by Suketu Mehta
Municipal drinking water comes only once a week, in tanker trucks, and only if the drivers are bribed 100 rupees per tanker. But it’s still not enough, so the housing society pays for three tankers of water every day from private suppliers, at 325 rupees a tanker. The tanker operators are the most powerful political lobby in Mira Road. They have divided up the tanker routes among themselves and prevent the municipality from laying new pipes, which would eliminate their business. Getting rid of water is as much of a problem as getting it in. Since the drainage systems are badly built, the society has to pay another 400 rupees a month to drain the ground of water. Periodically, when the water supply fails altogether, housewives and accountants emerge from their buildings and riot, sitting down on the train tracks to force the rest of the city to pay attention.
The residents also have to pay for a private sweeper to collect the garbage and take it away to God knows where. If they use the municipal bin, it gets picked up once a fortnight. There are no public bus routes in the suburb. At one point, the Thakkars’ housing society had started a service, paying a man with an eight-seater minicab to ferry the people of the complex back and forth to the station for 2 rupees each. The Mira Road rickshaw wallahs, who charge 20 rupees for the same service, surrounded the minicab and prevented him from operating. The police and the local assemblyman were called in; both took the side of the rickshaw wallahs. So the residents of Mira Road spend a major portion of their income paying for the most basic of municipal services: water, sewage, and transportation. Mira Road is just outside the limits of the Bombay Municipal Corporation. That explains its attraction and its deficiencies: It is a border township. But on the whole, the Thakkars are happier here. In Jogeshwari, better-off relatives would visit, look around, and ask them why they didn’t move. “It got irritating,” says Dharmendra. “Who doesn’t want to shift? But Father had done some wrong investment. Money was blocked.” In Jogeshwari, “I never used to give my address or anything to friends. I could not call my office colleagues. I would not go to their place. Now we are free to invite them. Relatives can stay overnight. Anybody can come anytime.”
Girish’s father spends his days finding out where the shops are, where the freshest vegetables can be bought. Girish says of his father, “He might never have thought that he would be in such a place in his life. Today we have a mixer, washing machine, TV. What don’t we have? A car. We don’t need it. Maybe we might have it after a couple of years.” The building abuts the train tracks; the suburban locals go by in a cacophony of diesel horns and the clackity-clack of wheels against the steel tracks. It takes two hours for Dharmendra to reach his workplace. “But we are in sales, so we can make up,” he explains, with a twinkle in his eye. Hours can be fudged.
The father compares Mira Road favorably to the slum he has just left. “There is silence now. In Jogeshwari there would be a fight somewhere, some noise.” (In Jogeshwari, I think, Sunil and Amol would burn down the municipal office to focus their attention on the water problem.) As people leave, the family shuts the door behind them. I have never seen the door in Jogeshwari shut during waking hours, and I ask about this. “It’s the system here,” explains Dharmendra. “It’s the flat system.” You are supposed to maintain your privacy when you move up to the middle class, into a flat. In the slum there is no such delusion.
Raju is twenty-five and unmarried, almost a spinster by the standards of their community. The Thakkars were waiting to move into this flat before they looked for a boy for her or a bride for Dharmendra, who just turned thirty. What kind of family would marry into a slum? Girish doesn’t revisit his old home in Jogeshwari, and neither does Paresh. It’s had three break-ins since they’ve moved, and the family doesn’t seem to mind very much. Raju goes back every day for her coaching classes, but their parents don’t go. Sitting in a third-story flat of his very own, Dharmendra, the perfume company executive, dismisses the place in which he was born and brought up: “Jogeshwari was a chawl.”
“What kinds of people live here?” I ask Dharmendra. “Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Muslims?”
“Cosmopolitan,” he responds. It is a fellowship of the upwardly mobile. The social networks of Mira Road, while not as cohesive as those of Jogeshwari, are still stronger than those of Nepean Sea Road. After Girish comes home to Mira Road, at ten in the evening, he goes to the neighboring building and brings over the two-year-old daughter of an acquaintance, to play with. He has about half an hour of this, which relaxes him. Then he drops off the toddler and comes back home to sleep. On a Sunday, Girish will go to Naigaon with his upstairs neighbor and buy the fermented sap and the fruit of the toddy tree. Then he will come back to his neighbor’s room and drink a liter and a half of toddy and eat a couple dozen tadgolas. He recommends it to me. “If you drink toddy it will clean out your system. You will be able to shit really well. Everything will come out easily.”
WALKING PAST THE LOVERS on the parapet of Marine Drive, Girish says wistfully, “One day I’ll also come here. With someone.” Girish and his brothers were role models in the Jogeshwari slums. Parents pointed them out to their children and asked them why they couldn’t be like the Gujaratis.
Girish has never had a girlfriend. He offers as his excuse the fact that from his first year in college, which is when middle-class Indians traditionally discover the opposite sex, he started tutoring to bring in money. As soon as his classes were over, at one-thirty, he would go to his students’ homes to give tutorials, until nine in the evening. “I never got time to run behind these females.” He thinks he can start something with a girl, if he stands at the same bus stop where a girl waits, for ten days. “Basically you have to pamper her.” There was a girl in a friend’s office, and Girish had once asked her to have coffee. She refused. “I said, Be off, who has time to run after you? I don’t have time for you. Sorry.”
Girish once had an Internet chat companion, a young Gujarati woman living in Japan. “I used to chat in a different style. I used to try and reach her heart. What do you think about life, philosophical, this, that. Then she came to India. Her father bought an apartment in Walkeshwar. She didn’t contact me in Bombay.” There is no disappointment in his voice; or it is well hidden. After all, she is a posh Walkeshwar girl now, more inaccessible to him than when she was Japanese.
Kamal, the mob comptroller, like Girish’s other friends, is greatly exercised by Girish’s continuing virginity: “He has great need of some oiling-greasing.” Kamal advises Girish, “Sex is connected to the brain; when you release, you can think better. That’s why your thinking is confused. You need to get laid. You say you have all these big contacts but you can’t utilize them. People don’t trust you because you are yourself confused. Get an item and get lightened.” He suggests a place where Girish can do so: Tip-Top Hairdressers in Goregaon, where the female hairdressers start with a head massage and work their way south.
Srinivas, his whoring friend, tells me he admires Girish’s contacts, his knowledge of people from every world, but is dismissive about his business prospects. “He has not been able to build a future,” unlike the rest of their group from college. “He is too honest.” He has been trying to persuade Girish to join the Landmark Forum, an organization that runs encounter groups and motivational classes. There are five levels, and Srinivas has reached the fourth one. It teaches him how to succeed in business. He has successfully motivated Girish into not feeling sad when he comes back from Navsari and first glimpses the outskirts of Bombay, at Virar. Girish went to a guest session of the Forum, but decided against taking the full three-day class because it cost 3,000 rupees.
Bombay has raised and nurtured Girish, but now he has reached the end of something. “I’m not getting back what I’m putting into struggling,” says the programmer. “There are times when I don’t even have ten bucks.” Girish realizes that what he does is not essential to human happiness. “I’m in the service industry. A person can manage without my service.” Dharmendra’s perfume company, meanwhile, is feeli
ng the pinch of the recession. Nobody’s getting fired, but nobody’s getting any raises, and the company’s not filling in posts that are vacant. Girish is their only winning horse now. The next move—to Borivali, where they’ve set their eyes on a thousand-square-foot flat—is contingent on a steadily increasing flow of money, and the only possibility of that happening is with Girish, with computers.
Girish has now ended up in the front room of his business partner’s flat on Pedder Road. He likes working in the fancy address. “I never thought in my life that I’ll reach Pedder Road. I only knew Jogeshwari.” The address is just about the only reason Girish is in the business, with a man he met in the stock market. “My partner is no help to me in my business. He won’t even open the yellow pages and make calls from it.” Instead, he stays up till three in the morning downloading pornographic pictures. But his partner is from Bombay high; Girish is from Bombay low. “I am with him because I’m hoping he will pick me up.” He makes a spider with his palm and fingers and lifts it high in the air. “He will pick me up.”
I had told Girish about a friend of mine at the U.S. Consulate, in the visa section, and this set him thinking. Perhaps he could use my influence to secure a green card. “I haven’t asked you to take me,” he lets me know. “I just said I’d like to go, and I’m learning these computer languages. I’ll strike when the iron is hot.” If he can send $1,000 a month home to his father after he meets his expenses in America, that’s all he wants.
“Then you can buy the flat next to you in Mira Road,” I say.
“Dariya Mahal. Think big,” he immediately corrects me. “If one man goes, six people will be blessed. My entire family.” And not just his family. “If I go, I want to bring up one or two guys.” He would like to get Srinivas out of the country too. Srinivas’s father has just died; he has three sisters and a mother. Girish has another friend who is working in his uncle’s cloth shop. “I want to bring him up. I know he’s a good guy. He struggles too.” If Girish has a sum of money, he will give his friend money to rent a shop for a year. I am enchanted by this invisible network of assistance, a man going abroad and sending small sums of money back to seed cloth shops, college degrees, and weddings. It is not a Mercedes or an Armani suit that Girish craves; it is the opportunity to “bring up” others like him.
I ask him about his idea of America.
“I only know one thing for sure: If you struggle there the same amount you struggle here, the success rate is two hundred times.”
What else besides money?
He recalls a recent accident we were both witness to: An auto-rickshaw had knocked down a woman selling balloons on the street. She looked terribly wounded and clutched her head. The brightly colored balloons, which had been aloft over her, were now all bunched up on the pavement. I was alarmed, but Girish predicted, “Watch, she’ll get up and ask for money.” A rain shower suddenly drenched us, and the stricken woman got up quickly and ran for shelter under a shop. Another woman selling balloons approached the rickshaw and abused the driver, demanding money for her colleague.
“That balloon lady had a power,” Girish notes. “She could enter the rickshaw and stand there. In America it would be different. You saw the female went into the rickshaw and asked for money. There it would be analyzed, whose mistake it is. She can’t just enter your rickshaw and say give money or I won’t get off your rickshaw.” Here is an interesting take on class: Girish, who is poor, thinks the people even poorer than him have too much power. I ask him what he thinks of them, of the very poor.
“I don’t like them, I hate them.” He thinks that the beggars of the Bombay streets spend all their money on liquor and other vices. Many of them make more than the salary of a government official, he says. He will help a friend in need but almost never gives money to beggars. He is repulsed. “They hold your feet. Little children hold your feet and touch their foreheads to your feet.” He speaks of them with a vehemence I have not seen in him before. They are uncomfortably close. There is a complex relationship between the poor and the very poor. A distance has to be maintained, always in battle with a natural sympathy. A mix of “There but for the grace of God go I” and “They have nothing to do with me.”
I ask him if he will go back to Jogeshwari to live.
“Why are you sending me to Jogeshwari again? I have a higher vision. From Mira Road I want to go to Vile Parle, and from Vile Parle I want to go to Bandra, and from Bandra to Pedder Road.” It is a train catcher’s dream of upward mobility; switching from the local to the express till he gets to his destination, in South Bombay. He wants at least to get to Vile Parle in three or four years. He can only reach even this middle-class suburb if he takes a shortcut; if he gets on the fast train to America. “Being in Bombay I can’t go to Parle. I need twenty lakhs, which in Bombay I’ll need twenty years to earn. I can spend four thousand a month all my life. But I can’t buy a ten-foot-by-ten-foot house in Bombay. I cannot do that.”
He does not think such a move—from Mira Road to South Bombay—would even be possible in a town like Navsari, where his family is from. “The reason is, the society there is small. You know what background a man comes from. In Bombay, you will never know I stayed in slums. My business partner never knows I stayed in slums. I only told him I stayed in ‘chawl type.’”
I ask him if he thinks he had a happy childhood in the chawl in Jogeshwari. It is of some interest to me, because I don’t think of my childhood in Bombay as having been particularly happy.
“At this time I can’t tell you whether I was happy or not because it is gone now. I never knew what a football was. I had a red rubber ball.” He holds out his palm, very small.
DHARMENDRA COMES to my house one day to invite me to his wedding, which is in his village in Gujarat. I ask him if he is enjoying the days of his engagement, if he is going around the city with his fiancée. He looks baffled. “I have not met her.”
He means he has not seen her after he went with his parents to her house, where not one word was exchanged between them. Her name is Mayuri. He asked his sister to talk to her. The second time in Dharmendra’s life he sees his bride will be when she lifts her red sari—covered head to accept him as her swami. They are getting married four weeks after seeing each other for the first and only time.
“Is she good looking?” I ask about his wife-to-be.
“Average.”
“What was it about her that you liked over the other girls you saw?” I ask Dharmendra.
He shrugs. “It was mostly the timing.” Dharmendra has seen five or six other girls, but he wasn’t ready to get married before. But now the family’s moved into the Mira Road flat, and he’s over thirty, and there are four siblings in line behind him, notably his sister. It’s getting rather late for Raju to marry. But she can’t until her elder brother does. So Mayuri arrived at the right time, and without really looking at her or talking to her he agreed to marry her.
“How do you know you’ll get along? That you won’t fight?”
“We will be adjusting. We have to adjust for some things; she also has to adjust for some things.” I notice that he doesn’t say I have to adjust. His whole family will have to adjust. Dharmendra, like most of the people in Bombay, lives all his life under the shelter and protection and tyranny of the We. But chances are that Mayuri won’t have to do much adjusting. The Thakkars don’t believe in dowry, to begin with. It is the custom to give the groom a new suit and a ring. Mayuri’s parents asked him to choose material for a suit to be tailored. Dharmendra, conscious that a suit would cost more than 6,000 rupees, asked for a blazer, which would be considerably cheaper.
ALL DAY LONG the women of Padga Gam are singing wedding songs. Loudspeakers spread their atonal, tuneless voices all over the village. I am sitting in the Thakkars’ country home, talking to a yellow man. All the women of the family and the wives of the guests have molested Dharmendra, spreading yellow tamarind paste over every part of his body that can be touched in public: his hair, his th
ighs, his chest. A pair of shorts covers up the only part of his body that is not yellow. There is, says Dharmendra, a “hat trick” of marriages in the village. There are no more auspicious days after tomorrow till Diwali, five months away, which also explains the haste. Dharmendra’s marriage was decided first, so he took one of the three auspicious days. The others couldn’t take the same day, he says.
“Why not? Are they related to you?”
“No. But they are from the same village.” All the cooking, the arrangements for beds to put up visitors, is done by village people. In Padga Gam, marriages are not of individuals or even families. They are of villages. Most of Padga Gam has been invited to Dharmendra’s wedding, as it was to the wedding yesterday and as it will be to the wedding tomorrow. All the neighboring houses are thrown open to the out-of-town guests of the Thakkars. The owners of the houses will come back specially from Bombay, to attend the wedding and also to make sure their neighbors’ guests are comfortable. The village headman is coming back from New Zealand. The sense of community that the Thakkars and people in the slum areas abound in is brought to Bombay from the village.
A wide assortment of cousins and uncles attends the marriage. One works on an oil rig in Abu Dhabi (“forty-five days on, thirty days off”); another is a property dealer in Bombay who spent six years in Nigeria getting rich off the currency scam in the eighties. In the evening, the men sit on a sheet behind the house and drink warm beer, which tastes good because it is illicit; Gujarat is supposed to be a dry state.
