Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Open drains crossed the ground in some parts, but they ran with water, often soapy water, and when she released her nostrils, they didn’t smell putrid although she never risked it for long.

  It was impossible to keep from looking in the open doorways as they passed because they were sometimes less than a step or two away. Whole families sat on the floor of spaces exactly the size of the bathroom at the Taj.

  Some rooms had a bench that ran down the length of one wall where a body or two or even three might be slumbering. At the back, single gas-burners on narrow counters made up the entire kitchen, with pots hanging from the ceiling. Between the doorways, rickety bamboo ladders led to the top floors, where similar-sized rooms she guessed housed similar numbers.

  Children ran up and down the ladders like monkeys, or sat in doorways while their mothers, crouched, swept their tiny floors with brush brooms.

  Their spaces were minuscule, but Heavenly was right, these women were proud of where they lived. As proud if not more so than many of the women Annie could think of who lived in giant McMansions at home and still moaned about cupboard space.

  To think she had been investigating a new island bench for her own kitchen! The kitchen she barely used now the children and her mother were gone and she didn’t even need to make up Bertie’s special rice dinner or bother with the occasional chicken stew.

  She couldn’t believe it had been more than a day since she had thought of her poor dog, but before her eyes could well with tears, a baby goat about Bertie’s size ran on wobbly legs right in front of her across the alley. A chicken popped out of a doorway in front of it and gave it such a fright that all four of its little hoofs left the ground. It then skittered and galloped back between her legs and into another doorway, where it squeezed under a wooden stool and poked its head out to look up at her.

  For a mad second Annie actually thought it could have been Bertie.

  Something about the eyes, the comedy scamper, the checking to see if she was pleased or not.

  ‘Do animals get reincarnated?’ she asked Heavenly, who had stopped to talk to a young woman in the house next door to the chicken.

  Heavenly was unfazed. ‘You think you know this one?’

  ‘I’m sure it must sound silly but my dog, Bertie, he’s been missing for a while and Mr Hugh Jordan thinks he is gone, so I was thinking that maybe …’ Now she said it out loud it definitely did seem silly. And besides, what help would it be to her to know that Bertie was now a baby goat in a Mumbai slum? He’d only end up in a korma.

  ‘The animals here lead a good life,’ Heavenly said, as though reading her thoughts. ‘And when they finish it, they lead another one.’

  So a korma would not be the end of it. Annie wasn’t sure how comforting that was.

  ‘But anyway, in India, you do not need to die to be reincarnated,’ Heavenly continued brightly. ‘Some prefer to do it while they are still right here on this great good earth.’

  Bertie would probably have preferred to be a live preppy Ivy League type with a trust fund, Annie thought. So if he was no more, as Hugh suspected, and if he had a choice, she hoped that’s the one he’d made. Although now the baby goat was playing with a potato, rolling it across the floor with its nose, and she had to admit the little dear looked pretty darn happy exactly where it was.

  Shruti bustled up behind them, carrying a plastic bag full of onions she’d bought along the way. Pooja and Suraj were slowing her down, she said, because they had bumped into an old friend and were arguing about where they were when they’d last met him.

  She would wait for them, she said, they wanted to go to the hospital anyway, in case they saw anyone they knew there.

  ‘You OK, Mrs Hugh?’ she asked.

  ‘She is fine,’ answered Heavenly. ‘Come on, now I show you our industry area.’

  They waved goodbye to Shruti and crossed another lane, wider than those in the residential maze, but still impossibly thick with cows, bicycles, motorbikes, cars, trucks, rickshaws, taxis and the constant pumping wave of pedestrians that made Mumbai seem alive, like a heart, the people passing through it this way and that in fat ribbons like blood through veins.

  On the other side of this lane, the open doorways led into far less domestic views — the first one was full of rubbish piled right up to the ceiling and had three people sitting on their haunches sifting through it. So did the next one, and the next one, and the next.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘You will see,’ said Heavenly. ‘Out on the streets there are people collecting the garbage. You have seen these people? Maybe with big bags full of garbage? They bring it to Dharavi to sell it to one of these families. Then the families sort the plastics into different colours, then the different colours will be taken to different machines and will be melted down to little pellets, then the little pellets will be sent all around India and the world to factories where they will be made into other things of that same colour.’

  ‘So this pile of pink could end up being a Barbie doll?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Heavenly, smiling. ‘In India, your trash is our treasure, but it might also one day be once more your treasure.’

  ‘So even plastic is being reincarnated.’

  ‘While it is still with us here on this great good earth, yes,’ said Heavenly. ‘This is a perfect example of what I am telling you.’

  They turned left down an even grimier alley, this one thick with grey dust and hotter than the ones through which they had already passed. At the first doorway, Heavenly leaned in to address a small man poking at the embers of a smouldering fire. Everything including him was the same shade of ash.

  ‘Behind you, look.’ Heavenly pointed to a stack of shiny silver bars, like gold ingots but bigger, that were stacked against the wall. ‘Each one is fourteen kilograms of melted aluminium cans!’

  ‘But surely it’s too hot for him to work in here,’ Annie said, smiling at the man, who smiled back, revealing a mouth entirely free of teeth.

  Heavenly shook her head. ‘He makes good money,’ she said. ‘So for him is good temperature.’ She said something to the man that made him laugh. ‘I tell him he will be retiring to Kerala before we know it.’

  Beyond every doorway in the next alley sat rows of men working on old Singer sewing machines, the sort that Eleanor had used when Annie was a child, with a foot treadle operating the needle.

  In the last doorway, the whole room seemed to be taken up with bright-green leafy cotton fabric that covered the floor and billowed between the machinists.

  ‘Dresses for Africa,’ said Heavenly after a quick chat with the closest machinist. ‘Made right here in Dharavi.’

  There were fifteen thousand one-room factories in the slum, Heavenly told her. It was the best place in the world to buy suitcases. Or Levi’s. Or leather jackets.

  ‘But isn’t it slave labour?’

  The men bent over their sewing machines making the African caftans looked fresh from the sort of scenes that flashed up in TV news stories about sweatshops.

  Heavenly shook her head. ‘Do you know, there is almost no unemployment in Dharavi. These people who live here come from out of Mumbai where there are no jobs at all and they work hard. It may not seem much money to you, or me even, but it is enough for them to save and go back to their villages one day and get on with their lives.’

  ‘So no one lives here all the time?’

  ‘Oh yes, doctors and lawyers and air hostesses live here all the time. But these people making the dresses and the leather bags, they come and go.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next alley they passed through led into an airy square. Every doorway that opened onto it was painted a different colour, and in one corner there was a raised pergola featuring a Hindu shrine wreathed in flowers and crawling with ginger kittens.

  Dotted around the square were large inverted wicker domes on which poppadoms were drying in the sun.

  ‘You probably eat these in your hotel,�
�� Heavenly said. ‘Best poppadom in India come from Dharavi.’

  Annie tried to look enthusiastic yet could not help but feel concern over the proximity of the kittens to the uncovered poppadoms.

  Heavenly didn’t miss this. ‘Maybe they are royal princes in a past life, eh?’

  The two women perched on the edge of the pergola in the shade, watching as a middle-aged man stepped out of his doorway wrapped in nothing but a towel, brushing his teeth.

  ‘Do the houses have bathrooms?’ Annie asked.

  ‘There is running water, not all day, but in most houses,’ Heavenly said. ‘But the toilets are shared.’

  ‘By how many?’

  ‘Oh, about a thousand,’ Heavenly said. ‘Tourist ladies love that.’

  Two neighbours were sitting on their doorstep to Annie’s left, chatting. One was peeling garlic, and the other chopping potatoes on a board on the ground.

  The man cleaning his teeth had wandered over to them and was spitting out his toothpaste next to the potatoes.

  An older woman emerged from the room behind the garlic peeler; a teenage boy slipped out after her and disappeared down the alley.

  ‘How many people live in these little places?’ Annie asked.

  ‘We like to keep the family together,’ Heavenly said. ‘So maybe there is a mum and a dad, and their mums and dads, and some children.’

  ‘Six adults? And then the kids?’

  ‘Yes, and we sleep side by side like sardines in a tin,’ said Heavenly. ‘You have children?’

  ‘Yes, two, but they don’t live with me anymore. They’re away at university.’

  ‘And your mum and dad?’

  ‘My father died years ago, and my mother, just a few months ago. We didn’t sleep like sardines but she did live with us, in our house.’

  ‘Your house is big, yes? She had her own room, your mum?’

  ‘Yes, she had her own room, my mum.’

  Annie had not changed a thing in it. She still slipped in there some days and lay on the bed, pressing her face into her mother’s pillow, closing her eyes and sinking into the faint cloud of White Linen she had convinced herself was still there.

  ‘Come on,’ Heavenly Hirani said, jumping to her sandalled feet. ‘The pottery district is next — it is my favourite.’

  They entered the darkest part of the maze yet, slithering between buildings, Heavenly greeting every second occupant as she negotiated their way, warning Annie when to duck her head, when to make way for another small animal, when to peek inside a doorway at a particularly tidy or interesting home.

  There were no maps of Dharavi, she said, no street names, no method to its madness.

  At one stage they emerged into a large open area which to Annie’s horror was piled with garbage almost as high as the two-storey slum buildings beside it. Children ran up and down the rubbish hills, chasing and playing, dogs barking, chickens squawking.

  ‘But, Heavenly, this cannot be safe,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Heavenly agreed, merely raising an eyebrow. ‘The charities people did clean it up once or twice, but the people here filled it in again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if it is cleaned up someone will build more houses on it and then there is nowhere for the children to run and sometimes we like to see the sky.’

  Annie looked up at the hazy blue above them as a train rattled past behind the rubbish hills.

  Heavenly Hirani turned down another alley, this one so narrow that she felt her shoulders could almost touch either side; it was barely a person wide.

  In through one doorway, she saw a family of sardines, flat out on the floor, all lying on their sides, just as Heavenly had described. There were four adults and three children in descending size, each with an arm slung over the one in front, the smallest clutching a towel.

  It grabbed at her heart, that sight, and squeezed. She fought the urge to stay and just watch them sleeping, but Heavenly was moving quickly up ahead, and Annie knew that if she was left behind she would never find her way out again.

  The narrow alley spat them out into another square, but nearly every inch of this one was covered in teetering stacks of terracotta pots of every shape and size, from something Annie might put her earrings in to something she might plant a tree in.

  The doorways here opened into rooms full of loose clay, some of it in various stages of being made into something else, some of it just piled, wet, in a corner. As they walked away from the square, more pots lined the sides of the alleys, which were interrupted every now and then by a smoking pit. Annie assumed they were where the clay was baked.

  Wherever she looked — in doorways, down halls, in crowded rooms, on stoops — clutches of people were gathered, chatting, combing each other’s hair, passing fruit or children around, or newspapers, ribbons, glasses.

  The generations were all here together, mixed up in this part of the slum with the terracotta pots and clay, everyone all in together, talking, laughing, sharing.

  You would not lie on your deathbed in Dharavi without anybody noticing, thought Annie. You would not be a sad story in a newspaper: a lonely corpse sniffed out by hungry dogs weeks after your death.

  This was what families were supposed to be like.

  ‘What about your family, Heavenly?’ she asked the little woman.

  ‘Oh, they are everywhere,’ she said. ‘Always. Here and there.’

  They passed a tannery, a chai tea stall, a samosa stand; and just as they threaded their way back closer to the railway lines Heavenly pointed out a movie cinema held together with nothing more than some old rope, a few sheets of corrugated iron and a peeling collection of ancient Bollywood posters.

  ‘You see, we have everything here,’ Heavenly said. ‘We are very busy.’

  ‘It’s kind of amazing,’ Annie said.

  ‘An eye-opener would you say?’

  ‘I don’t think I would have believed it without seeing it.’

  ‘This is what the people tell us,’ Heavenly said. ‘There is not a lot of personal space in Dharavi, but there are a lot of other things.’

  ‘At the very least it’s a lesson in getting along,’ Annie agreed. ‘But the people who live here — if they haven’t got villages to go back to — they’re happy staying here? They don’t want to move anywhere else in Mumbai?’

  ‘There is nowhere else in Mumbai. And Dharavi is in the middle of three big railway lines, only twenty-five minutes from an international airport, and provides the city with so much that if everybody here stopped doing what they are doing for even one day the whole city would collapse. There are three hundred bakeries here in this slum. Three hundred! And you know how we like our breads. Besides, what would all those ladies in Africa do for dresses, hmm? Strut around with nothing on?’

  ‘I just assumed that it would be a place people were desperate to escape from.’

  ‘Mrs Hugh Jordan, people are breaking their necks to get into Dharavi. It is a government-designated five-star slum,’ said Heavenly. ‘That is right, government-designated! It might look ramshackle to you, but it is location, location, location. You have that where you come from?’

  ‘But surely not all slums are like this?’

  ‘Of course not. Mumbai is a rich city compared to most and there are a lot of very poor people in India — you know this already — but there are a lot of very poor people in other countries, too. I think what Dharavi shows is that to be poor is not the worst thing. It is not the best — but it is not the worst.’

  ‘We don’t have anything like this where I come from,’ Annie said.

  ‘Then you are very lucky,’ Heavenly replied.

  At this they emerged back onto the same stretch of Indian high street where they’d left Pinto, and on hearing a cackle Annie turned to find Shruti standing behind her, proudly sporting a pair of bright-blue spectacles.

  ‘So, what do you think? They will do me till I can get a pair of Dolce and Gabbanas, eh?’

  Pooja and S
uraj were staying, she reported, to go to a movie. She would have gone to it herself, she said, but the glasses were too strong and made her feel queasy.

  ‘Your niece couldn’t find you a different pair?’

  ‘She is a doctor, not a miracle worker,’ Shruti said. ‘And the ones that were better to see through did not go with my sari.’

  A loud honk rose out of the sea of other loud honks as Pinto’s taxi pulled up and the three of them climbed into it.

  Pinto looked rested and relieved to have found her, agreeing to drop Heavenly and Shruti back to Chowpatty Beach.

  ‘You like this slum?’ he asked her, as they headed back to Lands End.

  ‘I don’t know if “like” is the right word, but I was amazed by it.’

  ‘Amaze good or amaze bad?’

  ‘Amaze good! I thought it would be sad, but it wasn’t.’

  ‘No one in the slums has time for sad, ma’am.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And the tourist madams like that it is not so disgusting as they think.’

  He was right about that. She’d been scared of what she might see at Dharavi and, because of that, what she had seen had an extra rose-tinted glow to it.

  ‘But now I show you something different.’ They were near Jaslok Hospital, in the middle of four lanes of traffic, but Pinto started to slow the car down.

  ‘Look up there to your right, ma’am,’ he said. ‘See this big building that rises in the sky much higher than all the other buildings around it?’

  Annie looked, but the traffic hurtling around them made it hard to concentrate.

  ‘Pinto, should we be holding up all these cars?’

  ‘Yes, is fine. But do you see this building, ma’am?’

  She looked again. ‘Yes, I see it. I couldn’t miss it.’

  ‘Ma’am, before at Dharavi you have seen one square mile with one million peoples living on it, yes?’

  ‘Yes, Pinto, but please, speed up.’

  ‘Look out the back window at this building while I speed up, ma’am. OK? Now you are seeing one twenty-seven-storey building that has just five peoples living in it.’