India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (7 page)

The recent convert to New Life Fellowship grins obligingly.
Only her eyes betray the confusion brought on by her husband’s unintelligible little speech. She directs me to sit on the bed as she busies herself preparing lunch.

The bed is the only substantive piece of furniture in the room. Slightly wider than a standard single, it is shoved up against the wall closest to the alleyway. If Babu were to stretch, he could lever the door handle with his foot. The home-made bed has bricks for legs, four of them stacked one on top of the other in each corner. The majority of the family’s personal possessions are packed into cardboard boxes and shoved under the hardboard base. Some sheets and a few everyday clothes squash flat underneath two meagre pillows at the head of the bed. Nabi and Ashu sleep on rush mats on the concrete floor. The mats too are packed away.

The house has the feel and shape of a domesticated prison cell. An electric fan and lone light bulb dangle from the ceiling. A tiny alcove opposite the doorway houses the kitchen. It comprises a concrete chopping surface, a gas hob and a metal drying-up rack. The latter sags under the weight of a dozen aluminium plates and cups. Below the sink runs a single shelf. It divides the cooking pans above from the plastic water containers below. In front, a pair of gas cylinders stands squashed together. They look like two bronze bullets squeezed into a firing chamber. In winter the gas hob serves the additional function of heating the house as well as the family’s food.

Along from the kitchen, in the other corner, stands a squat lavatory. It is curtained in behind bricks and a wooden door. The size of a phone box, it doubles as a shower room. (Doubling up, I learn, is essential when you live in half the minimum space necessary.) Jyoti refuses to use the in-house loo for reasons of habit and privacy. Instead, she prefers to toilet with her girlfriends in the public lavatory block. She makes her way there every morning in the pre-dawn light, armed with toilet paper, toothbrush and an eagerness to be updated on the latest goings-on in the slum. Still, just having their own lavatory differentiates the house from its immediate neighbours. It’s a status thing, much like having a bidet in Billericay.

The most obvious symbol of success balances on a metal support attached to the far wall near the bed. The Samsung colour television presides over the room from just above head height. ‘Twenty-one inches,’ says Babu. ‘Any smaller and my eyes would spoil.’ He subscribes to fourteen paid-for channels at a total cost of seventy rupees per month. Most show re-runs of popular Hindi and Western movies. For a year, he has been hassling the local dealer to add the Pix channel to his package, ‘but he is not listening only’. When Babu is not watching animal documentaries, he likes action flicks. Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone count among his favourites.

The TV rack holds a Phillips DVD player as well. Babu frequently sits up late into the night to watch pirated films that he buys at one of the many pavement Blockbusters around the city. He has a few blue movies squirrelled away too. These he reserves for the very early hours when Jyoti is asleep. If she wakes, which she sometimes does, she scolds him fiercely for his devilry.

A knot of black wires extends from the back of the Japanese television to four small speakers spread around the room. Babu bought the surround-sound system with his last Diwali bonus. His boss was hoping he’d buy a fridge or water purifier, but to no avail.

Babu comes and sits beside me on the bed. He pulls out a collection of family photos from a plastic bag beneath the bed. The low-resolution scenes, blurred by thumbprints, are typical of such collections: birthdays, first days at school, family outings. Curiously, there are none of Babu’s wedding. I ask why. ‘No camera,’ he explains. He pauses a fraction, as if contemplating what to say next. ‘We had a private party only. Nothing fancy.’ The wedding breakfast, it turns out, consisted of a six-pack of beers back in the slum.

Mixed-faith marriages, even at the bottom of the social hierarchy, are best celebrated quietly. As it is, Jyoti’s family situation doesn’t lend itself to happy get-togethers. Her mother died when Jyoti was young, immolating herself with paraffin and a match. The family cried murder, however, and pointed the finger at Jyoti’s
father. Under pressure from her aunt, Jyoti testified against him in court. Her father was duly imprisoned. She later recanted. It was too late. He’d already died behind bars. Jyoti and her five siblings bounced around family members for a little while, but eventually ended up on the street. ‘That’s why none of them have a good education and why everybody is doing violence with each other,’ Babu notes. Jyoti eventually landed herself the job as a maid in Kuffe Parade. ‘Then I got into a love affair with her,’ Babu says. His tone is unromantic and everyday. ‘And one day I went to get married.’

A soft, metallic thud sounds from the corrugated iron roof, disturbing what has become a rather sorrowful stroll down memory lane. ‘Just a pigeon,’ Babu says, his ear attuned to every noise and movement in and around his one-room house.

The interruption allows for a welcome change in subject. Babu lays the photos aside. Sometimes kids from his alleyway clamber on to the roof to lie out clothes to dry, he explains, looking up at the roof. ‘I shoo them off actually.’

Trespassing children are just one of the daily annoyances that slum life brings. Other people’s rubbish dumped on his doorstep vexes Babu too. (Garbage collection is ‘privatised’ in as much as residents who don’t want to dispose of it themselves must pay someone else to take it away.) His biggest grouch is the thieving. Some mornings he tries starting his motorbike, only to find that the petrol has been siphoned out of the tank. ‘They do it with a Biseleri bottle,’ he explains, in reference to a popular brand of mineral water.

‘Is there much crime?’ I ask, interested to know how much weight Babu gives to such incidents.

Mumbai’s shanties, like shanties in all of India’s large cities, have the reputation of being dens of vice and violence. For the tabloid press, the slums always provide the backdrop for grisly murders and massive drug busts. Middle-class friends would often look at me in horror on hearing I’d been traipsing around a slum. ‘Tell me you didn’t take your watch?’ one girl even remonstrated. ‘People get stabbed in those places for far less.’ It was the term
‘those places’, spoken with such contempt, that kept me going back.

In my personal experience (albeit limited), social solidarity in the slums often far exceeds that in the atomised worlds of expensive apartment blocks and walled-in communities. ‘Close-knit’, for Babu, represents far more than just a geographical description of where he lives. The willingness of his fellow residents to band together makes burglary a high-risk business. ‘We beat them very badly if we catch them,’ Babu remarks. ‘There’s no mercy for them.’ The consensus is simple: if people must rob or deal drugs, then they should do so elsewhere. Not, ever, on their own doorstep.

‘How about gangs? Do they operate in the slums?’ I enquire.

The question isn’t asked entirely blind. Sitting on my bedside table back at my lodgings is an open copy of Suketu Mehta’s
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
. A graphic description of the city’s teeming underbelly, a large portion of the book is dedicated to the Dawood Idrahim gang. Allegedly based in Karachi, with operations throughout Mumbai, the Indian mafia don oversees a genuine multinational corporation of crime.

‘They are no gangs exactly. Actually, they are more like teams,’ my host responds, uncharacteristically judicious in his selection of words.

The description makes them sound harmless, as if it were all one big game, a case of supporting one football club over another. If so, then the rules are certainly unforgiving. ‘One of my friends was stabbed twice during the last Holi celebrations,’ says Babu, his tone almost blasé. The man was a gang member, he adds. It’s meant as an explanation, not a description.

The slum is definitely no play park. The spectre of violence is forever lurking in the shadows. Shanties, by definition, host the poor. That impoverishment might give rise to petty theft. It could exacerbate domestic violence too. In some cases, it might even foster organised crime. Yet poverty rarely results in murder. India has religion and politics for that.

Every now and then, India’s hard-won reputation for inter-faith
harmony and secular plurality takes a blood-soaked battering. The weeks after Independence, when trainloads of slaughtered corpses trundled into Delhi and Islamabad, set a lamentable precedent for what – admittedly, very occasionally – was to come. One of the latest such outbursts occurred in 2002, when inter-sectarian violence in Gujarat left more than one thousand dead. Unofficial figures put it at double that. The majority were Muslims. Most were poor.

Mumbai’s recent history bears the scars of similar inter-communal madness. In December 1992, the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya (the result of the same religious dispute that sparked the Gujarat riots a decade later) provoked a rampage by Mumbai’s Muslims. Hindu reprisals soon followed. Babu was sixteen at the time. For his safety, his mother pulled him out of school. He never went back. ‘Riots. Bloodshed. Each and everything happened,’ he says, dredging up the events that thrust him into an early adulthood. ‘It is in front of my eyes. It is still kept in mind.’ He shakes his head, mostly in sadness but, I like to think, partly in an attempt to dislodge the memories. He blames fighting between Hindus and Muslims for depriving him of his education. They spoilt his future, he insists.

Babu clears his throat with an eruption of violent, guttural hacking. Calmly he steps towards the door, leans over the threshold and spits a globule of yellowish-green phlegm into the alley. He turns back. ‘For that reason, I am becoming a driver only.’

There is no time to consider the implications of the statement, for in run Nabi and Ashu. Wild and impish, they scream gleefully at the unexpected sight of their father and run open-armed towards him. Each grabs a leg. With much giggling, they attempt to wrestle him to the ground. Babu retaliates with tickles and enveloping bear hugs.

‘Boys, stop messing,’ barks Jyoti with a well-honed, on-stage anger. The tussling ceases immediately, all three recognising an order when they hear one. The boys dutifully carry out the instructions that follow. Satchels are put away under the bed, hands
are washed and bottoms are parked on the concrete floor in front of Cartoon Network.

‘Now, boys, homework straight after lunch, okay,’ Babu chips in. ‘You must grow to become good in the reading and writing.’

The second injunction, spoken in Babu’s evening-school English, is said for my sake more than for the boys. He wants me to know that he takes their education seriously. He would like to see Ashu become a doctor one day. ‘For that, he has to go for good studies in science.’ He shrugs his shoulders. Neither has shown much enthusiasm for their schooling so far. ‘They like many jokes and having fun.’

As he’s talking, Nabi pinches Ashu and a small scuffle breaks out. Jyoti gives both a sharp clip around the ear and silence returns. For a brief moment, the only sound to be heard is floppy-haired Ben 10 gearing up his all-powerful Omnitrix wristwatch to do battle with Swampfire and his alien accomplices. ‘See what I mean?’ Babu says, raising his hands in a what’s-a-man-to-do gesture.

‘I want to see my children become good and honest and intelligent men in the future.’ His face grows serious. ‘This is one of my dreams, my main dream actually.’

He gazes down at his two children, who are sitting rapt as the supersonic boy wonder drubs yet another ghoulish baddy. Then his lips part in a paternal smile.

‘But actually for now they are still kids only.’

Jyoti requests her husband to turn off the television. ‘Lunchtime,’ she tells the boys, who moan at not being allowed to see how Ben 10’s intergalactic alien-blasting ends. Obediently they swivel round and, together with Jyoti, begin to eat. In front of their crossed legs sit two small mess dishes, each with a measured dollop of dhal and rice. For flavour, the parsimonious meal depends heavily on a splattering of stir-fried okra. The slices of green vegetable represent the only concession to colour too. The boys mechanically move the contents of the bland lunch from hand to mouth, munching unenthusiastically as they go. The same meal is repeated in the evening, only with chapattis instead of rice (‘rice
has gone up to forty rupees a kilogramme,’ Babu would mutter in disgust at a later date). For variation, Jyoti sometimes buys radishes because she knows Babu likes them. Meat, however, remains a rarity on the family dinner table.

‘I’m not so much interested in non-
weg
,’ Babu confirms. ‘Egg food, fish food, sometimes the chicken food I like. But chicken, I liked roasted only. Not with curries and all that. That I hate it.’

The truth, I suspect, is slightly different. When Jyoti buys meat, it’s at the start of the month; that’s to say, in the flush wake of payday. It is cash, not culinary preference (and certainly not caste or religion), that makes the family pious eaters.

Babu indicates that we should be on our way. I’d offered to buy him lunch after the visit. Now I feel guilty for not suggesting he bring his family along too.

As I rise to leave, I remember the cheese balls. There are in my shoulder bag. I reach in and pass the two packets to Jyoti. It’s a mistake. The sight of the manufactured pap, glistening with E numbers, causes the boys to lose immediate interest in their meal. ‘Now, now, now,’ shouts Ashu, hassling his mother for the snack food. He crawls over onto his back in a tantrum when the request is denied. ‘Finish your food first,’ Jyoti scolds. Babu shouts something strict at him in Hindi, which evokes yet more convulsions. The English word ‘stubborn’ is used several times. Ashu takes himself and his fit off to an empty patch under the bed. His brother, meanwhile, silent until now, begins to bleat plaintively. Further wailing erupts in response from below my seat on the mattress.

Fortunately, a distraction in the shape of a twelve-year-old boy rescues the visit from the brink of mayhem. Dressed in the pukka uniform of the nearby Navy school, Anand is the bright kid on the block. Momentarily forgetting the cheese balls, Ashu and Nabi jump to their feet to greet their friend.