Maximum City? More like maximum book. This hard to put down title is one of the best books about India I’ve recently read. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is a non-fiction book written by Sekutu Metha, a Bombay native.

The book is void of the usual Indian formula of adversity through heartache many headlining books of late seem to repeat ad nauseum.

From The New Yorker

Modern Bombay is home to fourteen million people, two-thirds of them packed into neighborhoods where the population density reaches one million per square mile. Its official name is now Mumbai, but, as the author points out, the city has always had “multiple aliases, as do gangsters and whores.” Mehta, who lived there as a child, has a penchant for the city’s most “morally compromised” inhabitants: the young Hindu mafiosi who calmly recollect burning Muslims alive during riots twelve years ago; the crooked policeman who stages “encounter killings” of hoods whose usefulness has expired; the bar girl, adorned with garlands of rupees, whose arms are scarred from suicide attempts. Mehta’s brutal portrait of urban life derives its power from intimacy with his subjects. After clandestine meetings with some of Bombay’s most wanted assassins, he notes, “I know their real names, what they like to eat, how they love, what their precise relationship is with God.” Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker