Many are touting Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Knopf Canada, $39.95) as a potential classic. Mehta spent his early childhood in Bombay but left at 14 for the U.S., where he's now a much-decorated journalist and writer of short fiction. Returning 21 years later (to "Mumbai"--he sees the name change as a purely political ploy and so refuses to play along), he finds himself in the place he's no longer of. This at times slightly surreal situation calls to mind V. S. Naipaul's writing about going "back" to India, the land of his forefathers where he'd never lived, and finding himself horrified.

Mehta, a very different sort of writer from Naipaul, is at least as much fascinated as he is aghast in this city of 18 million people where in some places the population reaches one million per square mile. His ethnicity allows him to move freely amid the perpetual chaos and to get to know as a mature adult what he couldn't have even guessed at as a child or adolescent.

What's most interesting about the book is its construction. Other than trying to make some sense of his impressions and explorations, Mehta forsakes an obvious narrative line for three long sections, all loosely defined. One is about some of the forms that the quest for power in Bombay takes. The second concerns criminal life, broadly speaking, illustrated in an often impressionistic manner. The last takes up people who've come from other areas and whom the anthropomorphized city eats up as food. But all that suggests Maximum City exists within a rigid framework, when its beauty is that it's held together mostly by the skill of Mehta's prose.

Consider this paragraph near the end, when Mehta is getting set to move away from Bombay for the second time:

"I am sick of meeting murderers. For some years now, I have been actively seeking them out, in Varanasi, Punjab, Assam, and Bombay, to ask them this one question: 'What does it feel like to take a human life?' This unbroken catalog of murder is beginning to wear on me. So when my uncle phones me one day and tells me about a family in the diamond market that is about to renounce the world--take diksha--I put aside everything else and go to meet them....They are becoming monks in a religion which for 2,500 years has been built on the extreme abjuration of violence. They are preparing to enter an order that has a different conception of life and its value, where they will stay indoors all four months of the rainy season because if they inadvertently step into a puddle of water they will be taking life--not only killing minute water organisms but also killing the unity of the water. From men who sleep tranquilly after taking a human life, I want to go to a family that thinks it sinful to end the life of a puddle of water."