An Interview with Suketu Mehta
Nikita Biswal
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), Suketu Mehta’s groundbreaking portrait of the twenty-first century city of Bombay, now known as Mumbai, was a landmark debut. The book went on to win the Kiriyama Prize and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. “There is little question that it will become the classic study of Bombay,” William Dalrymple pronounced—an appraisal that stands up. Over the years, Maximum City has become an indefatigable part of the city’s fabric, a staple on streets across the country where pirated copies are sold on traffic signals and pavements, which Mehta maintains is the true litmus test for a book’s success.
Equal parts essential and electric, and sedulously researched, Maximum City plumbs into the depths of the city, revealing the ostentatious and private lives unfurling in its beer bars, hotels, dance clubs, slums, and alleyways, where Mehta’s interlocutors open the doors to its hard and consoling worlds. Mehta spent two years interviewing the city, as Karan Mahajan puts it, writing his accounts in the dead of the night, from three to six a.m. In 2019, Mehta published This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, a searing argument in defense of global migration. Mehta has received an O. Henry Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Whiting Award for his fiction. He has written original screenplays for films and is currently at work on a book about contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
On the topmost shelf in his office at New York University, where Mehta is an associate professor of journalism, a plastic box contains the complete unabridged manuscript of Maximum City, totaling 1,167 pages. When we speak about his ongoing project, he points to the box and explains, “As you can see, I don’t write short books.” Although he often speaks in quips, Suketu Mehta is an interviewer’s dream—generous, candid and outspoken, with frequent breaks into anecdotes. As our conversation progressed, it became easy to discern that he is a romantic, an advocate for the power of stories, the uncompromising standards of journalistic reporting, and the indispensability of classrooms, public groups and libraries. We touched on his relationship to the different facets of his work, both nonfiction and fiction, public and personal, and how it has transformed with time.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What is it about cities? In particular, what is it about New York and Bombay, which mirror each other in your work? You have called New York “the Bombay-est city in North America.”
MEHTA: Part of the reason is biographical. I was born in Calcutta, but I was six when I left. I spent my formative years in Bombay, and then moved to New York when I was fourteen. These two particular cities—they are both not the capitals of their countries, so that Bombay has the same relationship to Delhi as New York has to D.C.—are port cities, completely open. In the case of Bombay, open to people from all over India, and in the case of New York, people from all over the world. It is this openness, this heterogeneity that I like. There is a storied, mythic Bombay, and a storied New York, which takes inspiration from the real brick and mortar city, but it’s an imagined city, dreamt and visualized. When people come to New York from Kansas or Kinchasa, some part of this city is already recognizable to them. It’s that distance between the myth and the real city that I am interested in exploring.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You’ve been working on a book about immigrants in contemporary New York for nearly a decade now. What stage of writing are you at?
MEHTA: Well, this is a chapter about the NYPD. It’s a first draft and let’s see what the word count is—51,895. That’s a little too much for one chapter. But that gives you an idea. I’ve been at work on this book on New York for a long time. And it took me longer than I thought it would. There have been sections of chapters which have been published in magazines. There was one about an African woman who embellished an asylum claim. Another one about a group of young women who ran New York’s most boutique weed delivery. There’s one about a group of South Asian hedge fund people who were caught in insider trading. It began as a book about immigrants in contemporary New York, but then it expanded to people that I found interesting. The structure is very similar to Maximum City. It’s these different worlds of the city. There’s another chapter on Coney Island. There’s one on Queens. What knits it together is my own story of coming to New York at fourteen, growing up in Queens, living in Brooklyn, getting married, getting divorced, raising children, looking again for a fresh start. The working title is City of the Second Chance, because it’s a place which can give you a second chance at work, love, career, family. It has the possibility of continuous reinvention until one day you just get out and leave, and say goodbye to all that, like Joan Didion did.
When I was writing Maximum City, that’s all I was doing. It still took five years. But with this one, I was teaching full-time and raising two children. When I was writing my Bombay book, I pretty much had the nonfiction landscape of Bombay to myself. There had been very few nonfiction books written about Bombay, so everything was new and fresh. With New York, I am up against the greats—every man and his dog has written a book about the city. Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and Joan Didion and E. B. White—it’s a tall order. But there’s a whole new New York that hasn’t been represented in those books. I feel I have something new to say about this New York in nonfiction. For example, I was embedded in the training academy with the NYPD for six months, and then three years later, I hung out with these rookie cops for the whole summer, rolling along in the back of police cars wearing a bulletproof vest. I got to know these cops as human beings.
I am very interested in political and economic and urban issues, certainly, but I am not a politician, economist or urbanist. I am a writer. My first concern is the human being at the foot of history. In Hindu iconography, Shiva in the Nataraja, figured that when he’s dancing, his foot is over this creature riding underneath him, a small human or dwarf. For me, my focus is on that human who’s underneath the massive foot of history. As Shiva beats out his dance of time, I want to know what animates that person, whether it’s a cop, or a hedge fund merchant, or a weed dealer, or a ride operator in Coney Island. I am interested in what animates them, who they are in love with, what their dreams are, what their self-conception is. When I go into those lives, the larger political-economic issue always turns out to be more complex than I initially thought.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: When you are writing about such a storied subject, do you find yourself turning to other writers?
MEHTA: I teach these books so I am continuously turning to them, but my interactions with my students really animates and inspires me because they are going out and collecting fresh stories about New York. Even when I am not out there, I see New York through their eyes. I have two sons who are both journalists. It’s inspiration. I am not only reading books, but I am also seeing the city through these young people. I am struck by how optimistic they still are about the city. It’s like what Joan Didion says: New York is a city where something extraordinary can happen any minute, any day.
I also regularly go back to Jackson Heights where I grew up, to the Bronx, all over. I’ve been traipsing around the city now for a long time. The stories that are not being told in fiction and nonfiction are in the outer boroughs. For me, the real movement, the most interesting stories of the city, are not in Manhattan. I went out to Coney Island to write about the redevelopment of the amusement district. It’s what the whole world knows about Coney Island—the rollercoasters and the ferris wheels and so forth—but there’s a whole other Coney Island of housing developments, some of the most desperately poor parts of the city, that has never really been written about. I’ve found that these stories that are new and surprising to me will be new and surprising to the reader.
“I felt outraged by the debate around immigration in the West. It is centered on the question, ‘What’s in it for the rich countries?’ I wanted to turn it on its head. Why are people moving in the first place? It’s because rich countries have left poor countries no choice. Through colonialism, corporate oppression, war, and climate change, life in these countries has been made unlivable. People are roasting to death. They are moving and they are going to move in greater numbers than ever before.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What do you make of the role of the writer as a public intellectual?
MEHTA: In 2019, I took a kind of busman’s holiday from my New York book, and I wrote This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. It’s a polemic. It’s a strongly, passionately argued manifesto, calling for immigration as reparations and advocating for greater global migration. There I actually get on my soapbox, but it’s also a deeply personal book. I talk about my own family’s migration—a continuing migration—around the planet. I also did quite a bit of reporting for that book all over the world. I felt outraged by the debate around immigration in the West. It is centered on the question, “What’s in it for the rich countries?” I wanted to turn it on its head. Why are people moving in the first place? It’s because rich countries have left poor countries no choice. Through colonialism, corporate oppression, war, and climate change, life in these countries has been made unlivable. People are roasting to death. They are moving and they are going to move in greater numbers than ever before. I submit that it’s a good thing, both for the countries that these people are coming to, for the people themselves, and for the countries that they are leaving. I added fifty pages of footnotes in my immigration book to back it all up.
With New York, I am also a huge and avid consumer of egghead-speak about the city. But in the end, people read me not because I am going to have a policy prescription for what ails the city, but because I can tell a story well. That’s my core competency and that comes from my training in fiction. I am a licensed fiction writer, and I want to return to fiction after this New York book.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: As “a licensed fiction writer,” do you find that the project of journalism and fiction are at odds?
MEHTA: No, not for me. I would like to do both. I’d like to write more screenplays too. To me, the two complement each other. I think every journalist should take at least one semester of a short story writing course, and ideally, another semester of a poetry writing course. In long-form journalism, the reader is entitled not just to information but also to pleasure—the pleasure of a beautiful sentence, a story that moves and troubles. My fiction writing helps my nonfiction. A lot of novelists do a lot of research. Gary Shteyngart, for example. He was in Bombay with me once researching a travel article and I saw him with his reporter’s notebook, taking notes, interviewing people. It made its way not just to his travel article, but also to Lake Success, his novel, which has an Indian protagonist. So there really isn’t a Church and State divide between the two.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Is the boundary between fact and fiction fluid in your work?
MEHTA: No, in my journalism, there’s no fiction. I don’t make anything up. I don’t believe in rounding out characters. I don’t believe in composites. If there’s a quote, someone has said it. If I reconstruct a scene, every line is based on a detail that someone has told me. I let the nonfiction leak into my fiction, but not the other way round. I use the techniques of fiction, which is what the New journalists did in New York Magazine in the 1970s. They made magazine articles really riveting, but again, without making anything up.
Storytelling is paramount. There’s a global battle of storytelling, and the populace are willing. People like Putin, Modi, Trump, Orbán in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil—a populist is a gifted storyteller, someone who can tell a false story well, and the only way it can be fought is by telling a true story better. There’s a giant battle of narrative and it’s being fought not just on TV, but on social media. This is a whole new narrative field that we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around. There are people making enormous amounts of money on narrative, largely on false narratives. We have got to learn to tell true stories better. We have to get better at storytelling. So I find it important to go to people who I don’t agree with. In my Bombay book, I hung out with the Shiv Sena. In New York, I hang out with cops who I drink with and invite home. I went to the Dinesh D’Souza show to debate immigration with him. That’s how you understand narrative—you go and speak to people you disagree with. Very little of it happens in the modern university. I am astounded by how exclusionary and narrow the field for debate is at a place like NYU, because it’s self-selected.
During the pandemic, I bought a house in rural North Carolina, where I have hardcore Republican neighbors for the first time in my life. Half my neighbors are gun nuts and half are yoga teachers. The gun nuts often hang out with me. They drink bourbon with me on my back porch and speak to me until three in the morning about what they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. For me, my first duty as a reporter is to listen without judgment. There has to be space for whoever I am speaking to to speak without feeling judged. Ultimately, the judgment is reserved for the reader. I will always have people who would be morally complex characters in my books.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What drew you back to fiction?
MEHTA: The novel I have been meaning to write is called Alphabet. It’s a tale told by a fetus, still gestating. It was occasioned by the imminent arrival of my first son. It’s about the splitting of the self. It begins with a father who’s sleeping next to a mother in the East Village, and she’s heavily pregnant. And he moves his hands over his wife’s belly, and feels the vibration, and the fetus starts speaking to him. The fetus asked him this question: Who are you? The whole novel proceeds from that. It’s something I have been adding to on and off over the years, but I haven’t had a concentrated period in which I could do it, so, as soon as I finish my New York book, it’s what I want to return to. It’d be interesting to go back to it and see how the characters have grown, in vitro or otherwise, over this long span of time. I’d also like to write short stories. After struggling with a book for years, to be able to take a month, a week if you are lucky, to bang out a short story—I am envious of people who can do that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you find that fiction comes to you more naturally than nonfiction?
MEHTA: I remember when I was writing the novel, it took me a long, long time to write. I had to make things up, unlike in nonfiction. I see my novelist friends who would sometimes take ten to fifteen years to write a book, and then agonizingly slowly rework the whole thing—writing five hundred pages and throwing it away because it doesn’t make sense. The nice thing about knowing writers is when I am feeling bad about how long it’s taking, I go hang out with them. The writer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, since Random Family, her masterpiece, which came out in 2000, has been working on a nonfiction book about stand-up comedians. She once asked me, when I was feeling bad about how long the book was taking, do you want your name on it? And I said, no, not yet.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: V.S. Naipaul, who you’ve said has influenced your writing, has suggested that half a writer’s work is the discovery of his subject. How did you discover your first subject?
MEHTA: When I was in Iowa, I just wanted to go back to India. I wanted to go back to my childhood, so I wrote about it in fiction. I evoked that lost India in my earliest stories, and my grandparents, particularly, whom I missed enormously. Later on, when I came from Iowa to New York, where no one would have paid me to write short stories, I wrote for a series of technology magazines. Then I was in Paris, earning a lot of money writing for this incredibly boring computer publication. I chucked it all up, went back to Iowa City, spent a year writing short stories. I wrote this love story, called “Gare du Nord.” It came out many years later in Harper’s Magazine and won an O’Henry Award. That’s another thing I would like to write later on—a really kick-ass novella about love. There’s a wonderful Gilbert Sorrentino story I teach in my journalism classes, called “The Moon in Its Flight.” It’s one of the greatest love stories I’ve ever read. It takes place in 1948, a teenage love story set in the different worlds of New York. That, to me, was an early and continuing inspiration for my writing.
The thing about cities was sort of accidental. Granta in 1997 was doing an issue on India and I threw a bunch of ideas at Ian Jack, the editor and he said, “Have you heard of a man named Bal Thackeray?” That changed my life. I went off to Bombay on my own. The article was written on spec. I think Granta still owes me $500 for it, but they published it. As soon as it came out, I had offers from publishers to turn it into a book. So, I went off and took my family, my very young children, to Bombay. We moved and I spent the next two and a half years reporting.
But there was a deeper impetus for doing the book. You do a magazine article out of a commission. You do a book, really, out of necessity. For me, it was necessary to go back home, to see if I could go back home, to the city that had become Mumbai in my absence. That’s the driving force of it. In the case of the New York book, I want to give it to my two sons, both of whom were born on the island of Manhattan. It’s my explanation of their hometown for them.
“I am determinately non-binary. I am bi-textual: I write fiction and nonfiction. Western logic is based on the Aristotelian principle of the excluded middle—something is either true or false. That’s why we had George Bush saying, after 9/11, ‘You’re either with us or against us.’ Whereas the Jain system of logic has no fewer than seven possible states of being.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you imagine a particular audience when you are writing?
MEHTA: I imagine many audiences. For my New York book, I want it to ring true to New Yorkers, just like my Bombay book. I knew that if I saw it [Maximum City] pirated on the streets of Bombay, then Bombay would have taken it to heart, and it has. It’s still being sold on the streets of Mumbai. So it needs to feel real to New Yorkers, but there’s also a global audience. My books are translated into German and French and Hebrew, so people who don’t know New York should also get something out of it. When I was writing about Bombay, people could live perfectly happy lives without ever reading a book about the city. But it’s still selling all around the world because it’s a set of stories about the metropolitan experience. I used to think a lot about whether my audience is in India or outside, but I have assigned myself the right to write about whoever I want. I also want my readers to be whoever they want. There’s a lot of debate now about cultural appropriation and the right of a writer to write about certain things, which to me sounds incredibly limiting, almost an affront to the rights of a writer. Tolkein wasn’t a hobbit. Tolstoy wasn’t a woman. I think the more interesting debate is who gets permission to narrate. That is, if a Russian woman had wanted to write a love story told from a male point of view, would she have found a publisher for her book?
WASHINGTON POST: In This Land, you use the plural personal pronoun variably. How does “them” versus “us” operate in your writing? And more broadly, do you think about whether you are inside or outside your subject?
MEHTA: I am determinately non-binary. I am bi-textual: I write fiction and nonfiction. Western logic is based on the Aristotelian principle of the excluded middle—something is either true or false. That’s why we had George Bush saying, after 9/11, “You’re either with us or against us.” Whereas the Jain system of logic has no fewer than seven possible states of being. Something can be true, false, both, neither. It’s the most exquisitely developed system of conditional logic in world philosophy. It’s called Syadvada, the science of maybe-ness. To me, this seems a much more accurate representation of the world and human personality. I don’t see people as with me or against me. A murderer can also be a good friend, a father, a patriot, someone who returns library books on time. A lot of fiction now subscribes to the easy moral simplicity of Twitter— you’re either a hero or a villain, but we are individually multiple.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What do you mean by that?
MEHTA: Religion, for example. Most of my friends are atheists, and it’s so easy for us to dismiss the Christian nuts, or the Hindutva bigots in India that we’ve spoken out against repeatedly, or the Taliban, as deluded by religious fundamentalism and archaic. A lot of them are motivated by deep, abiding religious faith. I come across that a lot in my book about New York, when I speak to immigrants. I did an article on worship houses of Brooklyn where I spoke to immigrants for whom this place of faith works on multiple levels. It’s a community center, but also provides a transcendence to their lives, which is incredibly important for non-believers. I am not a non-believer, and I like that the tradition I come from also allows for non-belief. There were very famous philosophers in Hinduism who completely denied the existence of not only God, but were empiricists. Charvaka said that you couldn’t trust anything that you couldn’t perceive through the five senses. So it’s very important for us to suspend judgment and try to understand where people are coming from before we dismiss them.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What inspires the form of your books?
MEHTA: It’s done as a collaborative project with my editor, or editors. There are two people in life that a writer needs to be smarter than himself: his shrink and his editor. I’ve been very lucky. My first editor was the late, great,Sunny Mehta at Knopf. Sunny, in an inspired move, assigned Deborah Garrison, the poetry editor of Knopf, to line edit my book. There’s nothing like a poet line editing your work. For This Land is Our Land and my New York book, I have another incredibly gifted editor, Alex Star at FSG. With someone who can see beyond yourself, you can arrive at a structure which feels both organic and logical. With Maximum City, I didn’t know what kind of book I was going to write. I had no idea who I was going to be speaking to and how I would structure it. I ended up structuring it in a set of different worlds of the city where the through line is my own quest. There’s travelogue but there’s also lots of statistics. I do believe in the informative purposes of nonfiction, but it needs stories—a spoonful of story helps the data go down.
What I tell my students is—for a good book or a magazine article in nonfiction, you need three things: stories, statistics, and a statement. The reader comes in because of human stories, but they are just anecdotes unless they are backed up by data. This is why you need to go into the library, to see what’s come before. You need to speak to academics in the field. You need to find the numbers. And the two together have got to add up to an argument. The reader has to finish your book and feel like you’ve made a point, or at least attempted to. William Whitworth, who was the editor of The Atlantic once, had the perfect formula for a good magazine story. He said, “A good magazine story is the careful accumulation of facts, leading to a surprising conclusion.” I always thought that was a wonderful formulation.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What takes you from one project to the other? Do you approach it with the same set of questions, or is the impulse to find something different each time?
MEHTA: The short answer is a publisher’s advance. A lot of what I’ve done, I’ve done because I have two kids to support, and actually it’s not a bad impetus. Lots of people with family money—trustafarians—they’ll get around to writing someday. They don’t have the need to write to pay the bills. For the great Czech writer, Jaroslav Hašek, who wrote The Good Soldier Schweik, his masterpiece of Czech literature—it’s this picturesque tale of a private in the Austro-Hungarian army who’s not concerned with ideology, or nationalism. He just wants a good drink, a good meal and a good night’s sleep—that’s what drives him. Hašek himself liked to drink. He didn’t particularly care about writing, but he knew that if he wrote, he would get money to drink. He would write a chapter and then run to the publisher and give it to the publisher, the publisher would pay him by the chapter, and then Hasek would go on a multi-day bender, possibly pass out on the park bench. When he woke up, he needed money again. So he wrote another chapter on that bench and took it to the publisher. That’s how The Good Soldier Schweik got written.
When I left the family diamond business, I had to support myself somehow, and raise a family. I could have written many different things before I’d done my first book. My editor, Sunny Mehta, told me to do the nonfiction first, because it’s easier to describe. This is the great dirty little secret of writing. So much of it is just dictated by what an agent or editor at a publishing house finds will sell in the market. We disdain the market, but it’s not a bad way of filtering out what seems great to you and what other people are really interested in.
Salman Rushdie talks about seeing a storyteller in India once, who recites epics and religious stories to these huge crowds, stories which sometimes go on all night. His income is the donation they put in, and if a story isn’t holding them in real time, they simply walk away. So he needs to know what is engaging them. The same thing with children. Children have an absolutely honest feedback loop for any kind of story, fiction or nonfiction. If they are bored, they will just walk away. But if you hold their attention, they will beg for more.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Looking back, how has Maximum City aged for you as its writer?
MEHTA: It is the portrait of a city at a particular point in time, the late 90s. But many of the things that I talk about—the criminalization of politics, the undertone of violence, the threat of Hindu nationalism—that’s still very much the case. There are other things now. The great fear of the city is now terrorism since the 2008 attacks, not organized crime. But it’s still being read. A screen adaptation is in the works. Because of the form that the book took, it’s a collection of human stories with the city as the background. It’s not about Bombay—it’s about my Bombay. It’s about an NRI going home. I think that’s why people are still reading it twenty years later.