One of Mamdani’s more poetic campaign motifs is “public excellence”—the idea that socialists need not compromise on quality-of-life concerns. In the past few months, Mamdani has attempted to reframe his suspicion of police as a human-resources issue, an obstacle to excellence: rank-and-file cops are regularly asked to handle distressing situations outside their skill set, such as dealing with the homeless and the mentally ill. He hopes to take those tasks off their hands by creating a Department of Community Safety, though, by his own admission, some of the details are “still to be determined.” At the prompting of a Times interviewer, in September, Mamdani half-apologized for his old tweets about the N.Y.P.D., but he rejects the notion that his views have evolved. “The principles remain the same,” he told me. “There are also lessons that you learn along the way.”
No small number of Mamdani’s detractors wonder if someone of his age and experience will be capable of running the biggest city in the country. New York has a hundred-and-sixteen-billion-dollar budget, three hundred thousand employees, and a police department larger than the Belgian Army. For more than a century, people have wondered if the city is ungovernable; with the exception of Fiorello La Guardia, who had New Deal money raining down on him, every idealistic leader who has been elected mayor has left City Hall in some way battered by it. “The good mayor turns out to be weak or foolish or ‘not so good’ . . . or the people become disgusted,” the muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1903. A City Hall veteran recently told me, “You’re constantly making bad decisions that you know are bad decisions. You’re presented with two bad options, and you’ve got to pick one, and that’s your day.”
If Mamdani is elected, the N.Y.P.D. may well continue to sweep up homeless encampments and forcibly remove protesters who block bridges or roads; he hasn’t yet ruled these things out. (“His administration will not seek to criminalize peaceful protest or poverty,” a Mamdani aide said.) At a recent forum on public safety sponsored by the policy journal Vital City, he was asked about police involuntarily detaining the mentally ill. “It is a last resort,” Mamdani said. “It is something that—if nothing else can work, then it’s there.”
Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. This was the same year that his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, released “Mississippi Masala,” about a romance between a spunky Indian Ugandan exile (Sarita Choudhury) and a straitlaced Black carpet cleaner (Denzel Washington) in small-town Mississippi. While scouting for a location to set the scenes of her protagonist’s childhood in Uganda, Nair found an airy hilltop property in Kampala, overlooking Lake Victoria. The home appeared in the movie, and Nair and her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, bought it. Zohran spent his first five years there, playing in the lush gardens under jacaranda trees. In a Profile of Nair from 2002, John Lahr wrote that the director’s “talkative doe-eyed son” was known by “dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani.” (Mamdani’s staff today still call him Z, though recently some have started, winkingly, to address him as Sir.)
Nair met Mahmood while she was researching “Mississippi Masala.” The daughter of a stern, high-ranking Indian state official, she studied at Harvard, and by her thirties had garnered attention for films that examined life on the margins of Indian society: among cabaret dancers, street children, visiting emigrants. Mahmood was born in Bombay in 1946 and grew up in Uganda, part of the Indian diaspora that emerged in East Africa during the British colonial period. In 1962, the year Uganda became independent, Mahmood was awarded one of twenty-three scholarships to study in America which were offered to the new country’s brightest students. (Barack Obama’s father had come to study in the U.S., three years earlier, under a similar program for Kenyan students.) He returned home after his studies abroad, and, like the protagonist Nair later imagined for “Mississippi Masala,” was exiled in Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of some sixty thousand Asians from the country. The event became a focus of Mahmood’s writing on the pains of decolonization; for Nair, it became the backdrop for a love story. “He’s some kind of lefty,” Nair told her collaborator, Sooni Taraporevala, the day they planned to meet Mahmood for an interview.
In 1996, Mahmood published his breakthrough work, “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism,” which described the persistence of colonial structures in independent African nations. He dedicated it to Nair and to Zohran, who, he wrote, “daily takes us on the trail that is his discovery of life.” Three years after the book was published, Columbia offered Mahmood a tenured professorship. The family moved to New York, into a faculty apartment in Morningside Heights, where they often had Edward and Mariam Said and Rashid and Mona Khalidi over for dinner. “For Zohran, they were ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties,’ ” Mahmood told me in an e-mail.
During the fall of 1999, Mamdani’s parents enrolled him at the Bank Street School for Children, a private school. The first year, he felt singled out—“being told again and again that I was very articulate with my English,” Mamdani recalled. Eventually, though, he settled into a typical Upper West Side childhood: Absolute Bagels, soccer in Riverside Park, listening to Jay-Z and Eiffel 65 on his Walkman on the way to school. In 2004, Mahmood took a sabbatical, and the family returned to Kampala for a year. One day, Mahmood went to Zohran’s school, to see how his son was adjusting. “He is doing well except that I do not always understand him,” Zohran’s teacher told him. On orders from the headmaster, the teacher had asked all the Indian students to raise their hands. Zohran had kept his down, and, when prodded, he’d protested, “I am not Indian! I am Ugandan!”
On a Saturday morning this summer, I met Mamdani outside the Bronx High School of Science, his alma mater, to walk around with one of his favorite old teachers, Marc Kagan, who happens to be the brother of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court Justice. Kagan, the author of “Take Back the Power”—a firsthand account of his years as a radical organizer in the city’s transit union—taught social studies at Bronx Science for ten years. He inspired fervent admiration in his students, some of whom (Mamdani included) called themselves Kaganites. In his classes, Kagan talked about how race, gender, and class had shaped world events. “We got away from the great-man theory of history,” Kagan, a bespectacled, gray-bearded guy in his late sixties, said as we crossed the school’s sunken courtyard. Mamdani caught my eye and mugged. “There’s just one,” he said, nodding toward Kagan.
