India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (9 page)

The injured water carrier proved unable to speak. Nor did Mr Shaikh bring his memory back with him from the dead.
Worse was to come. Subsequent tests (‘the doctor was all the time scratching his foot with a pen’) revealed him to be partially paralysed. Only his head would move with any freedom. The entire right side of his body was rendered entirely immobile. As for his other side, motion was largely restricted to the thumb and middle finger of his left hand. Even then, the fingers worked – to quote his son – ‘like a crab’. The water-supply business, needless to say, ceased trading.

One morning, after dropping his boss at work, Babu took me to see his crippled father in Geeta Nagar slum. Father and son are almost neighbours, their respective shanties separated only by a short, narrow causeway between the compound wall of Navy Nagar and the sea. The space is just wide enough for a dirt track.

Babu’s father moved there from his birthplace in Jamkhandi, in Karnataka, back in the late 1950s. His brother, Babu’s uncle, had found a job and sent for him. Aged twelve, he arrived with a small trunk and an arranged wife. The slum was just spouting its first shoots then. Back then the area used to be scattered with bushes, elderly residents recollect with nostalgia. Back then, they would keep hens and goats. An old British cannon used to stare out to sea on the stone-built tide-breaker. In the early 1960s, Mr Shaikh moved out of his brother’s house and built his own bamboo hut. Sectarian issues were simmering. India had already fought one battle with Muslim-dominated Pakistan and a second was about to follow. When it came, Geeta Nagar was shrouded by blackouts, night after night.

Babu was born on the spot of that bamboo hut, as were the majority of his five sisters (the public hospital started charging for beds after the birth of daughter no. 1). His parents live there to this day, although now its walls are of brick and the roof a mix of corrugated iron and blue tarp. A quarter of a century and much lobbying later, Geeta Nagar finally gained access to fresh water. It took a further decade to get electricity.

Before arriving, Babu parks the Maruti on a rocky bulge midway down the walled causeway. ‘I need piss,’ he says, extricating himself from the car and wandering down to the waterfront.

I wonder if urinating represents some kind of pre-visit ritual for him. The thought doesn’t distract me for long because soon a group of three boys wander over and begin peering inquisitively through the car window.

I’m grateful when Babu returns. ‘Uncle, uncle,’ the boys shout with genuine affection at the long-limbed driver, who is doing up his fly. There’s nothing of the ‘baldy’ jokes here. Each is dressed in a football shirt and, to a boy, aspires to become a professional cricketer in the future.

‘Geeta is the name of a woman actually,’ Babu says, breaking off to shout at the grubby trio who are messing with his wing-mirror. She was a politician from here, he continues. She’s still alive, actually. Babu worries about when she ‘gets die’, as he puts it. ‘They will snatch the place actually and make seven-storey apartments there.’

For the moment, Geeta Nagar is safe. ‘This is a lovely place actually,’ he says, pointing out to the bay in front of us. Momentarily calm and creatively decorated with driftwood and plastic, the inky water stretches out in an ample arc. To the left runs the old sea wall, now bereft of armaments and pockmarked by stone-stealing looters. Inland, to the right, a sturdy buttress of reclaimed land stands above the water line. Trimmed with reed beds, it bends round to the elegant, expensive apartments on Kuffe Parade. ‘That is the Coastal Regional Zone,’ Babu says, recalling the open creek that preceded the reclamation project. He directs a finger towards the sky-rises across the bay, now creeping their way on to the precious plot wrested from the sea. ‘These constructions are illegal actually.’ He is, most probably, right. Yet I have a hunch Mr Shaikh’s lifetime home will be levelled long before a stop order is ever placed on the big-ticket building projects opposite. Babu turns to go.

It is an hour before we reach his parents’ house, which is located at the far end of the slum, almost rubbing up against the Navy wall. The walk through the bustling passageways reminds me of my earlier visit to Babu’s home. Geeta Nagar has much the same vibrancy about it; people at every turn, working, shouting,
praying, selling, washing. It is life in the raw, where fights and fornication are as open to all as the contents of a postcard.

Babu moved out of Geeta Nagar when he married Jyoti. He did so because he felt ‘claustrophobic’, he’d told me previously. Picturing the cramped cul-de-sac that he now calls home, I’d failed to understand what he’d meant by the term. Now, walking beside him, watching him stop and greet all and sundry, listening to him talk of childhood friends and long-gone events, the penny drops. His claustrophobia is not physical; it’s emotional, perhaps even psychological. He is living on top of his life, constantly treading and re-treading old memories, forbidden from ever properly starting again. It makes for a composite existence, each day, each experience compressed against those that came before, another layer in the persona that is Mohammed ‘Babu’ ‘Baldy’ Shaikh.

He might have fled, but he hardly turned prodigal. Every Sunday, he returns to give his father a scrub and to shave his pallid, grey-stubbled face. During the week, he’ll pop round to check on them as well. If they need medication, he’ll buy it. If they need more ‘rations’, he’ll stock up. ‘I’m the lone son of my parents.’ The phrase implies an unquestioned obligation.

When it comes to family responsibility in India, primogeniture rules. And Babu’s inherited burden is not inconsiderable. Apart from his father’s paralysis, his mother has severe diabetes. On one of our many lunches, Babu had appeared unusually sullen. His mother, he’d revealed after some prompting, had been rushed to hospital the previous night. She’d been suffering from acute ‘body pain’ for several days and eventually fainted.

For once, Babu was devoid of appetite as he recounted the episode. He’d paid for a taxi to take her to G. T. Hospital in Colaba, reasoning that ‘it is difficult to get a patient on the motorbike’. On arriving, the doctor had given him short shrift. ‘Why not eating?’ he asked. ‘Why spend one hundred rupees on taxi to come to hospital too?’ He’d sent them home, mother included, ordering the patient to purchase an Accu-Chek meter to measure the glucose levels in her blood. The contraption costs just shy of two thousand rupees. Cash-short as ever, Babu doesn’t know
whether ‘to buy or not to buy’. His mother’s life might depend on it. It is a Shakespearean dilemma – one of many played out in the slums of Colaba every day.

Babu’s obligations don’t end there. His sister Bano married a drunk who beats her. The two are temporarily separated. Until they ‘compromise’, Babu has her and her two teenage children to care for as well. His eldest sister recently died of cancer while on a trip to Madhya Pradesh. Babu paid the cost of the taxi that transported her body the two-day journey home.

His two other surviving sisters – Janeb and Fatima (the fifth died shortly after birth) – married well. Their husbands run a stone-necklace business in Crawford Market. ‘They are quite rich and have a good lifestyle.’ Unfortunately for Babu (and his parents), paternal care passes through the male not female line. The daughters’ obligations lie with their husband’s parents now; a belated adoption via marriage.

‘I have many mouths to feed,’ the boy from the slum says as we draw up to the hut where he took his first breath. ‘That’s why I never miss my duties.’

It brings the notion of ‘enterprise’ into sharp relief. India’s young entrepreneurs strive and struggle to create that highly prized thing called ‘value’. Babu works every hour to keep his dependents from starving. Hundreds of millions of industrious Indians are just the same.

Stooping beneath the low door-frame, we enter his parents’ home. The air is oven-hot and sprinkled thick with a dust of powdered sugar. His father is sitting cross-legged on a small, elevated bed in front of the door. The bed’s positioning is intentional, providing its invalid occupant with a view of the children playing outside. They are his sole entertainment. A wooden bracket stands bolted just above the door, enabling him to reach up with the crab pincer of his left hand and lever himself upright. White-haired and rickets-thin, Babu’s father (with his son’s help) has attempted to spruce up his woebegone appearance with a smartly trimmed goatee. The old man’s eyes brighten a fraction on registering our arrival. I spot kindness in them, or would like to think I do. I have no way of checking, however, for it is the only gesture of recognition that I can discern. He remains looking forward as we pass.

Babu’s mother, Jamila, is also sitting cross-legged, but on the concrete floor. She is chopping cauliflower. Dressed in a pale blue cotton sari with faded pink flowers, she looks crumpled and battle-worn. It’s impossible to conceive of Babu’s emaciated mother as a child bride, presumably young and hopeful once upon a time. Her salt-and-pepper hair is tied back in a bun. Metal bracelets rattle softly from her stick-like wrists, a close-at-hand reminder of a far-off wedding. She is making papad, picking out Styrofoam-like curls of dhal rice from an old biscuit tin and tossing them into a hot frying pan. The dehydrated food hisses and spits as it hits the sizzling oil, filling the room with a curious smell of fried onions and burning plastic.

The visit proves a dispiriting experience. Jamila offers gap-toothed smiles, yet says nothing. Mr Shaikh merely sits and stares blankly. Babu tries his best to lighten the mood and make me feel at home. He directs me to the room’s only chair, sends off the ten-year-old Soyab (who, in the fluid way of Indian relations, is identified as both his sister’s son and his cousin’s brother) to buy some Thums Up, and generally sees off the silence with his own brand of repartee. The latter focuses mostly on his mother’s dwindling health and his father’s toilet problems.

Feeling suddenly depressed at the grimness of it all, I look around for a distraction. My gaze settles on the room’s only decoration. It comes in the shape of a poster depicting a milky-white, rosy-cheeked baby. ‘Smile and the world smiles with you,’ the caption reads. The fresh-faced image almost seems cruel in its candied, blueberry-pie optimism. Babu’s mother follows my eye. She turns to her son and mutters a short muffled sentence, her first and last. ‘My mother says she is happy,’ he translates back to me, ‘but she is sad in the heart because all her children have gone.’ Gulping back my drink, I ask Babu if we might be best to leave his mother to her cooking. I’m not sure how much more I can take.

We exit through the back. The Shaikh residence differs from
Babu’s in having two rooms. It is not the exception. The hut opposite even has a second storey, like two Lego bricks affixed one on top of the other. The owner works in the Gulf, Babu explains. ‘He died recently.’ The way he says it, I imagine the man’s ghost still lugging bricks on a construction site in Dubai, carefully saving his money to send as remittance home.

I breathe deeply as we leave the hut through the rear door. The salt air, caustic and ungranulated, clears my head and fills my lungs. I take another gulpful as my eyes adjust to the sunlight. In front is the sea, lapping against the litter-strewn rocks below. Across the water sweeps the curved esplanade of Marine Drive, known as the Queen’s Necklace for its twinkling lights after dark.

A footpath of sorts, lined with an open drain, separates the huts from the sea. ‘Sometimes it floods,’ Babu remarks without any special emphasis, lowering a flat hand to his thigh to show how high the water rises. He points to the stain of a tidemark on his parent’s brick-plaster house.

I see that a fishing rod is wedged on the zinc roof between odds and sods rescued from the sea. Fishing, along with swimming, comprises a childhood passion that Babu has taken with him into adulthood. ‘I fish just there,’ he says, pointing to a rocky outcrop at the water’s edge. As if following his finger, a small boy emerges from a nearby shack, clambers down the sloping sea wall, drops his trousers and defecates on the exact same spot. Two elderly men are similarly engaged further along the wave-splashed rampart.

We begin to make our way back to the car. As we turn to leave, a gap-toothed young man just out of his teens joins us. Babu introduces him as Govind and describes him as his ‘brother-in-law’. His obvious youth (he must be two decades younger than Babu’s youngest sister) makes that doubtful. Perhaps he’s the brother, or even the son, of his genuine brother-in-law? Either way, there’s an evident affection between the two.

‘Govind is into crime and all,’ Babu says, gently cuffing the semi-relative on the back of the head. The young man looks at him blankly, his mouth drooping open like a thirsty dog’s. It’s the
expression of a halfwit or a drug user. Which of the two, I can’t tell.

Govind is still in eleventh standard. Babu’s younger charge somehow owns property. Inherited, quite probably. Walking back through the slum, Babu points out a single-room shack. A woman is scrubbing her child in the far corner of the furniture-less space. Her husband is at work. He checks stock levels in a biscuit factory. The couple pays Govind one thousand five hundred rupees per month for the privilege of the leaking roof and concrete floor. His rental portfolio comprises two other similarly spartan dwellings.

Despite the steady income, Babu worries that he is wasting his youth. He’d like to see him with a career. What about driving? Babu counts several driving protégés in the slum. His preferred means of instruction are unorthodox (‘I teach by hitting and slapping’), but all have gone on to secure jobs. Govind is not cut out as a driver, though. Too little concentration, according to Babu. ‘Anyway, driver is not a good status job, actually.’

In conspiratorial tones, he leans over and shares his own aspiration for the younger man. ‘I’m trying to get him into the police.’ Govind grins inanely. It is one of the few legitimate professions to which the young delinquent appears vaguely amenable.

As the months pass, I’d like to think Babu and I become firm friends. Or as firm as our different backgrounds, languages and cultures allow. The more we lunch, the more we confide, as though food and privacy are inversely correlated. He regularly asks me about my wife and children, who are living in a rented flat in Kerala and whom I miss when I’m away. We talk at length about his family too: the progress of Jyoti’s diet, Nabi and Ashu’s school marks, his parents’ ever-failing health. Some of what he shares is personal, such as the fact he’s not circumcised (his antipathy to Islam evidently has a history) or that he keeps liquor under his bed (although he claims never to touch it, ‘hardly ever actually’). But much of what we discuss sticks to the everyday, like the best way to rid a dog of maggots or which is the best-flavoured lassi (mango, apparently).