Character Analysis in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Satishbhai, the Underworld Shooter, and Sevantibhai, the Rich Diamond Merchant (Term Paper Sample)

Name
Instructor
Subject
Date
Character Analysis in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Satishbhai, the Underworld Shooter, and Sevantibhai, the Rich Diamond Merchant
The two characters, Satishbhai and Sevantibhai, are struggling to renounce two contrasting things. Satish, as Satishbhai is referred to, is engaged in underworld criminal activities to fight poverty, while sevantibhai is running away from wealth. He has denounced all his worldly possessions in order to attain moksha, spiritual liberation. As the title of the narrative on Sevantibhai suggests, he is literally saying “goodbye to the world.” On the other hand, the kind of liberation that Tish seeks is not spiritual. He wants to find meaning in this life by fighting against the forces that keep the poor in poverty. He is not saying goodbye to the world, but working towards achieving a meaningful life in this world.
The two characters’ approach in attaining their goals in life is different. Whereas Satishbhai uses violence, Sevantibhai has denounced all forms of violence. It is symbolic that the first time Satish speaks, he refers to death and killing. After seeing an animal on the way, he tells the driver to “Blow him away from the road” without any fear (Mehta 228). This statement alone portrays the character of a man who does not have second thoughts about ending a life. He can kill as casually as swathing a mosquito.
Satish is also philosophical. He uses philosophy to rationalize and justify his actions of violence. He compares the pain of a dying cat with the condition of the middle class children of Bombay. He claims that by striving to end violence through violence, the underworld shooters are giving these children mukti- hope and a positive future.
Perhaps the biggest contrast between the two characters is that whereas Sevantibhai seeks liberation through external means, such as spiritual enlightenment, Satish finds liberation in himself. When the narrator asks him whether he has ever done any spiritual research to justify his philosophy that god is the biggest player in the game of life (thus implying that he is also playing a game like god by involving himself in underworld violence), Satish responds that he does not need any spiritual research to arrive at this wisdom. He says that:
“I don’t do research. I go within myself. Everything is in me. You want to know when I reach the deepest meditation? It is when I’m in the toilet. It’s a very creative time for me. I plan everything, all my work, in the toilet (Mehta 237).
This confession contrasts with Sevantibhai’s belief that enlightenment and liberation from ignorance does not come from within one’s self, but from through divine/supernatural means, a state achieved through self sacrifice. That is why he renounced all his worldly possessions and sought the life of a monk, wondering throughout rural India. His looking away from the world for enlightenment is the exact opposite from Satish, who finds inspiration in the most awkward of all places, the toilet!
Sevantibhai calls his wife shravika; laywoman. Cutting of all family ties. says that “Now we are only united by selfishness. Hundred percent” (p. 537). The bonds of family, formed over a life time, will be voluntarily broken in one massive public ceremony.
Escape from the belief of samsara, reincarnation, and achieve moksha, liberation or release from the bondage of the flesh and the physical world. Samsara is the cycle of death and rebirth, which is boring on account of its repetitive nature. This attitude is reflected in the writer’s complaint that he is tired and sick of meeting murderers, bored of the “unbroken catalogues of murder,” which he finds wearisome (Loy 535). Likewise, Sevantibhai and his family are tired of the unending catalogue of birth and death, of having to wait and get reborn in another animal form again and again. To solve their problem, the Sevantibhai family decides to abandon all worldly possessions, which apparently ties them to the physical world and its limited knowledge about the afterlife. They seek moksha, a spiritual journey that would liberate them from “ignorance to a state of enlightenment and self-realization” (Loy 65).
Unlike Satishbhai, Sevantibhai is not affected by having too little, but by having too much. Satishbhai’s philosophizing that he kills to give hope to the children of middle class Bombay suggest that he is concerned about poverty. This explains the approach that Sevantibhai takes in justifying his desire to renounce wealth. He adopts the rhetoric of excess by believing that too much worldly possessions are not good for one’s spiritual enlightenment. Like the wrestlers, he prefers to go with the rhetoric of insufficiency by believing that less is good (Alter 133). The family goes to a small town and gives away everything that it has earned in this life, which is worth over 2 million dollars. This rejection of wealth and the good life for the sake of attaining a better strikes a parallel with dieting in Joan Brumberg’s “Fasting Girls,” whereby good health is sought by denouncing the pleasurable things of life, such as good food. Like the girls, Sevantibhai wants to improve his condition through the sacrificing of the luxuries of good. Sevantibhai is like the American society; rich and obese, her upper class is denouncing good food, in its twisted believe (which is similar to Sevantibhai’s illusion) that slender bodies are the healthiest.
However, Brumberg seems to be critical of this approach by portraying the desire for slim bodies among girls as a misconception of beauty. In Brumberg’s view, dieting dies not lead to a healthy body, but to anorexia. Likewise, Sevantibhai has clearly adopted a twisted view of salvation by going into the extreme- giving away all his possessions. His actions reflect a state of mental disorder, which allows him to live in illusions and self deception about the way to spiritual enlightenment. The truth may be that he is not enlightened at all, but living in delusion. In this regard, Satishbhai’s casual outlook of the world and life is more realistic and authentic than Sevantibhai. In a deeper obersvation, however, the narrator could be suggesting that the pursuit of wealth is more dangerous to one’s mental health than engaging in violent crime. This is because Sevantibhai apparently loses his head after accumulating too much wealth, whereas Satishbhai, despite having killed many people, is still very rational in his approach to life. Sevantibhai has clearly lost it.
Sevantibhai is impulsive, for he experiences a sudden spiritual awakening. The writer says that “Sevantibhai had originally been a most unobservant Jain, for he never went to pray in the Jain temple below his own building” (Mehta 537). He previously enjoyed the good life. He only attained sudden realization when he read a sentence in a book titled I Should at Least be Human, when he chanced upon a sentence that electrified him into religious fanaticism. The sentence was a question that challenged him: “Are you going to be dismissed or will you resign?” (Mehta 538). It was a challenge to reject the world before the world rejects him. It reflects a desire to have the first say in one’s destiny. Thus, he assembled his family and declared his decision to take diksa, the “preparation or consecration for a religious ceremony” (Saraswati 2004). This contrasts with Tish’s initiation into violence. Satish’s initiation into an underworld shooter was gradual. At first, he used the gun for play, threatening people with it but without shooting the (Mehta 228).
However, the two characters are similar in the way they try to rationalize and justify their sinful acts. They are both...