India (11 page)

Papu, the young Jain stoockbroker, speaking of the Shiv Sena, one of the many components of the threat around him, said, ‘All our problems are economic. We wouldn’t have a problem if we didn’t have an economic problem.’

He was taking me that afternoon – after trading on the stock exchange had ceased – to see where he lived, and especially to see the slum by which he was surrounded. Dharavi, as its name was, was a famous slum. There were people in Bombay who claimed, with a certain amount of pride, that it was the largest slum in Asia.

We were in a yellow-and-black taxi, and moving slowly: sunlight and crowd and hooter-din, the hot exhausts of buses billowing black, grit resting on the skin. And then, in the middle of this, a glimpse of purity: a group of thin young boys in white loincloths, walking fast on the other side of the road.

The boys were Jains, Papu said,
munis
, aspirants to the religious life, and they would have been the disciples of a guru. Munis didn’t have a fixed abode; they were required to move about from place to place and to live off charity. There were places attached to temples where they might spend a night; they asked at Jain houses for their food.

How would they know that a house was a Jain house?

‘Normally there is a board at the entrance, or an emblem of some sort, or some kind of tile. Nowadays you can even get
stickers. But usually there is an attendant with the young munis. He takes them round and shows them the houses. It is said that the purpose of this discipline is to control the ego. In Jainism knowledge is very important. A brahmin is supposed to be the most intellectual person; he is the person to whom everyone listens. It is to become someone like that that the munis go around asking for their food. To gain knowledge, they have first to keep the ego under control.’

But the rituals and traditions came from a more pastoral time. Did they serve their purpose when they were acted out now in the streets of Bombay?

Papu’s attitude was that rituals had to be constantly adapted. Jains, for instance, were supposed to bathe every morning and walk barefooted in an unstitched garment to the temple. In Bombay many Jains could still do that; Papu’s mother did it in the suburb where she and Papu lived. But Papu himself couldn’t do it. He might walk to the temple after his bath, but he couldn’t walk barefooted and he couldn’t go in an unstitched cloth, because nowadays he went to the temple on his way to work.

I told him about my visit to the Muslim area and my talk with Anwar.

He said, ‘The aggression can be made creative. We used to play basketball with a Muslim team from that area. The aggression of the young Muslim boys made them good basketball players. It gave them the killer instinct.’ The killer instinct which Papu saw in the Indian industrialist, but which traders like himself didn’t yet have. ‘If I hit them, they hit back. And they play to win. Whereas I come back home satisfied with a good game. If they hit me, I wouldn’t hit back. I suppose I might complain, that’s all.’

He talked again about his wish to retire at forty to do social work. I knew, from what he had said before, that he had doubts about the idea, doubts especially about the possible waste of his God-given talent, which, if properly used, might produce more funds for his welfare work. Now – sitting in the taxi, in the dust and afternoon glare, at the end of his working day – doubts seemed to have taken him over and enervated him. He wasn’t even sure about the social work he was doing on Sundays among people of the slum in his area.

‘Every Sunday a group of us, mainly Jains, feed the slum people. We feed perhaps 500 of them. We start at about 10.30 in the
morning. For many of the people we are feeding it may be the only big meal in the week. It may keep them going. I am doing it to help them – there can be no doubt about that. But there is also in me a feeling of relief from the guilt which I always have. Whatever I do for them, I know there are limitations. Perhaps I should try to help them to help themselves. My father’s idea about this was: “I would like to teach them fishing, and not give them fish.” If I’m giving them a square meal, it ends there. What I think I would like – even if it means helping only five kids rather than 500 – is that the five I help should be able to make a living.’

He was obsessed by the idea of charity, of what he, with his blessings, might do for others. Charity was like an an expression of the religious life, the prudent life, the pure life.

We came at last to Sion. This was the name of the suburb where he lived. He asked the driver to drive round the area of ‘quarters’. His spirits, low during the drive out, went lower. He spoke of prostitution and despair in the back streets; but he didn’t look at what we were driving through. The ‘quarters’, though, were only government quarters, apartment blocks for government employees. As a piece of urban development, it was depressing – Indian architecture at its most ignorant and inhumane, concrete block after concrete block set down in scarred, bare land looking in places like a rubbish dump – but it wasn’t the slum I had been preparing myself for.

That slum, the famous one, was, in fact, on the other side of Sion. Papu had, however, stopped talking about it. And I began to feel that, though the idea of showing me the slum had been Papu’s, his mood had changed during the drive out, and he couldn’t face it now.

We went to the street where he lived. It was in the middle-class area of Sion, some way from the quarters, and on the other side of a thoroughfare. It looked a well-to-do and established street; there were big trees; and well dressed men and women, office workers, were waiting for buses. The flat Papu had bought on that street had cost the equivalent of £100,000 – and we were an hour away from central Bombay, and close to a very big slum. That gave an idea of what had happened to property prices here. It explained why the big problem for most people in Bombay was the problem of finding room, a place to stay, a place to sleep; and why the huts
and shanties and rag-structures filled so many of the city’s nooks and crannies.

The sandy yard of Papu’s block was swept and clean and bare. In another city it might have seemed a drab yard. But here it was noticeably clean, noticeably bare; and it was as though the emptiness of the yard was an aspect of its cleanliness.

Papu said, This is a co-operative block. That means that the people here are vegetarians. The people in the other building’ – the neighbouring block, architecturally similar – ‘are mixed vegetarian and non-vegetarian. Property values are higher here because this building is vegetarian. If you cook fish, there is a smell that it generates. If there is a non-vegetarian in a building, you may sometimes see a goat tied up in the yard for a couple of days, and then one day you won’t see the goat, and you’ll know it’s been killed and eaten. But it’s changing for young people in our community. When they go out they feel that the rest of the world eats meat, and they can get the feeling that they might be feeble, without manhood. Everybody tries to change things to suit himself.’ That was also what Papu thought about rituals: they were being adapted all the time.

We took the old-fashioned lift to his flat. He showed the distinguishing Jain sticker above his front door, and the Hindu marks on the front doors of other flats. His sitting room, looking out on to the street and the school across the street, was big and uncluttered. It was of a piece with the yard: the emptiness of the space was like luxury. The walls were clean, the terrazzo floor gleamed.

I asked about my shoes. He said it wasn’t necessary to take them off. But later he said something which made me feel I should have taken them off without asking. We were talking about ritual acts; and he said that a Punjabi friend had said that the floor of the sitting room where we were was truly a floor one could walk barefoot on. What the friend meant was that normally the ritual of taking off shoes – before entering a temple, for instance – meant walking on filth, getting your clean feet dirty in the name of a ritual cleanliness.

Papu said, ‘I like the concept of purity. I like it as a way of life.’

His mother came out and was introduced: a grave, silent lady, part of whose life had been spent in Burma, until, with the independence of the country, the Indians had been expelled. She
brought her palms together in the Hindu gesture of greeting – and I remembered that she walked barefooted every morning to her temple.

‘In India religion enters every sphere of activity,’ Papu said. He opened a drawer. These are company reports.’ He took one out. This is the annual report of a South Indian company.’ He showed the photographs at the front of the report. They recorded the visit of a holy man to the company’s headquarters, and showed him standing in the middle of the board of directors, all the directors standing stripped to the waist and in puja garb.

They are one of the most efficient cement plants in the country,’ Papu said. ‘At the back of our minds we always have this idea that following religion or rituals is not going to harm us at all. So why not do it? There was the father-in-law of one of my friends. He told me one time that to succeed in a certain thing you’ve got to feed a cow every day with certain things. Say, wheat. Feed a cow every day with wheat. Well, at that stage in my life, if I’m working towards a goal, I don’t want to leave a single stone unturned. And I know that by doing this thing I’m not going to harm myself. So why not do it?

‘There are certain places of worship in Bombay – temples, mosques, even churches – where people go on certain days. On Tuesdays they go to Siddhi Vinayak Temple, devoted to Ganesh. Why Tuesday? No one really knows, but all the people there are probably doing it for the same reason, and on the same principle: Why not do it?’

‘A materialist attitude?’

‘Certainly. Ninety per cent of us call to God when we need something. There is a church here that Hindus go to. It’s something they believe in, but it isn’t their religion. If you’re a Hindu, how can you go to a church?’

On the sloping middle shelf of the wall unit there was a copy of
Fortune
magazine and a book,
Elements of Investment
. Papu was aware of the oddity: those practical books and magazines, his own Jain faith, his need for a comprehensive purity, the setting, the other faiths around him.

Tea was brought out, on small stainless-steel trays. It was a Jain tea, vegetarian, nothing prepared with eggs. There was a puri, and various fried things made from flour and ground lentils.

I thought that Papu had given up the idea of the visit to the great
slum of Dharavi. But his spirits had revived in the sitting room of his flat, and after our tea he took me to a back room, to show me the view. The slum was closer than I thought. It lay just beyond the railway tracks that ran at the back of the street on which Papu’s block stood. Papu’s middle-class area, so established-looking when one came to the street, was contained in a narrow strip between the area of the quarters and the area of the great slum.

He said, of the slum, ‘You wouldn’t be able to stand the stink.’

A little later, with the determination and suddenness with which people go out into bad weather, he said we should be going.

We set out on foot. The slum was only a short walk away. We began to cross the busy, dusty bridge over the railway lines. The afternoon traffic was hectic. We had barely got down the hump of the railway bridge, when Papu, losing a little of his resolution, said we should take a taxi.

To stress the extent of the slum, he said, ‘Look. No tall buildings from here to there.’ It was a good way of taking it in. Otherwise, moving at road level, one might have missed the extent of the flat ragged plain, bounded by far-off towers.

And then, in no time, we were moving on the margin of the slum, so sudden, so obvious, so overwhelming, it was as though it was something staged, something on a film set, with people acting out their roles as slum dwellers: back-to-back and side-to-side shacks and shelters, a general impression of blackness and greyness and mud, narrow ragged lanes curving out of view; then a side of the main road dug up; then black mud, with men and women and children defecating on the edge of a black lake, swamp and sewage, with a hellish oily iridescence.

The stench was barely supportable; but it had to be endured. The taxi came to a halt in a traffic jam. The jam was caused by a line of loaded trucks on the other side of the road. The slum of Dharavi was also an industrial area of sorts, with many unauthorized businesses, leather works and chemical works among them, which wouldn’t have been permitted in a better regulated city area.

Petrol and kerosene fumes added to the stench. In this stench, many bare-armed people were at work, doing what I had never seen people doing before: gathering or unpacking cloth waste and cardboard waste, working in a grey-white dust that banked up on the ground like snow and stifled the sounds of hands and feet,
working beside the road itself or in small shanties: large-scale rag-picking.

Papu said he hardly passed this way. In the taxi he sat turned away from the slum itself. He faced the other side of the road, where the loaded trucks were idling, and where, in the distance, were the apartment blocks of the middle-class area of Bandra, on the sea.

The traffic moved again. At a certain point Papu said, This is the Muslim section. People will tell you that the Muslims here are fundamentalists. But don’t you think you could make these people fight for anything you tell them to fight for?’

The stench of animal skins and excrement and swamp and chemicals and petrol fumes, the dust of cloth waste, the amber mist of truck exhausts, with the afternoon sun slanting through – what a relief it was to leave that behind, and to get out into the other Bombay, the Bombay one knew and had spent so much time getting used to, the Bombay of paved roads and buses and people in lightweight clothes.

It had been hard enough to drive past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and the terrible air, and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, I was told. Was the smell of excrement only on the periphery, from the iridescent black lake? No; that stench went right through Dharavi. Even more astonishing was to read in a Bombay magazine an article about Papu’s suburb of Sion, in which the slum of Dharavi was written about almost as a bohemian feature of the place, something that added spice to humdrum middle-class life. Bombay clearly inoculated its residents in some way.