The Country of the No has become, in that one small gesture, the Country of the Yes. I now realise that if you don’t understand the No, pretend it doesn’t exist, was never said, then, slain by your incomprehension, it will transform itself abruptly into its opposite. Or it might never become a Yes but will turn into a wagging of the head, which can mean either No or Yes, depending on your interpretation. You will interpret the wagging generously, charitably, and proceed.

We fought with Bombay, fought hard, and it made a place for us. I went home and they opened the door and took me in, and they took in my wife and foreign children and made them feel it could be their home too. They gave me the food I liked to eat, and played for me the music I liked to hear, though I had forgotten how much I liked that music. They asked me to write for them – for their movies, for their newspapers. “As a concerned citizen, we want to know what you feel about Kargil,” the editor of a book of essays on the war asked me. I was given a place here that I’ve never had in the country I’m going back to, a voice in the national debate. “How are you going to go back to New York after this?” actresses, accountants, whores and murderers ask me. “New York will be boring.”

After two and a half years, I have learned to see beyond the wreck of the physical city to the incandescent life force of its inhabitants. People associate Bombay with death too easily. When 500 new people come in every day to live, Bombay is certainly not a dying city. A killing city, maybe, but not a dying city. When I first came here I thought I was here in the city’s final stages. Then I moved to a nicer apartment. A city is only as thriving or sickly as your place in it. Each Bombayite inhabits his own Bombay.

Because I had been away and then returned, I was alert to what had changed: the way the colour of the building had faded, the extent to which the banyan tree shading the bus stop had grown. If it had been cut down altogether, I remembered that there had been one there. I had left as a teenager, spent twenty-one years wandering around the cold countries of the world, and returned to resume an interrupted adolescence. 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. Why did I choose to follow these particular people and not others? They were, for the most part, morally compromised people, each one shaped by the exigencies of city living. What I found in most of my Bombay characters was freedom. The pursuit of a life unencumbered by minutiae. Most of them don’t pay taxes, don’t fill out forms. They don’t stay in one place or in one relationship long enough to build up assets. When I get back I will have to deal with minutiae: send out invoices on time, balance my chequebook, worry about insurance. Surviving in a modern country involves dealing with an immense amount of paper. He who can stay on top of the paper wins.

Each of us has an inner extremity. Most of us live guarded lives and resist any pull that takes us too far towards this extremity. We watch other people push the limits, follow them up to a point, but are then pulled back, by fear, by family. In Bombay I met people who lived closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known. Shouted lives. Ajay and Satish and Sunil live on the extreme of violence; Monalisa and Vinod live on the extreme of spectacle; Honey is on the extreme of gender; the Jains go beyond the extreme of abandonment. These are not normal people. They live out the fantasies of normal people. And the kind of work they do affects all other spheres of their lives, until there is no separation between the work and the life. They can never leave behind the work at the bar or the police station or the political party office; in this sense they have all become artists. The attraction, the immense relief, of total breakdown, a renunciation of order in one’s life, of all the effort required to keep it together! Since I couldn’t do it in my own life, I followed others who did and who invited me to watch. I sat right at the edge of the stage, scattering these pieces of paper over them as payment. And in watching them I followed them closer to my own extremity, closer than I had ever been.

Bombay itself is reaching its own extremity: twenty-three million people by 2015. A city in which the population should halve, actually doubles. Walking alongside every person in the throng on the streets today, one more person tomorrow. With every year Bombay is a city growing more and more public, the world outside gradually crowding the world inside. In the mad rush of a Bombay train each one of the herd needs, as a survival mechanism, to focus on what is most powerfully himself and hold on to it for dear life. A solitary human being here has two choices: he can be subsumed within the crowd, reduce himself to a cell of a larger organism (which is essential to the make-up of a riot), or he can retain a stubborn, almost obdurate sense of his own individuality. Each person in that train has a sense of style: the way he combs his hair, the talent he has for making sculpture out of seashells, an ability to blow up a hot-water bottle until it bursts. A character quirk or eccentricity, extrapolated into a whole theory of selfhood. I always found it easy to talk to people in a crowd in Bombay because each one had distinct, even eccentric, opinions. They had not yet been programmed.

The Battle of Bombay is the battle of the self against the crowd. In a city of fourteen million people, how much value is associated with the number one? The battle is Man against the Metropolis; which is only the infinite extension of Man and the demon against which he must constantly strive to establish himself or be annihilated. A city is an agglomeration of individual dreams, a mass dream of the crowd. In order for the dream life of a city to stay vital, each individual dream has to stay vital. Monalisa needs to believe she will be Miss India. Ajay needs to believe he will escape the police force. Girish needs to believe he will be a computer magnate. The reason a human being can live in a Bombay slum and not lose his sanity is that his dream life is bigger than his squalid quarters. It occupies a palace.

But what every Indian also desires, secretly or openly, is to devote his life to a collective larger than himself. The Muslim hit men of the D-Company think of themselves as warriors for the qaum, the universal nation of Islam. Girish wants to bring money home to his family. Sunil claims, when he is not thinking about business, to be working for the nation. For in this country, which of all civilisations has been devoted to the most exquisite consideration of the interior life – of the form, structure and purpose of the self – we are individually multiple, severally alone.

One blue-bright Bombay morning, in the middle of the masses on the street, I have a vision: that all these individuals, each with his or her own favourite song and hairstyle, each tormented by an exclusive demon, form but the discrete cells of one gigantic organism, one vast but singular intelligence, one sensibility, one consciousness. Each person is the end product of an exquisitely refined specialisation and has a particular task to perform, no less and no more important than that of any other of the six billion components of the organism. It is a terrifying image; it makes me feel crushed, it eliminates my sense of myself, but it is ultimately comforting because it is such a lovely vision of belonging. All these ill-assorted people walking towards the giant clock on Churchgate: they are me; they are my body and my flesh. The crowd is the self, fourteen million avatars of it, fourteen million celebrations. I will not merge into them; I have elaborated myself into them. And if I understand them well, they will all merge back into me, and the crowd will become the self, one, many-splendoured.