by Alan Weisman
There is so much work here because of the perpetual construction, regardless of diluvial monsoons and temperatures that even in winter can approach 100°F. Just before June rains, 107–110°F is not unknown. To see Mumbai enter a monsoon is like watching a stew come to full boil. The atmosphere jells, heat waves ripple from pavement, asphalt perspires shiny beads of tar. But nothing stops. If anything, Mumbai accelerates, as construction turns feverish ahead of ruinous downpours, and colored tarpaulins are rigged over the gaps between soaring new properties-in-progress.
It is a city devoid of vacant lots. Between every pair of new skyscrapers are more ubiquitous tarps, with people who arrived yesterday living under them. Beneath affluent high-rises along the waterfront, people dwell in drainage pipes. Wherever there’s a wall, bridge, or abutment, tents are strung by migrants. They come willing to work any job, high on a bridge or deep down a hole. First the laborer arrives, then his brothers, then an entire generation of relatives accompanying his wife, then they have kids. When they’ve worked long enough to amass scraps of metal or loose concrete chunks, walls slowly rise to meet the oilcloth roof, and then there’s another slum.
Nobody chases them away, because they’re productive. Over past decades, it’s been China with the huge young labor force. But with China now aging, it’s India’s turn for what demographers call the population dividend, and a cornucopia of labor runneth over in Mumbai. Even the richest man in town, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of the energy and materials conglomerate Reliance Industries, who’s built a twenty-seven-floor, four-hundred-thousand-square-foot home for his family, doesn’t run off the neighbors living in the cracks between the surrounding buildings, because his mansion needs a staff of six hundred.
Mumbai is one of the few places on Earth where there is 100 percent employment, where literally anybody can find work—unlike its gloomy megacity alter-ego five hundred miles up the Arabian seacoast, Karachi. Mumbai may lack Karachi’s menace—but what will happen when it’s all built?
Building is what Krishna Pujari is worried about—not that they’ll stop, but that Dharavi, where he lives and makes his living, is where the developers have fixed their crosshairs next, and they’re going to build him out of business. Until recently, Dharavi claimed to be the biggest, most densely agglomerated slum in Asia. By 2011, however, the Times of India reported that Dharavi had been surpassed by four others—all of them also in Mumbai.
Still, Krishna declares, none has the sheer presence of Dharavi, an expanse of tarps and tin roofs reaching the horizon, so close together that when seen from the tracks above—Dharavi is wedged between two commuter rail lines—it seems possible to stroll across them and never touch ground. And they are seen from those tracks by millions daily, because Dharavi is practically in the middle of Mumbai’s financial district, on sublimely valuable real estate that has developers drooling and scheming.
In the seventeenth century, before the British East India Company appeared, Mumbai was a clutch of fishing villages on seven islands. The British built causeways to connect them, encircling what became Bombay Harbor. By the nineteenth century, the gaps between the islands had been filled. Where Dharavi sits today was once under water—its name means “waves”—and frequently is again when monsoons engulf the open sewers.
In Dharavi’s dark passageways, most barely broad enough for two adults to pass, a million people work in ten thousand small industries, under conditions that would burst dials off occupational health and safety meters, if such things existed. In warehouses with scorched asbestos walls, blackened men melt scrap aluminum soda cans into ingots. Nearby, other men salvage empty five-gallon vegetable-oil tins by immersing them in cauldrons of water heated over indoor bonfires to boil away the residues. Alongside them, women scrape off loosened labels while mopping their faces with limp cotton saris. Above, smoke gathers like a low-hanging thundercloud as it slowly bleeds through a hole in the ceiling. The room clangs like a giant bell as more men flatten tins too damaged for reuse.
Two streets over, Krishna Pujari greets by name every man who, for a stretch of several blocks, recycles cardboard—saving what can be stamped with a fresh logo, shredding the rest to mulch into new cardboard. He pops his head into rooms where flocks of children salt cowhides headed to China for tanning, a business employing forty thousand Dharavi citizens. He proceeds to Kumbharwada, a ten-acre sector where twenty-two hundred families—mothers, fathers, swarming kids—turn truckloads of clay hauled from rice paddies north of Mumbai into ornamental ceramic pots. These are some of Dharavi’s original tenants; their pottery works are licensed cottage industries, which Gandhi promoted. On homemade wheels, they throw thousands of flowerpots, wrapping each in clothing scraps that burn off as they’re fired in hundreds of mudbrick ovens.
This was one of Dharavi’s more benign industries, until cotton clothing gave way to polyester.
“I warn them,” Krishna says, “that fumes from melting nylon are toxic. ‘We have to work,’ they say. ‘Show us a better way, and we’ll use it.’ ”
Krishna Pujari’s own way is entrepreneurial. A whiplike, smiling man in jeans, polo shirt, and gold chain, he was thirteen when he came in 1993 from a farming village near Mangalore, the second oldest of nine children. He put himself through secondary school carrying tea to office workers, and when more of his brothers arrived, they started servicing cafeterias. Waiting tables one day, he learned from a British expat that tourists in Brazil actually hire guides to show them dirt-poor favelas above Rio de Janeiro. Since 2006, he’s run Reality Tours & Travel, offering guided trips through Mumbai slums to around twenty tourists a day who pay to see abject poverty.
Recently, he’s begun bicycle tours that begin at dawn at Dhobi Ghat, the vast outdoor laundry where linens from Mumbai’s hospitals and hotels are scrubbed and hung to dry. He’s done well enough to bring a wife from his village, a marriage his parents arranged. His latest venture is the computer class he started in a long, dark room whose floor is lined with a dozen old terminals. In front of each sits an intent barefoot child, half of them girls, including three in headscarves. “We’re teaching them skills of the future,” Krishna says proudly.
He continues on, dodging barefoot children retrieving balls from open drains that froth with gray bubbles, past doorways emitting the sharp tang of lye, where men and women carve three-foot-high brown blocks of the laundry soap they make into bars. Above their heads hang plastic bottles of colored liquids, each a different scent for the dish detergents they also make. Farther above, beyond the ceiling, is where they live. Nearly all of Dharavi’s people live above their workplaces, but it’s too tight here for staircases, so sleeping quarters are accessed by ladders clamped to exterior walls.
Krishna climbs one that leads to a roof—which, like every other rooftop in sight, is covered with kaleidoscopic piles of crushed plastic that’s been washed and spread on tarps to dry. Plastic is the biggest Dharavi industry of all. It arrives by truck in huge sacks from around the world: salvaged water bottles, plastic cutlery, hospital waste, cruise ship waste, spent plastic bags, and mountains of synthetic-fiber clothing. Dharavi plastic pickers have contracts with hotel chains and entire airlines for their disposable cups, knives, forks, spoons, and coffee stirrers. “What looks like garbage to others, to us is gold,” Krishna says.
In an alleyway below, women separate all this scrap plastic by color into dozens of milk crates, while a girl in a paisley hijab serves them tea. From here it is bagged and hauled farther up the alley to cast-iron grinding machines built from retrofitted truck flywheels, which spit sparks and billowing plastic dust. The pulverized results are dunked and doused in a succession of fifty-five-gallon drums, then taken up top to dry. Finally, they’re rendered in vast vats into molten polymer soup, whose acrylic stench suffuses the alleys where more women are sorting used swizzle sticks and stacks of lipstick-stained plastic airline cups, and men strip insulation from enormous tangles of copper wire.
The plastic gets poured into mo
lds, producing pellet-sized nurdles to be shipped and remelted into consumer goods: so-called “added value” whose profit margins Dharavi never sees, except for what gets molded right here into miniature temples, plastic deities, cruciforms, and other trinkets. The curios of the world are no longer confected by the world’s artisans, but mass-crafted by its slum dwellers.
A few blocks later, Dharavi’s acrid aromatics dissolve into something actually inviting. Krishna drops into a basement bakery, one of hundreds here that make cakes, biscuits, bread, and savory curry-flavored pastries. He accepts a piece of a wheel of pappadam, stretched to dry across a straw basket.
“Few people realize that tons of food that Mumbai eats daily is made here—the labels don’t say where.” Neither do many know that Dharavi’s combined annual income is an estimated $665 million. Mumbai’s financial rajahs have other plans for this prime location: a contentious Dharavi Redevelopment Project involving blocks of high-rise apartments, offices, hospitals, shopping malls, and multiplexes is scheduled to begin momentarily. Everything else will be demolished.
“Everybody’s fighting it. But the government says whether you agree or not, we’ll do it, because we own the land.” And if they’re all kicked out?
“We’ll go farther north. And build many more Dharavis.”
Human-rights advocates often argue that the world’s poor are unfairly targeted for population control, because collectively they leave a much smaller footprint on the planet than the overprivileged few. That was surely true a half-century ago, when two-thirds of the world’s humans were peasants. Today most are urban—and most of them are urban poor. However ragged they may be, Dharavi’s rabble increasingly carry mobile phones; the electricity they use to charge them may be pirated, but generating it produces carbon nonetheless. The stupendous Mumbai traffic grew even more demented with the introduction of Tata Motors’ Nano, powered with a rickshaw engine and designed to sell for US$2,000 so that everyone might afford one. Most Dharavi dwellers probably can’t—but their children, already learning to colonize the twenty-first-century cyberscape, probably will. With the roads and rail tracks of Mumbai lined by more multistory housing for miles in all directions except seaward, their cumulative demand will broaden that footprint across what was once farmland and home to myriad tropical fauna.
The ancient Hindus saw those fauna not as creatures beneath ourselves, but as manifestations of the many faces of God. The first four avatars, or incarnations, of the life-affirming deity Vishnu weren’t humans, but animals: a fish, a tortoise, a boar, a lion. Hanuman, the great warrior deity of the Ramayana, is depicted as a monkey. And one of the most venerated aspects of God in the entire Hindu pantheon is Ganesha, the elephant-headed overcomer of obstacles.
At Mumbai’s Siddhivinayak Temple, which is dedicated to Lord Ganesha, the usual multitude has gathered despite the afternoon’s wall of rain. It is Tuesday, the most auspicious day for Ganesha worship according to Hindu astrology. Bearing bouquets of marigolds and hibiscus, five hundred thousand people shuffle barefoot in snaking lines past several metal detectors, toward an elephant-headed effigy seated in half-lotus on a gilded throne draped with garlands of flowers. According to legend, the two-and-a-half-foot-tall icon, carved from a single chunk of black slate, was discovered buried in a field. Today it is coated with red lacquer and encrusted with diamonds. Ganesha wears a gold crown and rings on his four hands. His trunk swings to the right, signifying that he fulfills all desires. The pilgrims who leave flowers, sweets, and fresh fruit by the carved wooden image of Kroncha, Ganesha’s pet mouse, come to beg the deity’s protection for their marriages, their newborns, their new homes. For those far in back, a Sony monitor overhead shows the devotional puja service, where, to the echo of kettledrums, the choicest of these gifts are laid directly at Ganesha’s holy feet.
“The elephant is huge, strong, and intelligent,” says pandit Gajanan Modak, Siddhivinayak Temple’s head priest, a thickset man in a gold-trimmed white dhoti. “Like humans, elephants have religious rituals. They mourn their dead, and bury them with branches and leaves. They have sharp eyes, and deep emotions.”
But unlike humans, India’s elephants are now endangered, and humans are outnumbering and imperiling all the animal aspects of God in the pantheon. In Mumbai, the Parsi Zoroastrians, who believe that burial and cremation contaminate the Earth with impurities, have always left their dead atop holy towers for vultures to consume. But now the birds have disappeared, felled by the same cattle ointment that devastated Nepal’s carrion-eating birds. The Parsis are left to try decomposing bodies with solar concentrators.
When Mumbai’s vultures disappeared, feral dogs and cats proliferated, causing a rabies epidemic. “We humans are a problem,” Modak says. “When we perform puja, afterward we pour the rice and flowers into the river as offerings for the fish. But nowadays people stuff them into plastic bags that end up in the sea.” There is a need, he says, to measure the number of people this world can contain. In Hinduism, there is no proscription against using any means available to do that. “Hindus have always planned their lives. Modern life requires modern planning.”
But is there not a need to bear children until a son is born to light his parents’ way into heaven?
“A myth. I have two daughters. They are as capable as any man to light our funeral pyres.”
He serves prasad—yogurt and honey, blessed during puja—to his guests. “We are bringing the Kali Yuga upon ourselves,” he says. “That is when we destroy our environment and kill ourselves. Even the smallest insect has a reason to be in this world. We are all creatures connected with each other. Lord Ganesha has his mouse, to whom we bow and ask permission to venerate our lord. Lord Krishna has his divine cow, Saraswati her swan, Lakshmi her owl. Hindus accept that we can’t live without animals. If they survive, we survive.”
Along with his sacred cow, the blue avatar Lord Krishna is always shown with his beautiful lover, the supreme goddess Radha.
“She is nature, the mother of us all. Krishna, like Jesus and Buddha, is the incarnation of God in human form. He represents the human population. They are the ideal couple we must strive to be: humanity and nature, in perfect balance. In perfect harmony. In perfect love.”
CHAPTER 15
Safe Sex
i. Rubber
Thirty kilometers below Bangkok, where the Chao Phraya River meets the Gulf of Thailand, stands a remnant mangrove forest. In the early twentieth century, several monks retreated here from the city to practice the oldest form of Buddhism, known as Theravāda, or the Forest Tradition. They named the temple they founded Wat Asokaram, the Monastery of No Sorrow.
In the twenty-first century, the estuary surrounding Wat Asokaram is no longer a forest wilderness. To one side are shrimp farms; on the other, a beach resort. The temple itself is now a Buddhist tourist attraction: a three-tiered, white wedding cake with thirteen spires. At one end of its ample parking lot, a path leads into what is left of the mangroves. Along raised walkways amid the trees are the monks’ kutis: clapboard cottages on pilings above tidal mud flats, shaded by curtains of hanging aerial roots.
The throb of urban Thailand fades here beneath the chitter of curlews and the splash of crabs and mud skippers. “In a city,” says Ajaan Boonku, a monk here for more than half a century, “you can study to control the mind. But it is difficult to achieve tranquility. In a forest, it is much easier to not think.”
Ajaan Boonku, Theravāda Buddhist monk, Wat Asokaram Monastery, Thailand
At eighty-three, Ajaan Boonku is mostly sinew and bone. Wrapped in a brown muslin sanghati, he sits cross-legged atop a prayer rug on his covered porch. A bench against the wooden porch rail holds offerings from pilgrims who come seeking peace and guidance: shampoo, bars of soap, mouthwash, toothbrushes, Sensodyne toothpaste, and boxes of tissues.
To Buddhists, attachment to material things, even to the world itself, is a trap, because nothing is permanent. Is there no obligation, then, for a Buddhist to try t
o conserve the world, such as these mangroves and their fragile fauna?
“A humble Buddhist cannot strive to control the world,” he whispers in a voice like rustling leaves. “But balance cannot be achieved without nature. We monks of the forest try to preserve nature, as examples for others to follow.”
And if the entire human race falls out of balance because there are more of us than nature can accommodate, does Buddhism permit us to control our reproduction?
“If more people means more problems, they can adjust by any means. In Buddhism, we don’t prevent birth control. People with good morals know to have the right-size family.”
But to those who lack a monk’s discipline, the means to act on those morals were long unavailable, and human numbers grew overwhelming, undoing much of nature. Has an onrush of humanity possibly hastened its own demise? Ajaan Boonku shuts his eyes and leans on one thin forearm atop his thigh. Minutes pass. Then he straightens.
“We don’t know if the end for humans nears. We know it may come, so the mind must be ready. Overuse of this world by people brings disaster—floods, global warming. But it’s not the end of the Earth, even if it is our own. Nature will move onward, beyond us. But for now,” he says, “it is a good idea for us to save trees. It helps.”
