Surprising Discoveries in the Slums of Mumbai

It often seems that there are two Indias. One is on the streets, right up front - the beggars, the pavement dwellers, the street children who pick through the litter for recyclables when they should be laughing on a playground. It’s noisy, in your face, assaulting you. The other India is cocooned behind all this, tucked away from it; a land of quiet, air conditioning, service and amenities. Mostly, the two Indias exist separately from each other, as if each half is unaware of the other side’s existence. In the middle of Mumbai sits a place called Dharavi, widely known as the largest slum in Asia. The land on which Dharavi sits was once swamp, later filled in to become a sort of human dumping ground for the poor of nearby Mumbai. Today luxury high-rise buildings look down over its teeming 550 acres. Here, it is estimated that close to a million people live. A local tour operator named Deepa shows visitors the “real” parts of the city, donating about a third of her profits to organizations that provide education for children living in slum communities. Yet Dharavi is not a slum in the way I had imagined – not a ghetto. It looks and feels much more like a village one would find anywhere else. Uniformed schoolchildren walk along the road holding hands or swinging backpacks. Industry and entrepreneurship abound; very few people are idle. Entire cottage industries thrive here, and all around me is the buzz of things happening. We come out into an open space and watch women making papadam, a thin crispy bread with bits of pepper in it. Squatting along the ground with their toddlers hopping around them, they roll balls of meal out on little ceramic plates with thin rolling pins. Then the tortilla-like rounds are placed on wicker baskets turned upside down to crisp in the sun. A few blocks away clay pots are being made, a woman mixing the clay for her husband as he sits at the potter’s wheel, skillfully and intently forming the perfect urn. Kilns line the middle of the alley, their smoke permeating the air and creating a stifling heat in the already 95-degree day. We pass an elderly, stooped woman who is laboriously carrying a load of the pots on her head to a vehicle to be transported for sale. To me, this place dispels the myth that poverty is due to laziness, that the poor somehow deserve their lot in life because they are lazy or stupid or otherwise lacking in some important character trait that the successful possess. Dharavi is a resounding rebuttal to that belief. I have rarely seen people work so hard in all my life; between work and taking care of a home and children, I’m certain that most people here toil from far before dawn until night. The residents here seem to have no privacy, no moments of solitude or sanctuary. Leisure time is a luxury, the province of the well-to-do, and just one more indicator of the abyss of difference between the haves and the have-nots of this world. Deepa understands well the two bewilderingly different Indias. But she offers up a third Mumbai: that of the hard-working poor. “This is the Mumbai of the aspiring migrant, with his fierce drive for survival, for self-improvement,” she says. “The Mumbai of poor yet strong women, running entire households on the strength of their income from making papads. Dharavi is one place where this third Mumbai is visible. They have hope for the future, you see? This is the Mumbai of dreams.”

Shelley S. ( Seattle , Washington , United States )