Slumdog Chamillionaire

After a day unexpectedly spent portraying an anonymous airport visitor in the future Bollywood smash hit Advertisement for Horlick's NutriBars, it was a rather severe change of scenery to once again wake up in the early morning, not to return to the glamor of Bollywood, but to venture into the heart of Mumbai's slums.

There are over 2000 officially recognized slum communities in Mumbai, housing some 55% of the city's population. For a city with 16 million people, you do the math. I'd been in contact with an NGO that regularly takes visitors on trips into the slums (for a fee directed towards charitable works), and it was they who led me, two Dutch people, and an easily-upset Israeli idealist through Dharavi, the largest slum in the whole of Asia. In an area between two train tracks, covering less than 2 square kilometers, Dharavi is home to over a million people.

You may be expecting me to say something like "The people of Dharavi cling to a threadbare existence, languishing in poverty and the greatest suffering imaginable." Not so. One of key points my guide stressed early on, as I now will, is that in reality slums are not as they are in many people's imaginings, giant camps of destitute and shiftless waifs whose lot in life it is to lie around their homes in misery because there's no employment or food or water. What they wanted to show, and which I can completely confirm, is that though the slums are certainly very, very poor they are fully functional, even flourishing communities.

Before going on it would be important to say in what ways Dharavi is an exception. For starters, the Mumbai slums have a higher average income than those elsewhere in India, not least because the exorbitant costs of the city force many people with comparatively respectable incomes to live in slum conditions. Secondly, Dharavi is unique among Mumbai slums in that it has its own major economic engine, a startling industrial feat, whereas other Mumbai slums are purely residential neighborhoods. Nevertheless, I was told (with figures to back it up) that despite Dharavi's uniqueness in these respects, we should not extrapolate that other Indian slums are necessarily the putrid hell-holes one might imagine them to be.

Oh, and yes, Dharavi is the slum where they filmed some scenes in Slumdog Millionaire (which I haven't seen). I was shown a giant pipe alongside which the protagonist apparently runs. I was also told that some infamous scene involving a toilet vat of some sort was actually constructed on a film set, and that the substance the boy jumps into was chocolate peanut-butter, "because no camera crew would film in shit."

Before going to the slum we stopped next to Mumbai's famous "dhobi ghat", a large grid of some 700 laundry-washing tanks where thousands of garments from across the city are still washed by the traditional method, namely dunking the item in water and then repeatedly bashing it against a rock. This is how I get most of my laundry done, and probably explains why I occasionally find a button missing. It was a little odd that we were not the only people there to watch a throng of dripping-wet men in sagging wifebeaters that revealed their glistening, ample chest hair in the act of vigorously whipping other people's clothes against cement walls. I would certainly not say it the scene had a particularly noble aesthetic, but everyone else seemed to be fascinated by the operation while I looked on with about as much wonder as you would if a tour guide took you to your local dry-cleaner's. Oh, how fascinating; just a moment please, I need to see if Habib here has got my slacks. I must say though that like everything about Mumbai it was an impressively large and artificial version of the commonplace.

And Mumbai is definitely large and artificial. We traveled northwards on the flyover avenues for over an hour before we got near the slum. Our guide then told us "Because Dharavi is shaped like a heart, and is located in the very center of the city, many people call it the Heart of Mumbai". I consulted a map. In the hour in which we had passed endless apartment towers and entire neighborhoods of creaking old mill-tenements, we had gone from the southern tip of the city to a point at the base of the peninsula, about a third of the way up the map, and this was the 'center' of the city. North of us lay hours more of the same. I'm telling you, even with half the city's people packed into slums and much of the rest in high-rises, a city of 16 million people is a very big place. And let's not even talk about the satellite cities and suburbs.

We arrived on one edge of the slum and saw a patch of swampy ground. "The area now the slum used to be land like this too, but by 1950's so much rubbish was there the ground was almost solid, so the poor people came, added more rubbish and some cement, and built the slum on top." The slum, quite literally, is built on trash.

Dahravi is built on trash in a figurative sense too, because trash is the fuel of the slum's startlingly efficient economy. I had heard about this, and imagined the situation to be much like that of a Costa Rican novel I once read, in which an entire community of dirt-poor people live off of a giant, festering pile of rubbish. This was quite different. The people of the slum (and slums in general, our guide claimed) had proven incredibly resourceful. At first we walked down a concrete-paved street that honestly looked no worse than an average side-street in Delhi, which is to say kind of gross, but hey. We were in the "industrial" part of Dahravi, but I saw no signs of factories. We then came across a long line of Tata trucks in the street, and workers were unloaded hundreds of sacks of plastic rubbish and carrying them off into alleys. This was the first glimpse we got of a recycling industry in Dahravi that apparently turns over $700,000,000 in profits a year. That's right. Seven hundred million dollars a year.

We followed into the alleys and soon the "factories" appeared everywhere. Everywhere we looked there were people hard at work in two- or three-story buildings in various specialized forms of rubbish recycling. We passed a number of factories that were occupied by men sitting in giant piles of plastic junk, sorting it by the quality and general type of plastic to be sent to other factories for further processing. I should add here that all these factories are locally-run ventures of the slum residents themselves, not some Dickensian enterprise with a fat cat from downtown stroking has jiggling belly as he laughs at how much money he can make by putting up his workshops in the slums. In the next street I saw a place where the floor was completely covered knee-high in empty computer cases being stripped of metal parts. Across the street, the plastic CD drive cases were being stacked up, and the screws were being carried off in canvas sacks on people's heads.

Around the corner, large steel grinding machines of the kind one sometimes finds at municipal garbage drop-offs were being cranked to crush the sorted plastic into itty little bits. We entered a doorway on this street and found a workshop where some ten people were engaged in making these machines. Tired of purchasing such equipment from the manufacturers, it seems residents of the slum had infiltrated the original factory for some time, become acquainted with the engineering, and returned home triumphant with a working knowledge of the assembly of such machines, which were now being produced for local use at a tidy profit. The guide saw me examining one of the other contraptions, a bulky lathe-like device being used to fashion parts. "They built these machines too" he said "some of the people here are now quite expert in metal engineering."

We crossed another street and climbed to the roof of a warehouse filled with plastic pellets, the little colored bits of plastic about half the size of a grain of rice that are the final product of Dahravi's recycling. From there the pellets are sent out by color-specific orders measuring in tonnes to giant moulding factories in the city. From the roof we beheld, as you may suspect, a memorable panorama. We could see the limits of the entire slum, and piled up in every alleyway and rooftop of the industrial area were meticulously categorized heaps of junk. Below us were hundreds of 20-gallon aluminum paint cans. On one nearby rooftop there was a ten-foot pile of yellow plastic buckets, and so on all around us, making the entire district appear buried in garbage. The most remarkable thing of it all, was that this slum was buried in garbage in such a way that it was a good thing.

Of course, when we're dealing with the processing of garbage not everything is good. We went through an alley to a building that was emitting rather foul-looking puffs of smoke. It was the paint-can factory. Here the paint cans were stripped of their labeling, beaten back into shape with hammers, and finally whatever paint residue remained inside was removed by burning. Those who worked in the factory essentially spent their every working day inhaling hot paint fumes. They tend to develop serious illnesses after not too long. Further on still we were in an aluminum smith's shop. Piles of aluminum garbage were being melted down in a roaring furnace. With beaming pride and great flair, one of the smiths whipped away a tarpaulin that covered a large cubic pile of something. Once the cover was removed we were stunned to behold a gleaming rack of aluminum ingots ready to be shipped to factories around India. A teenage boy waddled up with a sack between his legs and opened it to reveal rough lumps of pure silicon, which can be added to aluminum as per order to increase its strength. These people seem to have it all figured out.

And all of this, remember, just comes from trash picked up around the city and fed via a network of distribution points all leading towards the slum. It's not just Mumbai's trash, either. The slum has such reputation amongst Indian industry that rubbish is shipped there by truck even from other states, who in turn happen to receive phenomenal amounts of crap dumped from shipments carried across the waves from China and the United States. I may have seen some of your trash here in the slums of Mumbai, where trust me, they are making very good use of it.

You might be buying goods made from materials recycled or even manufactured here too. We passed on small, dark bakery in which the working boys were busy handling a 500-kilo mound of soft, sugary pastry dough. They were then fashioning it into "poof pastries" that are sold throughout India, and even in major supermarkets in the United Kingdom. Later in the afternoon, when we traversed the leather-tanning district, I was completely and utterly delighted to hear that the workshops in these alleys were turning the big, stinking piles of fresh animal hides into Dolce & Gabbana handbags. I don't mean fake Dolce & Gabbana handbags, I mean Dolce & Gabbana actually has contracts with these people. Forget giant sweatshops. Check you handbag labels. If it says "Made in India", maybe I could show you to a random hole in the wall in a Mumbai slum where a bunch of fuzzy goat skins with the meat rotting inside them are waiting to be made into next year's signature collection.

We toured the industrial area at length because this was regarded as the marvel of the slums, but we spent a lot of time in the residential areas too, and while they were not festering, shit-strewn camps with perpetually fly-covered babies crying in missionaries' laps for all eternity, one would certainly not refer to the area as having ideal living conditions. Having received some form of recognition from the government in a landmark 1995 Slum Law, they do receive full government services, though as our guide put it "some of the services can be poor." He said this while lifting a bundle of dangling electrical wires for us to pass under. "Careful. Sometimes there are small accidents." We walked then to a little cottage industry, as it were, of which he was immensely proud. We were within the confines of the Muslim part of the slum, which had been segregated along religious and ethnic lines since the 1993 Indian religious riots. In the workshop, carpenters were fashioning little ornamented niches out of various kinds of wood. "Birdhouses?" one of my fellow visitors asked. "No!" our guide replied exuberantly. "You see these Muslim people?" he asked while waving over a bunch of hunched, whittling carpenters in kufis, "They are making Hindu shrines!"

Continuing on through the residential part of the slum was quite an assault on the senses. It was unrelentingly dark and consisted entirely of alleyways. By 'alleyways' I don't mean just any alleys. What passes for a main street in here and may be lined with local grocery stores and tobacco shops, will be no more than two feet wide, and will certainly not go in a straight line. We winded through the blackness, our shoulders bumping into walls, our feet studiously avoiding the open sewer (my companions were clearly less accustomed to and more perturbed by this feat than your humble narrator), our heads ducking under swaying electrical lines, and generally making big clumsy fools out of ourselves every time we encountered somebody needing to pass in the opposite direction. And that was the main streets. We went off into the side streets, which at least had a covered gutter, because the gutter occupied the entire width of the alley. You could only pass through the street by leaning one shoulder forward, and coming across a stranger meant both of you pressing your bellies on the walls and shuffling your butts past each other. Along the way we peered into the open homes, which were well-built concrete structures looming above the narrow alleys high enough to make the whole area appear subterranean. Each dwelling was at best a ten-by-ten meter single-room apartment for the entire family (ten-by-ten feet was much more likely), for which they had to pay a considerable monthly rent often as much as one family member's entire salary. We were left to imagine what a "good" apartment in the city would cost, and were told that this is why not only the rural poor were forced to move into the slums, but also a large number of people with "respectable" jobs in shops, offices, and government agencies.

The smell of the slums, it must be said, is truly unique. In no other place will you find such a density and pungent diversity of foul odors, from carcasses to vats of dye, burning paint, refrigerators being drained of freon, scrap cotton smoldering atop clay ovens, the wet stench of lingering rubbish, giant baskets of broken plastic being melted, to the fiery aroma of strings of chillies being sliced open in a vegetable shop right next to your face.

My fellow visitors soon displayed a particular fascination with the issue of toilets. Through their dogged inquiries I learnt that there is a much-improved situation where one six-stall community toilet block now serves only 1500 people. My companions were predictably aghast. "Well Indian people usually can make themselves go only one time a day" explained the guide, "But yes, before work the morning queue can be rather long."

We then walked more and more, through the Maharashtran neighborhood, the Tamil neighborhood, and into the potter's district. I'll spare you the details; they were making pots. A young woman inside tried to entice us into buying some, and her English was quite good so I spoke to her and asked where she learned it so well. "At the community center," she responded "I am also trained in the use of some computer software." I just had to ask which ones. "I specialize in AutoCAD, but of course I also know..." Well, I'll be.

We learned a great deal about the health and education systems as well. In short, there are a great number of admirable and affordable private schools and clinics run by local businessmen and NGO's. The next generation, a rather squealy lot, is being taught in English rather than Marathi or Hindi, and fees are so nominal as to fade into insignificance. Government schools have a rather bad reputation, and government hospitals even worse. "Most of the 'doctors' at the government hospitals are medical students gaining experience..." Our guide went on "The full doctors usually have a private practice most days, so they just take the government's money and show up very late, if ever, to their duties at the hospitals...this is why the private clinics are better for almost every matter. This corruption is in so much of society."

Indeed, the corruption is everywhere. Indians are convinced they live in the world's most corrupt country, and you can't blame them. Police officials on 500-dollar monthly salaries live in beachfront mansions, and politicians bicker all day about meaningless trivia while they cover their real "employment" of peddling influence and lining their houses with crystal chandeliers. I just read that almost one third of the national parliament currently have criminal cases pending, including robbery, conspiracy, and murder. And that doesn't even begin to mention those who are just getting away with it completely, let alone local politicians. Maharashtra is an especially corrupt state due to the presence of the extravagant Mumbai mafia that controls the country's massive drug trade as well as other rackets, and have many top officials in their pockets. A month ago a number of top Mumbai cops were caught on video attending a mafia don's New Year's bash. Predictably they offered up pathetic excuses like "I will prove the man in the video is not me." Absurd, but what they really mean is "I may find a way out of this yet!" Nearly everyone agrees corruption is the ultimate source of the nation's woes, why it lags so far behind other countries like China with which it should compare, but nobody sees a way to change it. "To change something you must be in politics, and succeed in politics you must be corrupt. It is the only way."

Near the end of the tour we emerged finally into an open space, and into a rubbish dump, which appeared to serve also the purpose of a public park in these cramped quarters. Ahead were tall Soviet-style apartment buildings built only a few years ago by the government as a slum-relief scheme. Few people from the slums, who were entitled to the properties free of charge, reside in them though. It seems they much prefer to rent the apartments out (for a happy profit), and continue dwelling in the slum proper, where the women are especially fond of sitting around all day on their stoops and gossiping with their neighbors. Leaving their tight-knit community, even if it means a modest high-rise instead of a concrete box by the garbage dump, is not a price many are willing to pay. As a whole there is not much of a drive to "move out of slums"; they just want the slums to get a little better. As I looked around at the smiling, laughing faces and tried to decipher what I could of what was clearly jovial Marathi smack talk being yelled across the rubbishy plaza, I could understand just a little of the attachment the people felt to their homes. One of them started talking to our guide (who seemed to know just about everybody), then looked at me and made some remarks. "She is talking about you" my guide said. "I can see that" I replied, rather curious what this woman from the Mumbai slums had to say about me. "She says you look like Roger Federer."

And with that I left the slums. This fucking world.