bombay dreams; From street rebels to Bollywood, a superb account of the giant rags-and-riches Indian city.

Byline: Nell Freudenberger

While leaving Bombay a few months ago, I was rhapsodizing to

a friend about the city's charms-the lights on Marine Drive, the old art Deco movie houses, the still, green water tank on Malabar Hill. My Bombayite friend, who was navigating heavy traffic in order to drive me to the airport, listened to this litany for a few minutes before remarking, "Yes, Bombay is becoming the perfect city: slums below, flyovers in the middle, and billboards on top."

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Knopf), the brilliant first book by journalist and fiction writer Suketu Mehta, captures this layered quality, which can make the Indian capital of the movies seem like a city projected on top of itself. Calcutta-born, Bombay- and New York City-bred, Mehta is unusually well positioned to diagnose the "multiple-personality disorder," both charming and horrifying, of India's most crowded city. Next year, Bombay's population will top 27.5 million (greater than the continent of Australia's); by 2015, it is likely to outrank Tokyo as the world's most populated urban area. "Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet," Mehta projects. "God help us."

Like V. S. Naipaul's first nonfiction about India, Maximum City is the chronicle of an uneasy return by an author extremely conscious of his status as an outsider. In contrast to Naipaul, however, Mehta is immediately eager to be accepted-not only within his own community but among his subjects: mafia dons, hired killers, bar girls, gang members, and a family of billionaire diamond merchants who renounce their worldly goods for an ascetic life as wandering Jain monks. Mehta doesn't conduct interviews so much as make unusual friends; over the course of two and a half years, he pursues an overwhelming amount of what might chastely be called "research" but is really much closer to obsession. "I had the freedom-indeed, the mission-to follow everything that made me curious as a child: cops, gangsters, painted women, movie stars, people who give up the world."

If each city has a "catalytic" event, as Mehta suggests, then the anti-Muslim riots and retaliatory bomb blasts of 1992-93 were to Bombay what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to New York. Mehta meets the men at the top-even the instigator of the riots, Bal Thackeray-but the most illuminating parts of Maximum City are his interviews with their followers. He recognizes the roots of communal hatred in the daily humiliations of life at the bottom and shows how insufficient housing, water, toilets, ...