Privé, a members-only nightclub complete with rose-petal-adorned wading pools, is another popular gathering place of the elite. Velvet ropes bar entrance to nonmembers, and even though hopefuls pulled up in chauffer-driven Mercedes-Benzes the night I visited, the doormen did not let them in. I was on the list, however. It felt like New York in the '80s. Except this time I got in.

My host was Shrenik Zaveri, a jeweler responsible for outfitting the manicured fingers of many of Privé's patrons in bands of diamonds and rubies, gems the size of grapes bobbing on their generous poitrines. Unlike wealthy women in other parts of the world, the wives here were not tiny, starved to the existentially puzzling size 0. These women looked as if they eat. Although they had to be patient: cocktail hour started at 9 p.m., but the trays of food didn't appear until 1 a.m. As the crowd started flailing to Blondie and KRS-One on the dance floor, Rajesh Mehrotra, who is in the import-export business, jabbed his finger at men around the room and recited net worths: $100 million. $300 million. $1 billion. “We all own our own businesses,” Mehrotra said.

“So we party until 4. Then we go to work at 11.”

This all-night wilding does not sit well with Mumbai's establishment. Pavi Lee, an artist from a prominent family, lamented that the city is now filled with wealthy people who don't know how to behave. “They cheat their houseboys, they don't pay their maids,” she said. “They think that once they get on Page 3, they are suddenly part of society.”







The bubble is still growing, and nowhere is this more evident than on Apollo Bunder, where women carry $1,500 Yves Saint Laurent handbags and young couples sample the lobster risotto at Indigo, one of the city's chic restaurants. And then there is Mukesh Ambani, the second-richest man in India, who is building a 27-story skyscraper mansion for himself, complete with a home movie theater, a helipad and 600 staff members.

Sangita Sinh Kathiwada, a real-life princess who wears an 11-carat diamond on her finger, owns a high-end clothing boutique here called Mélange and has lived in Mumbai for 30 years. “The city is a mess,” she said during an afternoon visit. We drank water flavored with saffron and sugar; she sent one of her houseboys from her house to the store on foot for ice cubes made from purified water, as a friendly gesture to a foreign stomach. “A 12-minute walk is a 30-minute drive. It's easier to get a mobile phone than a land phone. But the city has nevertheless become the heart of the country's art, culture, theater, society and fashion.”

The change is one toward Americanization, said Gayatri Jhaveri, who runs an arts foundation. “I grew up when India was a socialistic society,” she said over tea in a cafe in Colaba, the city's shopping district. Despite the fact that she was raised in a palace with 30 servants, India's culture then, she said, was not one of constant acquisition: “We had a lot of money, but there wasn't anything to buy.” Now, she continued, “there is a burgeoning middle class, and they are very excited about being able to buy things.” Jhaveri and her husband decided to send their children to college in the United States rather than have them continue to grow up in this new India. “I thought my kids would grow up with a better life here,” she said. “But I had a better life.”

In addition to the poverty, the slums, the terrible chasm between rich and poor, the pollution, the noise and the daily reports of corruption in the newspapers, the city presents hygienic challenges to hyper-clean American sensibilities. More than two million people in the city reportedly have no access to a toilet. I met the American filmmaker Tracey Jackson, who was filming a documentary about her daughter teaching at a school in a slum. One morning at 5:30 a.m. she watched hundreds of men walk to the ocean's edge in Khar, a neighborhood that is home to both the poor and the upper middle class, and defecate.