming of his beloved city the assertion of the poorer people in Bombay, the Maharashtrian ghatis, those people who for him had so far generically been the "servants." One is tempted to say that the city was taken back by those who don't have any toilets. As Mehta puts it, "This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city. If they couldn't afford to live on our roads, they could at least occupy the road signs."

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