India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (6 page)

Access to water represents another constant preoccupation for the residents of Ganesh Murty Nagar slum. Babu is keen to brief me on the subject. But first he must ‘go do piss’. With his giraffe legs, he lopes off to the public latrines by the slum’s entrance. ‘Two rupees to go for loo,’ he says on his return. ‘But piss is free.’ He appears content with the economy afforded by his bowels.

The slum is divided into three sections, unimaginatively entitled Zone One, Two and Three. The first has water every day, but old leaking pipes. The other two have newer pipes, but supply alternates between them. Babu lives in Zone Three. ‘The water can come any time, but generally it is between mid-afternoon only and midnight,’ he explains. The flow dries up after twenty or thirty minutes, so speed is of the essence. If Babu is at home, he will help Jyoti fill the jerry cans at the communal tap. The plastic containers come in two sizes: twenty litres (coloured white) and forty (blue or black). If he’s out, she has to fetch their day’s supply by herself.

‘Sweet water’, as Babu refers to the intermittent supply from the mains, is good for drinking. Well water, by contrast, is not. On sale at various water tanks dotted around the slum, a twenty-litre container of the latter costs two rupees and fifty paisa. It used to be two rupees, Babu says, but the price is currently hiked due to summer water shortages. ‘This is policy.’

Babu’s interest in water is semi-professional. His father used to sell it. ‘Not the bottled stuff,’ he adds for clarity’s sake. His father would buy his sweet water ‘wholesale’ at Colaba market. He’d cycle over there, fill four forty-litre containers, and walk the
two kilometres back with his sloshing cargo dangling from the handlebars of his bike. His margin was three rupees per container. On an average day, he’d make four or five trips. I totted up the maths. He was clearing sixty rupees a day. Babu’s driving job is lucrative by comparison.

‘Sometimes he’d collect the water from a nearby building that had a leaking overflow pipe,’ Babu says, a crook-toothed smile crossing his clean-shaven face. ‘It is a military soldier building actually.’

As his father’s only son, Babu was occasionally drafted in to help. His inauguration as a water rustler came at age eleven. ‘Many times the police were catching us,’ Babu admits. First, they’d be dealt a beating. Then the uniformed officers would make them cut the grass or wash their bicycles.

Babu’s smile gravitates into a light-hearted chuckle at the memory. What kind of childhood must he have had, I wonder, to recall father-and-son moments like these with such affection?

The thought occupies me as we step into the slum. The entrance comes via a few downward steps and a shack-padded passageway. The path is wide enough for a bicycle but too narrow for an ambulant cow. Neither are considerations to be overlooked in India.

A corner store the size of a small garden shed serves as a sentry post. It is manned by a heavy-set girl called Rochi (meaning ‘light’). I stop to buy some Peppy Cheese Balls for Babu’s children. Clad in the white smock of a school pupil, the twelfth-grader has proficient English and a keen desire to practise. She plans to do a graphic-design course after graduating, she tells me. She won’t marry until she’s ‘well set’ in her career. Her father was a chauffeur for the US Embassy. He lived in New York for a year, but he had to have emergency heart surgery. The operation took place at the city’s Bellview Hospital. The last point is shared with a touch of wonderment, as if her father had dined at the Waldorf rather than narrowly escaping death after a massive coronary.

As we press on, Ganesh Murty Nagar opens up – or rather closes in – like a multi-highway rabbit warren. Everywhere there
are sharp corners and cavernous tunnels. Babu turns left and right and left again. It is not long before I am totally disorientated.

I concentrate my eyes on Babu’s over-exercised sneakers, watching their threadbare tread closely for both direction and dog shit. Head down, life unfolds in my peripheral vision. Curiously, the world at close quarters lodges more as sound than sight: housewives gab, televisions sing, couples yell, children shout, vendors vend, dogs howl. To my surprise, the cacophonous symphony calms my step. It’s as if the discordant score were choreographed to match the jumpiness I feel during my stroll through the slum.

Despite the baldy jokes, Babu appears well liked. People recognise him and he, in turn, waves, laughs and jokes with all and sundry as he walks. His stride is confident. His manner, warm. His bike might be rusty and his boss’s car a two-door, but at least he has wheels and a job. That counts for something. Plus, he’s fit and healthy. In the slum, that’s worth even more.

‘This is my sister-in-law’s house,’ he says, stopping by a piece of lurid red fabric hanging over an open doorway. He inches it open, a curtain twitcher in reverse. Cleaning the tiled floor with a mop bends a shadow in a sari. She straightens, smiles the briefest of smiles at the sudden burst of sunlight and returns to her chores. There appears to be little love lost between them.

Babu presses on until we reach a junction of sorts. It’s an absurdity to have a clearing in a forest that lacks trees, but that’s exactly how it feels: the sudden sense of space, the uninterrupted patch of sky, the ability to breathe. We are, as it were, poking our heads through the warren’s principal rabbit hole after days underground.

In reality, the open glade is little more than a widened lane. A myriad of tightly squeezed pathways squirt out of it, identical to the one we’ve just exited. There is room to move and, as a consequence, it serves as both a market and a meeting place.

Turning into the lane, Babu slows his pace to exchange pleasantries with the bow-legged postman, Mr Jadhav. White-haired and good-natured, the elderly mailman waddles to a stop. He
lowers his voluminous satchel to the floor, sending a runaway utility bill into the dust. Diligently, he brushes off the dirt and returns it to his stockpile. Mr Jadhav is an old hand. No one knows quite how long he’s been delivering letters around the slum. About as long as the independent Post Office of India has been issuing stamps, most figure.

A thin-faced man in a pressed white shirt hurries past us. Babu shouts at him to stop. ‘Can’t,’ the scurrying figure shouts back over his shoulder. ‘Late for work.’ Raju, Babu informs me, earns his keep as a chauffeur for global accountancy firm KPMG.

Mr Jadhav returns to his rounds and Babu wanders off. It is not long before he spots another familiar face. Robert is sitting on his haunches, shooting the breeze with a friend. Long of mane and languid of speech, Babu’s athletic-looking acquaintance boasts a baseball cap and a single-figure golf handicap. He works as a caddie at the Indian-only United Services Club (popularly, yet confusingly, known as the US Club).

The multiplicity of jobs and evidence of enterprise fascinate me. I turn to Babu and make a remark to that effect.

As he ponders the fact, a knock-kneed man in tatty shorts and flip-flops lollops by. He has a basket on his head full of nail polish, hairclips, brushes and cutlery. He dips into one of the feeder alleys. Just as he does so, a diminutive man emerges with a bulging sack of nylon underwear on his head. The two almost collide, narrowly avoiding what had the potential to become the slum’s first female department store.

Shifting his gaze to the flurry around us, Babu seeks to enlighten me to the occupations of his neighbours. ‘Most people here are drivers or maids. Or they work as security guards.’ He pauses. ‘Some do official work.’ By which he means that they are on the government’s payroll: a tea boy at the municipal water-works department, a ticket-office assistant for the railways, a runner for the court, an underling in the tax office, that sort of thing. Any higher and they’d have the salaries to pay for more desirable accommodation, or the clout to bribe their way to the same. ‘The lazy and the sick, they are not so much working actually,’ Babu
adds, not hiding his disapproval. The water seller’s son has been earning for as long as he can remember. He has a loathing for the unemployed, regardless of their personal circumstances. People should work. Final.

‘Oh, and others are doing the selling,’ he mentions as an afterthought, casually pointing his head up the lane.

Commercial activity – buying, selling, bartering, haggling, hassling, hawking – is so pervasive and public in India that it is understandable that Babu should initially omit to mention it. Hucksters crowd the buses and trains; stallholders stifle the streets; pedlars pack the pavements. India has a wallah for every ware under the nation’s white-hot sun. Children, adults, the elderly – none is exempt from the art of exchange, the primordial urge to trade. India’s mercantile horde made the country’s cities into a virtual marketplace long before the Internet propagated the idea. Who needs eBay when every street corner provides a living, crowded auction site?

The three-man shopping parade next to Robert proves the point. First in line is an elderly fishmonger. Silent yet stoic, the Zenned-out salesman wears an age-lined face as shrivelled and grey as his rapidly spoiling catch.

The second, a jolly fruit seller with apple-red cheeks, appears more animated about his trade. Babu sidles up to him. As the two talk, Babu’s two lanky fingers graze on the vendor’s grapes. Piled high on a wheeled cart, the driver pops them into his mouth with the casual insouciance of a gambling addict plugging coins into a fruit machine. At the bottom of the cart, a pile of ripening green oranges emits a wispy curl of incense smoke. ‘For the flies,’ says Babu, through a mouthful of grape juice.

A diminutive Bihari called Mukesh occupies the end of the row. He trades as a barber. His overheads are small: a stool, a comb, an oxidised pair of kitchen shears and a cracked mirror resting on a breezeblock. He charges twenty rupees for a trim. A shave costs ten. The head massage afterwards comes free.

‘I take Saturdays off,’ he says, when I ask if he works the whole week. ‘Hindus don’t cut their hair on Saturdays.’

Offending religious sentiment is bad for business. Perhaps that’s why Mahindra World City had no provision for public worship? Ganesh Murty Nagar could not be more different. Painted divinities preside over cubbyhole shrines at every turn. The busy lane alone houses a multi-coloured Sai Baba temple, an unsteady mosque of bamboo walls and tarpaulin roof, and a concrete Catholic mission hut built over an old creek.

Babu, for his part, cares little for any of them. ‘I am not into the religion actually,’ is how he phrases it. Later, when I knew him better, he’d expand on his world-view. His personal ethics reflect a succinct secularity. ‘My thing is to have good work, good food, good money and good sleep. Oh, and help the disabled people.’ A remnant of gratitude to the Spastic Society, perhaps.

Babu’s antipathy towards religion contains the odd exception. He has some sympathy for Christianity, for instance. His affections are in fact more specific. They concentrate primarily on St Anthony, patron of (among other things) pregnant women, sterility, starvation and swineherds. Babu credits the slum chapel’s official benefactor for answering his candle-lit prayers and providing him with two sons. He also has the Hindus to thank for allowing him one of their own as his wife (although she’s since jumped ship to New Life Fellowship, an evangelical group active in the slum). It is his fellow Muslims for whom he can find nothing good to say. ‘I am hating my religion’, is as far as he’ll venture. Now, I sense, is not the moment to ask why.

‘Are there many Muslims in the slum?’ I enquire instead.

According to Babu’s reckoning, roughly a third of his fellow residents would describe themselves as ‘Maharashtran Muslim’. Most of the rest are Hindus. South Indian Catholics and a small yet growing quota of born-again Christians make up the remainder.

However, it is caste – not religion – that Babu sees as the defining characteristic of his community. As we leave the lane and set off down a single-file corridor of a street towards his house, he waves an arm at the maelstrom of humanity around us. ‘There are only scheduled castes here. We’re all
non-weg
[a
common colloquial abbreviation for ‘non-vegetarian’]. Everyone drinks whiskey. No one eats on banana leaf. So even the Brahmins are only Brahmin in name.’

With that, he strides off. I clatter behind, tripping on duckboards and bumping into passers-by to prevent his running shoes from speeding off without me.

A few minutes and a dozen hairpins later, Babu draws to a halt. He turns to his left and looks down a stunted cul-de-sac. Sat on a doorstep, a young woman is scouring the scalp of her droopy-eyed five-year-old for lice. Babu wishes both ladies a good day.

‘This is my old house,’ he says, leaning a hand on the wall of a dingy storeroom.

The one-room house occupies the corner. It is full of empty water containers. The property measures eight feet by nine and is just tall enough to fit Babu’s tall frame without bending.

‘And this here’, he continues, swapping hands and proudly patting the exterior wall of the opposite shack, ‘is my new house.’

Less than three feet separates the two properties.

Babu unties his shoelaces at the door of his new home. ‘See? It’s much bigger. Ten feet by twelve.’ Unlacing my own shoes, I peer inside. Jyoti is sitting on the floor sieving rice for weevils. There is no chair. She is wearing a thin cotton dress over her squat, ample frame. She climbs to her feet. A patch of sweat causes the material to stick to her back, causing it to ride up ever so slightly. Embarrassed, she pulls at the hem.

I press my hands together to wish her ‘namaste’, mimicking the universal Indian salutation with which she greets me. I sense her momentarily sizing me up over the tips of her fingers. I wonder what she saw, because she never looks at me straight again.

Babu steps across the torn T-shirt that doubles as a doormat and places a protective hand on his wife’s head. His hips are almost in line with her shoulders.

‘This is Jyoti,’ he announces with atypical formality. ‘You must be excusing her. She is illiterate. But she is learning English speaking because she would like to study Bible studies.’