Divided by Gender

I'm still engrossed in Suketa Mehta's "Maximum City," a story all about Mumbai. I'm more than halfway through, but the book is starting to bother me.

Mehta traipses about town interviewing gangsters, politicians, thugs and cops. He talks at length about the brothels and gang killings of the organized underworld. While this offers its vicarious thrills (much like watching "The Godfather" - actually, the gangs Mehta profiles operate very similarly to the gang in that film) after a while, it becomes upsetting.

Mumbai has 18 million residents. About half of them are women. But not once, in all his pages, has Mehta scored an interview with a single female.

Women are very active in Mumbai politics, but Mehta completely bypasses them in favor of their male colleagues. When talking with gangsters, he doesn't interview their female family members, their many mistresses, or their unfortunate prostitutes. When working with famous Bollywood directors, he doesn't bother to even mention their female staff, or to seek out interviews with any Bollywood actresses.

In fact, his only female source so far is a 20-year-old stripper. Although she is a fascinating character, Mehta seems more obsessed by her youth and beauty than by her story. (He nicknames her "Monalisa," as if that isn't enough reason to doubt his objectivity.) He claims that she is "an expert in making men fall in love with her." She has certainly succeeded with him. The result is that it's a story about Mehta's attraction to, and construction of, this female. It's a story about the self that she peddles to Mehta. It is not particularly honest. (I realize the source manipulated the data, but a good journalist is supposed to see beyond such shenanigans.)

I can't help but think that if Mehta had interviewed any women at all, he would have written a very different book. After all, India's women are fascinating. Nowhere will you find a greater diversity of life choices. One of my cousins was married at the age of 22 and is now pregnant (a year later), another is nearly 30 and a successful professional about to go abroad. Meanwhile, the maid in my grandparents' house was married at age 12 to a man twice her age, and the maid in my uncle's house left her husband because he drank and beat her. The stories of India's women reflect the story of India. It is a country on the brink of modernity but still attached to the past. Riddled by divisions between social classes and socioeconomic classes.

So why doesn't Mehta talk with any women? Maybe he's imbibed the lesson of history, which is that men are always the heroes. Maybe Mehta, either deliberately or unconsciously, decided that women's stories are boring. (Certainly, women's stories don't seem to have the same mass commercial appeal - perhaps it was a financial decision.)

Maybe he's a jerk, and doesn't see women at all. (After all, I feel as if Mehta exploited his own book as a way to get the gangsters and filmmakers of his adolescent fantasies to finally meet with him.)

Or perhaps, less nefariously, Mehta just didn't have access to that many women. In traditional societies, the only women that men ever talk to extensively are their immediate family members and prostitutes. The women in the Jogeshwari slums probably weren't falling over themselves to share their life stories with Mehta, a man.

In "Naked in Baghdad," Anne Garrels, NPR's war correspondent, says that her editors initially didn't want to send her to war zones because of the risk of rape. Garrels, a lot gutsier than most, said that bad things happen to men all the time, too. But she also said that being a woman was an unexpected gift. The women of more conservative Muslim families, who wouldn't have been able to show their faces in front of a foreign male, opened up to Garrels. They invited her into their homes. She saw a side of Iraq that was more human, and this humanity is what enabled her to write such a compelling book about modern Iraq.