In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room (4 page)

‘So how did you end up at the church? Is your family Christian?' I asked.

‘My family all converted. I did too. I was happy to.' He smiled his jolly smile. ‘I like Jesus. We took my wife to the church and the priests sat in a circle around her and prayed. She kept talking in Tamil, but after seven days, she stopped. She was healed.'

‘And what about the tuberculosis?' I asked.

‘For that, there was nothing we could do. Her lungs seemed entirely damaged. The medicines were not working. I sent her back to the village for a while with the children – I had to work but I thought she would be much more relaxed there, it is less stressful, you see.'

I nodded.

‘In the village she was taken to the temple. The
devi
is worshipped there, she was the goddess we prayed to before. In the temple, the villagers said prayers for her. Then the goddess spoke to one of the village women and she told us, “Your family has left your own gods, your own beliefs. Come back to the goddess and whatever is inside your wife will leave her.” Varsha stayed in the temple. There they prayed over her and one day, her hair suddenly became wild like the goddess's. They told me the goddess had entered her and when she went back to normal, after the prayers had finished, she was better. The tuberculosis had gone.'

As we arrived at the gates to Chota Sion, I found myself partly attempting to calculate the probability of recovery from an apparent advanced state of lung damage and partly getting used to the divine modus operandi that Dharavi's residents seemed perfectly at ease with.

By the time SNEHA opened its doors in 1999, its clientele had long since become inured to cases of extreme violence to which both they and the police routinely turned a blind eye. Back in her third-floor office, rain still battering the tarpaulins below, Nayreen recalled to me her frustration at two early cases concerning the murder of young women. The first victim was the fourth wife of a man who set her on fire because she had brought no dowry. The second case was very similar, but in neither were there any witnesses willing to give evidence. Nayreen had told me of the strength of the community in Dharavi's mini-India. The bond between neighbours that provided fraternal support, but which could also become a wall of silence in the face of trouble, would become one of the greatest allies and obstacles to SNEHA's work.

And then another murder was reported. ‘This time it was a twenty-one-year-old woman who had just got married. While she was walking home one day, two men followed her making lewd suggestions. When she ignored their catcalls, they said she had disrespected them. The next evening they and one of the men's wives came to her door and forced their way in, severely beat her, locked her in her house and then set it alight.'

As the recent reports of gang rape testify, violence against women in India remains a depressingly intractable problem today, not just in Dharavi but across socio-economic groups throughout the country. But for Nayreen, this historic burning drove home the fact that the circle of violence and mental illness among both women and men would require much more than counselling if it were ever to be broken. ‘The whole community saw what was happening, but no one intervened – and afterwards, no one would talk. We had no clue what we were going to do. There were several other NGOs that could have helped gather evidence, but none did.'

While the badly burned victim fought for her life in hospital, Nayreen continued to work with police and the public prosecutor, trying to to build a case against those responsible.

‘I was curious about why no one in such a tight-knit community was prepared to speak out about such a brutal and unprovoked murder of one of their own.' Nayreen ascribed it to a mixture of fear and the cultural acceptance, ingrained over centuries, that men had the right to assault women with impunity. Mothers often stay in abusive relationships only for the sake of their children, and sometimes blame them too: Nayreen has heard five-year-olds say that they feel it is their fault that their mothers suffer. The deep and lasting psychological damage of such cycles of violence is not difficult to imagine.

‘It's the whole family unit – that case made me understand that traditional psychotherapy would not be possible,' she went on. The ‘family unit' in Nayreen's terminology was far broader than immediate relations. It included those who held honorary titles of uncle or aunt (who could be anyone at all) and even close neighbours. All were invested in their community relationships, so any could be quite seriously affected. ‘Slums are strong communities. When I began offering counselling sessions, the whole family would come – mother, sisters, neighbours. It became community counselling.'

The girl who had been attacked died from her burns, but she first rallied sufficiently to give a statement identifying her killers, who were subsequently gaoled for fourteen years.

Because of her involvement, Nayreen had become a target. ‘One of the men swore that he would take revenge on me. I don't know what will happen. There are only a few years to go now until he's released. But he's had counselling in prison, he is not as violent as he was.'

Stoic as she is about the murderer's reformation, it would be a satisfying end to a sad, violent story if he were to emerge from his sentence a milder man. To change the trajectory of culturally accepted violence has always been the aim of Nayreen and her team. There are now ninety-two local women's groups with more than a thousand members, and counselling programmes at Chota Sion that both women and their husbands attend regularly.

In India today, the healthcare given to many women is ensnared in gender inequality. Under her perpetually whirring ceiling fan, Nayreen and her colleagues explained to me at length how differently men and women are treated when they become physically or mentally ill – barriers that can be erected both by the Indian healthcare system and by the people it is supposed to serve. Gauri, the coordinator for SNEHA's counselling centre, described to me how, in many Dharavi families, if a man is ill it's common practice to take him to hospital, while a woman in the same situation is just given a bottle of simple painkillers by her in-laws and stays at home. ‘And worse,' she told me, ‘depression – any kind of mental illness in women – is seen as grounds for divorce; a reason to abandon their wives with nothing, no support.'

‘There was one couple referred to me,' said Nayreen. ‘Both were HIV positive, but the husband blamed the wife, saying that she had given it to him. That wasn't true, it was quite the other way around. Anyway, as I told you, people in Dharavi will try everything, so the husband went to some untrained Ayurvedic doctor – at least the man claimed to be a doctor – who said he could cure the husband, but he was very expensive. Now the wife was pregnant with their second child at the time – their first child was also HIV positive – but when our doctors recommended a termination, the husband refused to give permission. The whole family was convinced it was her fault. They took away her first child and were treating him with whatever this self-proclaimed Ayurvedic doctor was charging them for. She was distraught. We intervened legally and the child was returned to her, but he did not survive. The husband also died. The good news is that she survived, and she has now remarried a man who is also HIV positive, so she has a family again. Her second child is free of HIV.'

‘The same thing happens if a woman is depressed,' Gauri explained. ‘Her in-laws will abandon her. If a doctor or counsellor diagnoses depression, the husband just says she's mad and leaves her. There was a depressed woman whose husband was schizophrenic and had erectile dysfunction and his family blamed it on her because they said she was mad. Her husband tried to use her illness as grounds for divorce.'

Fortunately, the Indian courts knew better. The judge told the woman's in-laws that they could not remove her from her home, that she was not ‘mad' if she could get better with treatment and ordered that she should receive appropriate care that would improve her condition.

‘The problem is,' Nayreen told me, ‘women need sleep when they are on medication, but they are not allowed to rest. They are still expected to wake up early to do the cooking, the chores, so the husbands and in-laws see this “laziness” as justification for assault. There is no respite.'

Inside the maze of lanes and alleyways that formed the capillaries of the slum, I met three women who had experienced abandonment and abuse first hand and who now work with SNEHA to intervene and support others in the same situation. Their homes and their places of work were deep in the warren of lanes, and so that I was able to get there – and out again – Nayreen's colleague Bhaskar offered to show me the way.

Ankle-deep in filthy water made worse by the rapidly accumulating rains, I followed Bhaskar off 60-Feet Road and into another world. Past sweetshops and one-room barber salons, small vegetable stalls and video stores that became pornography cinemas by night, we entered through a lane flanking one of Dharavi's waterways. Liberally strewn with all manner of rubbish, the canal also served as a sewer. The slum's infrastructure facilitated this – some of the settlement's communal toilet cubicles were designed to protrude over the water. There was only room here to walk in single file. Bhaskar spoke little and walked fast and I struggled to navigate the uneven, submerged paving slabs to catch up with him in my sodden shoes. A small boy walking behind me was becoming increasingly irritated at my slowing him down, so that from behind me I could hear an unrelenting Hindi narrative describing my incompetence as he made several failed attempts to overtake. Eventually, as we turned off the canal way into the rows of tiny, brightly painted brick houses, I saw his spindly legs speed off into the distance. My young daughter was with us and I saw her look of utter desperation as she gave up trying to keep our umbrella open – though by no means large, it was wider than the lane between the houses.

As we came to what seemed to be a dead end, Bhaskar gestured left, inviting us to see the toilets. Six cubicles were laid out in a square, three either side of a small passage. At the end was a large hole in the wall that served as a window. It overlooked a swamp, a reminder of what the entire area was before it became Dharavi. It was bleak and wild and, had it not been heaped with still higher piles of rubbish than I had seen in other parts of the slum, it might even have been beautiful. Bhaskar explained how plans were afoot to seal the hole in the wall. ‘These toilets are for women,' he explained. ‘Boys know that and come here. They jump through this hole, grab the girls and take them out there – sometimes with their consent, other times not. It makes it a dangerous place for the women in the community.' It was a horrible thought, to imagine a girl abducted, molested and then abandoned in that stinking, muddy marsh.

A few steps on we arrived at a pastel-pink building which was home to Chandravati, a pretty, chubby woman in her late thirties who served as one of SNEHA's
sanghinis
, or female community workers. As I took off my soaking shoes before entering, her husband went to stand outside the front door. When I stepped in, I realised why. Her house, like all the houses in Dharavi, was a windowless, waterless, bathroomless ten-foot-square box and within it lived her entire family. Three of her seven children were lying on the floor as Chandravati attempted – unsuccessfully – to rouse them from their siesta to get them back to school for the afternoon. The room looked as though its primary use was as a kitchen, with various pots lining the shelves of one wall. On the opposite wall was a television and a narrow
charpoy
where she and her husband slept, though it was hard to see how they could both occupy it at the same time. She offered us a seat on its mattress and snapped one of her daughters into action to run out and buy us biscuits and soda to snack on as we talked.

‘Don't the kids want to go to school?' I asked Chandravati, who was still cajoling the sleeping trio.

‘My son is not so keen but my daughters are,' she told me. ‘They like school … but they don't want to go out in the rain.'

I didn't blame them.

‘Ninety per cent of the kids here do go to school now,' Bhaskar explained. ‘It's improved a lot. But once they get married they stop. They still marry young here, boys and girls. The boys work, the girls will be housewives.'

Just then, another of Chandravati's daughters, much too small for her seventeen years, appeared at the front door with a friend. She was dressed in a new ornate sari and jewellery. Her mother explained that she had recently been married, but that her new home was a long way away, albeit in a nicer neighbourhood. Now, there were only eight people in that beautifully kept little pink box. Though that must have offered some small relief, and Chandravati seemed very matter-of-fact about it, I thought the girl looked a little too young to have already left home and, despite her pride at having a daughter who had clearly married well, I could see her mother missed her. Still, at least she was away from the immediate danger of the toilets next door.

The danger posed by those toilets was what originally motivated Chandravati to volunteer with SNEHA. That and the reluctance of the municipal corporation to clean blocked drains, the problem of drug addiction among young men and the general harassment of women and girls in the community. She began intervening directly in cases of violence that the community reported or when she saw any girl being harassed by ‘goons'. She and three other local women joined forces and became the Dharavi's ‘vigilance inspectors'. Once, for example, when they heard that a boy had dragged a girl into the creek from the toilet and molested her, her team staked out the toilet until he eventually reappeared, whereupon they detained him and handed him over to the police. They also made sure that the police patrolled in the area regularly. What she and her colleagues had managed to achieve in an often lawless and dangerous place through sheer determination was impressive. But Chandravati was clear about what she still wanted to see happen in Dharavi. ‘My dream,' she said, ‘is to help empower women and girls to be courageous and live better lives. I want them to stop crying when they face violence and instead ask for help and support at the right time to free themselves from the situation.'