Maximum City (76 page)

There is a nonstop party in the Thakkar household. People will be coming and going for weeks, mostly their former neighbors from Jogeshwari, but also relatives, Dharmendra’s and Girish’s coworkers, Raju’s students, Paresh’s dancer friends. The Thakkars, after two generations, have just stepped into a pukka house, into the middle class. The progress of the Thakkar family is the story of the growth of Bombay. They moved from Fort, where Girish’s father lived in a large house with his extended family, to the Jogeshwari shanty and now to the Mira Road flat. Girish wants to move on to America, the peak of that trajectory.

For the first time in their lives, the children don’t have to sleep with their parents. The luxurious sleeping arrangements were chalked out when they moved in. In the bedroom: Dharmendra (the man on whose salary the family runs and the flat was bought) and Paresh, Girish’s younger brother, on the bed. The other brother, Sailesh, is working as a salesman in interior Maharashtra but visits often. In the living room: the mother on the divan, the father on the lower daybed, Girish near him, separated by a small gap, and Raju on the mattress by the kitchen. The two rooms, small to my eyes, are cavernous to the Thakkars. “One day it was actually uncomfortable for me,” Dharmendra says. “I couldn’t sleep.” So most nights they all sleep in the living room, watching the new TV, whose sleep timer shuts it off after thirty minutes. They like being lulled to sleep by the sound of familiar human voices. Having grown up in one room, they don’t know what to do with the extra room when at long last they get it.

The living room has hand-painted flower vases. There is nice light coming from the plant-fringed window but also a lot of mosquitoes, to which the family seems immune. Paresh’s drawings—one of the Eiffel Tower, another of the Statue of Liberty, and a third of a man shrugging off
his clothes and what appears to be his skin too—prominently adorn the showcase. One whole wall of the Thakkars’ living room is covered with dark brown stone tiles. It is vastly out of place with the other three whitewashed walls. Two spotlights on the top, near the ceiling, struggle to bring some light to the hard stone surface. “People think the stone is for decoration,” explains Dharmendra. “It is actually there because there is leakage in that wall.” In the brand-new building, water invades the structure from all sides and seeps through the walls. However, when visitors to his flat comment on how nice the stone looks, Dharmendra doesn’t correct them.

He shows me the brochure that enticed him and his family and all the other occupants to Chandresh Chhaya. It is extravagantly colored in a 1950s style—all bright reds, yellows, blues—and the kind of broad gaudy typefaces that American land companies used to attract migrants to sunny California. The misspelt text reads:

The illustrations in the brochure show a silhouetted skyline of skyscrapers and a pair of drawings of low buildings surrounded by palm trees, strolling couples, limousines gliding by on uncluttered roads, a children’s playground, and a blue sea wave about to break. A host of “special amenities” ranging from a bus service to the station to a tennis court, clubhouse, and library are promised, none of which have materialized. But if you were sitting in your shack in Jogeshwari, with the open gutter flowing outside, the shouts of the drunks and taporis at battle coming in with the giant mosquitoes through your one window, and examining this brightly colored brochure, your heart too would strain to believe it, would lend its promises the necessary credence. Perhaps your sleep that night would be illuminated with a dream of your children playing in that lush green playground, your wife preparing food on that marble kitchen counter, and yourself walking
back from the station toward your own flat on a Saturday night on the hundred-foot road, breathing the country air.

Chandresh Chayya is in terrible condition. The walls are uneven, gaping holes in the wall exist where electric fittings are meant to be placed, and as usual there is no lift in the elevator shaft. The stairs are also unfinished. The builder had promised amenities such as a garden, and an “ISI Mark geyser” for hot water. The garden became another building next door, and there was no geyser in Chandresh Chayya. So Dharmendra complained and a geyser was installed. It is a ridiculous little thing. “It won’t heat up water to wash a rat.” But it is, within the definition of the agreement, a geyser, and it has a good sense about how much water is available for it to heat up. Water for bathing comes into the taps here only every alternate day. The Thakkars have built water tanks in the loft to store it.

Municipal drinking water comes only once a week, in tanker trucks, and only if the drivers are bribed 100 rupees per tanker. But it’s still not enough, so the housing society pays for three tankers of water every day from private suppliers, at 325 rupees a tanker. The tanker operators are the most powerful political lobby in Mira Road. They have divided up the tanker routes among themselves and prevent the municipality from laying new pipes, which would eliminate their business. Getting rid of water is as much of a problem as getting it in. Since the drainage systems are badly built, the society has to pay another 400 rupees a month to drain the ground of water. Periodically, when the water supply fails altogether, housewives and accountants emerge from their buildings and riot, sitting down on the train tracks to force the rest of the city to pay attention.

The residents also have to pay for a private sweeper to collect the garbage and take it away to God knows where. If they use the municipal bin, it gets picked up once a fortnight. There are no public bus routes in the suburb. At one point, the Thakkars’ housing society had started a service, paying a man with an eight-seater minicab to ferry the people of the complex back and forth to the station for 2 rupees each. The Mira Road rickshaw wallahs, who charge 20 rupees for the same service, surrounded the minicab and prevented him from operating. The police and the local assemblyman were called in; both took the side of the rickshaw wallahs. So the residents of Mira Road spend a major portion of their income paying for the most basic of municipal services: water, sewage, and transportation. Mira Road is just outside the limits of the Bombay Municipal Corporation.
That explains its attraction and its deficiencies: It is a border township. But on the whole, the Thakkars are happier here. In Jogeshwari, better-off relatives would visit, look around, and ask them why they didn’t move. “It got irritating,” says Dharmendra. “Who doesn’t want to shift? But Father had done some wrong investment. Money was blocked.” In Jogeshwari, “I never used to give my address or anything to friends. I could not call my office colleagues. I would not go to their place. Now we are free to invite them. Relatives can stay overnight. Anybody can come anytime.”

Girish’s father spends his days finding out where the shops are, where the freshest vegetables can be bought. Girish says of his father, “He might never have thought that he would be in such a place in his life. Today we have a mixer, washing machine, TV. What don’t we have? A car. We don’t need it. Maybe we might have it after a couple of years.” The building abuts the train tracks; the suburban locals go by in a cacophony of diesel horns and the clackity-clack of wheels against the steel tracks. It takes two hours for Dharmendra to reach his workplace. “But we are in sales, so we can make up,” he explains, with a twinkle in his eye. Hours can be fudged.

The father compares Mira Road favorably to the slum he has just left. “There is silence now. In Jogeshwari there would be a fight somewhere, some noise.” (In Jogeshwari, I think, Sunil and Amol would burn down the municipal office to focus their attention on the water problem.) As people leave, the family shuts the door behind them. I have never seen the door in Jogeshwari shut during waking hours, and I ask about this. “It’s the system here,” explains Dharmendra. “It’s the flat system.” You are supposed to maintain your privacy when you move up to the middle class, into a flat. In the slum there is no such delusion.

Raju is twenty-five and unmarried, almost a spinster by the standards of their community. The Thakkars were waiting to move into this flat before they looked for a boy for her or a bride for Dharmendra, who just turned thirty. What kind of family would marry into a slum? Girish doesn’t revisit his old home in Jogeshwari, and neither does Paresh. It’s had three break-ins since they’ve moved, and the family doesn’t seem to mind very much. Raju goes back every day for her coaching classes, but their parents don’t go. Sitting in a third-story flat of his very own, Dharmendra, the perfume company executive, dismisses the place in which he was born and brought up: “Jogeshwari was a chawl.”

“What kinds of people live here?” I ask Dharmendra. “Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Muslims?”

“Cosmopolitan,” he responds. It is a fellowship of the upwardly mobile. The social networks of Mira Road, while not as cohesive as those of Jogeshwari, are still stronger than those of Nepean Sea Road. After Girish comes home to Mira Road, at ten in the evening, he goes to the neighboring building and brings over the two-year-old daughter of an acquaintance, to play with. He has about half an hour of this, which relaxes him. Then he drops off the toddler and comes back home to sleep. On a Sunday, Girish will go to Naigaon with his upstairs neighbor and buy the fermented sap and the fruit of the toddy tree. Then he will come back to his neighbor’s room and drink a liter and a half of toddy and eat a couple dozen tadgolas. He recommends it to me. “If you drink toddy it will clean out your system. You will be able to shit really well. Everything will come out easily.”

W
ALKING PAST THE LOVERS
on the parapet of Marine Drive, Girish says wistfully, “One day I’ll also come here. With someone.” Girish and his brothers were role models in the Jogeshwari slums. Parents pointed them out to their children and asked them why they couldn’t be like the Gujaratis.

Girish has never had a girlfriend. He offers as his excuse the fact that from his first year in college, which is when middle-class Indians traditionally discover the opposite sex, he started tutoring to bring in money. As soon as his classes were over, at one-thirty, he would go to his students’ homes to give tutorials, until nine in the evening. “I never got time to run behind these females.” He thinks he can start something with a girl, if he stands at the same bus stop where a girl waits, for ten days. “Basically you have to pamper her.” There was a girl in a friend’s office, and Girish had once asked her to have coffee. She refused. “I said, Be off, who has time to run after you? I don’t have time for you. Sorry.”

Girish once had an Internet chat companion, a young Gujarati woman living in Japan. “I used to chat in a different style. I used to try and reach her heart. What do you think about life, philosophical, this, that. Then she came to India. Her father bought an apartment in Walkeshwar. She didn’t contact me in Bombay.” There is no disappointment in his voice; or it is
well hidden. After all, she is a posh Walkeshwar girl now, more inaccessible to him than when she was Japanese.

Kamal, the mob comptroller, like Girish’s other friends, is greatly exercised by Girish’s continuing virginity: “He has great need of some oiling-greasing.” Kamal advises Girish, “Sex is connected to the brain; when you release, you can think better. That’s why your thinking is confused. You need to get laid. You say you have all these big contacts but you can’t utilize them. People don’t trust you because you are yourself confused. Get an item and get lightened.” He suggests a place where Girish can do so: Tip-Top Hairdressers in Goregaon, where the female hairdressers start with a head massage and work their way south.

Srinivas, his whoring friend, tells me he admires Girish’s contacts, his knowledge of people from every world, but is dismissive about his business prospects. “He has not been able to build a future,” unlike the rest of their group from college. “He is too honest.” He has been trying to persuade Girish to join the Landmark Forum, an organization that runs encounter groups and motivational classes. There are five levels, and Srinivas has reached the fourth one. It teaches him how to succeed in business. He has successfully motivated Girish into not feeling sad when he comes back from Navsari and first glimpses the outskirts of Bombay, at Virar. Girish went to a guest session of the Forum, but decided against taking the full three-day class because it cost 3,000 rupees.

Bombay has raised and nurtured Girish, but now he has reached the end of something. “I’m not getting back what I’m putting into struggling,” says the programmer. “There are times when I don’t even have ten bucks.” Girish realizes that what he does is not essential to human happiness. “I’m in the service industry. A person can manage without my service.” Dharmendra’s perfume company, meanwhile, is feeling the pinch of the recession. Nobody’s getting fired, but nobody’s getting any raises, and the company’s not filling in posts that are vacant. Girish is their only winning horse now. The next move—to Borivali, where they’ve set their eyes on a thousand-square-foot flat—is contingent on a steadily increasing flow of money, and the only possibility of that happening is with Girish, with computers.

Girish has now ended up in the front room of his business partner’s flat on Pedder Road. He likes working in the fancy address. “I never thought in my life that I’ll reach Pedder Road. I only knew Jogeshwari.” The address
is just about the only reason Girish is in the business, with a man he met in the stock market. “My partner is no help to me in my business. He won’t even open the yellow pages and make calls from it.” Instead, he stays up till three in the morning downloading pornographic pictures. But his partner is from Bombay high; Girish is from Bombay low. “I am with him because I’m hoping he will pick me up.” He makes a spider with his palm and fingers and lifts it high in the air. “He will pick me up.”