Authors: Suketu Mehta
After a while the boys got up to leave, but not before warning me, “Write correct things.” One of them laughed, without humor. “If you don’t write anything it’ll be okay too.”
After the boys left, the atmosphere lightened precipitously. The
women apologized for the boys. “They are angry,” one of the women said. “That’s why I didn’t want to bring them.”
Another woman told me how much this time with me was costing her. “I am sitting here but my heart is at home. Will I get water? Will I have to wait two hours?” To get water in the slum, the women have to line up and take numbers. Each person, in groups of thirty, gets two buckets for the household’s needs. Your religion determines how often you will bathe, where you will shit. “In the Hindu areas each lane has a tap, here each eight or ten lanes has one. Over there, there are toilets everywhere. In our area the toilets have been stopped for one year.”
Much of the slum is a garbage dump. The sewers, which are open, run right between the houses, and children play and occasionally fall into them. They are full of a blue-black iridescent sludge. When the government sweepers come to clean the drains, they scoop it out and leave piles of it outside the latrines. I couldn’t use the public toilets. I tried, once. There were two rows of toilets. Each one of them had masses of shit, overflowing out of the toilets and spread liberally all around the cubicle. For the next few hours that image and that stench stayed with me, when I ate, when I drank. It’s not merely an esthetic discomfort; typhoid runs rampant through the slum and spreads through oral—fecal contact. Pools of stagnant water, which are everywhere, breed malaria. Many children also have jaundice. Animal carcasses are spread out on the counters of the butcher shops, sprinkled with flies like a moving spice. The whole slum is pervaded by a stench that I stopped noticing after a while.
They complained that neither their municipal corporator, a Muslim woman, nor their state legislator, a Shiv Sena man, listened to them. So Arifa Khan, along with a group of eight other women, started a group in the Jogeshwari slums. Rahe-haq—The Right Path—is an organization of around fifteen women, most but not all of them Muslim. They started with nine members in 1988 in response to the toilet problem. There are two million people without access to latrines in Bombay. You can see them every morning along the train tracks, trudging with a tumbler of water, looking for a vacant place to squat. It is a terrible thing, a degrading thing, for a woman to be forced to look every morning for a little privacy to go to the toilet or to clean herself while she’s menstruating. No city this rich should make its women suffer this way. The women of this slum were luckier. They had toilets built by the municipality, but they were full, and the
municipality wasn’t doing anything about unblocking them. Every election, various leaders would come around to the slum and promise to do something about the toilets. The group of women got together and went to the municipal office. “We did bhagdaud,” explained the women. This term, familiar to anybody dealing with Indian bureaucracy, means to run around, to go from one office to the next with your petition till you get what you’re looking for. The women did bhagdaud, and finally some of the toilets were cleaned.
Energized by the success of their toilet struggle, the women went on to water. Water comes here for a couple of hours a day, and there is a long line of women with buckets at the municipal tap. At the time, the municipal water connections were cut back. This was done at the behest of local plumbers. They stood to make money if the municipality cut its connections, so they bribed the officials involved to do so. The plumbers charged 16,000 rupees for a half-inch pipe of water; four households might get together and pay 4,000 rupees each to buy one such connection. Tangles of pipes snake along the alleys in the slum. The women of Rahe-haq made a pani morcha, a water protest march, to the municipal office. The municipality was forced to increase the supply.
People in the slum started approaching the Committee, as the women call themselves, for other kinds of problems related to the riots. A widow who had gone mad after seeing the burnt corpse of her husband hanging from a tree was having problems getting compensation money that the government was giving to riot victims; the Committee interceded. The scope of their work became larger. Women who had been divorced by their husbands came to them; under Muslim law, a husband can part with his wife essentially by saying “I divorce you” three times. The Committee got a lawyer to provide these women with legal advice. A group of five women was set up to counsel couples between whom some shadow had entered. “We listen to both sides; we talk to orthodox people using religious arguments, then we get people back together. If the men are criminals we take them to court.” The women went on to sort out problems with ration cards, and in the last local elections they supported a woman from the slum under the Janata Dal banner.
I asked the women if their husbands supported the Committee. There was a gale of laughter. “We have to hear their curses.” The local branch of the Muslim League party started spreading rumors about them: They were
not modest; they were dealing with men every day in their work. They accused them of being un-Islamic and finally destroyed their office.
The women set up a day-care center and ran it themselves, until the boys who had recently been sitting in the room took the center from them at knifepoint. They wanted the room to smoke charas—hashish—and ganja; after the riots, the hotheads were newly emboldened in the community. Now the women had to do with this much smaller room, this charnel house of 1993, as their day-care center. They would soon be going again to the Municipal Corporation, to press for a bigger room, with a lock. If there is hope for Bombay, it is in this group of slum women, all illiterate, and others like them. Issues of infrastructure are not abstract problems for them. Much more than the men, the women have to deal with such issues firsthand. If you want to make sure that the money you send to a poor place will be spent properly, give it to the women who live there.
I asked one of the Jogeshwari women if she wouldn’t rather live in a decent apartment than the slum she lived in now, with the open gutter outside and the absence of indoor plumbing. Yes, there was a building planned nearby to resettle the slum dwellers. But people from her neighborhood wouldn’t move there. “There’s too much aloneness. A person can die behind the closed doors of a flat and no one will know. Here,” she observed with satisfaction, “there are a lot of people.”
Be it ever so humble. . . . We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery. What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, the people have formed a community, and they are as attached to its spatial geography, the social networks they have built for themselves, the village they have re-created in the midst of the city, as a Parisian might be to his quartier or as I was to Nepean Sea Road. “I like this place,” said Arifa Khan of her home and her basti, her neighborhood. “This is mine. I know the people here and I like the facilities here.” Any urban redevelopment plan has to take into account the curious desire of slum dwellers to live closely together. A greater horror than open gutters and filthy toilets, to the people of Jogeshwari, is the empty room in the big city.
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mostly of Maharashtrian Hindus, who call themselves “sons of the soil.” The Maharashtrians were people who
had been born here and were not consumed by immigrant striving: a race of clerks. Their ambitions were modest, practical: a not-too-long workday; a good lunch from the tiffin sent from home at midday; one or two trips to the cinema a week; and, for their children, a secure government job and a good marriage. They did not crave designer clothes. They did not want to eat expensive foreign food at the Taj.
I did not know many Maharashtrians when I was growing up. There was the world I lived in on Nepean Sea Road, and there was another world whose people came to wash our clothes, look at our electric meters, drive our cars, inhabit our nightmares. We lived in Bombay and never had much to do with Mumbai. Maharashtra to us was our servants, the banana lady downstairs, the textbooks we were force-fed in school. We had a term for them: ghatis—literally, the people from the ghats, or hills. It was also the word we used, generically, for “servant.” I was in the fourth standard when Marathi became compulsory. How we groaned! It was a servants’ language, we said. We told each other a story about its genesis. All the peoples of India had their languages, except the Maharashtrians. They went to Shiva and asked to be given a language. The god looked around, saw some pebbles, threw them in his brass pot, and shook it around. “Here’s your language,” he said. What did we know of the language that contains the poetry of Namdeo, Tukaram, Dilip Chitre, Namdeo Dhasal?
But all the time there was a Maharashtrian underclass, emerging, building itself. And now it had gained political power, strength, and a desperate confidence. It was advancing closer and closer to the world I grew up in, the world of the rich and the named. Many of the people on Nepean Sea Road were aghast not so much that the mobs were hunting out Muslims from the tall buildings but that they had dared to come to Nepean Sea Road at all. The arrogance of ghatis demanding to see the building directories! The other Bombay now sneaks in through our streets, lives among us, doesn’t like us being rude to it, occasionally beats us up. The riots of 1992 and 1993 were a milestone in the psychic life of the city, because its different worlds came together with an explosion. The monster came out of the slums.
B
OTH MY GRANDFATHER
in Calcutta and my uncle in Bombay sheltered Muslims in their homes during periods of rioting and saved their
lives. During the riots, my uncle also personally cooked food in a Jain temple and went, at great personal risk, to the Muslim areas to distribute it to people trapped by the curfew—five thousand packets of rice and bread and potatoes a day.
The riots taught the Muslims a lesson, said my uncle. “Even educated people like me think that with such wild people we need the Shiv Sena to battle them. The Shiv Sena are also fanatics, but we need fanatics to fight fanatics.”
I had heard another version of the same theory—that the warrior Maharashtrians protected the effete business communities—from one of Sunil’s friends, the municipal employee. “If we Shiv Sena people had not been here, all the Gujaratis and Marwaris in the white businesses would have been beaten, killed by the Muslims. They are not fighters,” he said, with an edge of scorn. “They are after money.”
My uncle looked past me, out the window at the darkening sky. He had a good Muslim friend in Calcutta, he told me, a friend who was in school with him in the tenth standard; they would then have been about fifteen. He went with this friend to see a movie, and before the main show, a newsreel came on. There was a scene with many Muslims bowing in prayer, doing their namaaz. Without thinking, my uncle said out aloud in the darkened theater, perhaps to his friend, perhaps to himself, “One bomb would take care of them.”
Then my uncle realized what he had just said and remembered that the friend who was sitting next to him was also Muslim. But the friend said nothing, pretending he had not heard. “But I know he did,” said my uncle, the pain evident on his face, sitting in this flat in Bombay thirty-five years later. “I was so ashamed. I have been ashamed of that all my life. Then I began to think, How did I have this hatred in me? And I realized I had been taught it since childhood. Maybe it was Partition, maybe it was their food habits—Muslims kill animals—but our parents taught us we couldn’t trust them. Even my son. I tell him, ‘After you’re married you won’t be so close to your Muslim best friend.’ The events of Partition washed away the teachings of Gandhiji. Dadaji—my grandfather—and Bapuji—his brother—were staunch Gandhians except when it came to Muslims. I could never bring a Muslim friend to my home and I couldn’t go to theirs.”
The next day, my uncle was sitting in the room with the little shrine,
doing his morning puja, as I sat with my laptop. “Don’t write what I told you,” he said, as I was writing it.
I asked him why.
“I’ve never told anyone that before.”
In the act of telling, my uncle was beginning to understand for himself the origins of hate.
In the Bombay I grew up in, being Muslim or Hindu or Catholic was merely a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. We had a boy in our class who I realize now from his name, Arif, must have been Muslim. I remember that he was an expert in doggerel and instructed us in an obscene version of a patriotic song, “Come, children, let me teach you the story of Hindustan,” in which the nationalistic exploits of the country’s leaders were replaced by the sexual escapades of Bombay’s movie stars. He didn’t do this because he was Muslim and hence unpatriotic. He did this because he was a twelve-year-old boy.
Now it mattered. Because it mattered to Bal Thackeray.
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in Jogeshwari was a long hall filled with pictures of Bal Thackeray and his late wife, a bust of Shivaji, and pictures of a muscle-building competition. Every evening, Bhikhu Kamath, the shakha pramukh, sat behind a table and listened to a line of supplicants, holding a sort of durbar. There was a handicapped man come to look for work as a typist. Another man wanted an electric connection to his slum. Husbands and wives who were quarreling came to him for mediation. An ambulance was parked outside, part of a network of several hundred Sena ambulances ready to transport people from the slums to hospitals at all hours, at nominal charges.
In a city where municipal services are in a state of crisis, going through the Sena ensures access to such services. The Sena shakhas also act as a parallel government, like the party machines in American cities that helped immigrants get jobs and fixed streetlights. But the Sena likes to think of itself not so much as a political party but as a social service organization. It functions as an umbrella for a wide variety of organizations: a trade union with over 800,000 members, a students’ movement, a women’s wing, an employment network, a home for senior citizens, a cooperative bank, a newspaper.