Dharavi - Thinking Again

Keeping up is critical. Geography’s not my forte (don’t ask me what is. I can do quite nice Lazy Daisy stitch, as and when the need arises...). I can – and do – get lost in my own Sainsbury’s, if they put parsnips where the cornflakes were, last week. The maze of Dharavi’s criss-crossing runnels and alleys would tax even Mr Roland’s innate compass, so we can’t afford to let Ravi get more than an eyelash in front. There’s so much to look at, in the residential zone, I’m getting neck-ache from swivelling side to side, as our guide nimbly hops across open sewers and darts down alleyways. Every young person we meet wants a hello or a high five, but I see Ravi’s chatting, too. He says, they’re all asking him about his exams. He’s about to sit his pre-university exams, and has been home to his village, preparing. Even the dogs we meet, he knows by name. We’re in good hands.

I ask him, what a house here is worth (entire floor space, less than a double garage), and he says, three, maybe four lakh (£40-50,000). I’m amazed, having had the Monu Singh All-Mumbai Property Tour, because Dharavi houses are more cramped and altogether less luscious, than the two lakh houses elsewhere. Then I remember the three most important things about real estate, no less true here, than in Putney. Little wonder, that developers are circling round and round, like black kites.

At the patisserie, trays of Khari biscuits – cooked and uncooked – are stacked in towers, on the floor, round the ovens. “You want to try?” Ravi says, ducking in and filching a hot handful. They’re like little mouthfuls of nothing, so light, probably about 840 calories each. We continue our trek, munching, spraying crumbs, and I worry about paying for our snack. “Don’t worry,” Ravi says, “you’re with me.”

We have to take off our shoes, to go into the sewing-factory. I leave my new trainers conspicuously lurking on top of a mountain of flip-flops at the door, and step inside. Everyone stops working, to come and talk to us. We count twelve men, each with a sewing-machine, and a heap of fabric pieces. They’re making baby clothes, pink and blue, to be sold locally. I ask how long their working day is. Ten hours. Twelve machines, twelve men, tiny room, no windows. As working conditions go, it’s not great. They’re all laughing, though, and proud of their work.

We see animals by the ark-ful, cats, chickens, dogs, goats, but no children under three or four. Where are the babies? “Inside house,” Ravi says. “All people looking at, no good for child. Stay inside with...” his English fails him, and he mimes the rest. They keep their babies away from public glare, marking their faces with a black dot, to mar their perfection, so as not to attract the Evil Eye.

Dharavi has water for three hours a day. When the tap’s working, you fill your blue water-tub, for the rest of the day. There’s approximately one toilet per fifteen hundred inhabitants, so the offices of necessity aren’t very appealing. Instead, people use Mahim Creek, or the ironically named Mithi (sweet) River. “Are you hot? Do you fancy a swim?” asks Ravi. He points, laughing, to the opaque grey water of the creek, with its unspeakable flotsam and jetsam. “You go, I’m waiting here!” We say, another day, maybe.

The poppadum ladies roll out balls of dough, and lay them on tilted round wicker trays, to dry in the sun. They’re paid 20 rupees per kilo, which the manufacturers sell on for 120 rupees. Ravi’s disgusted – he says it looks like they’re providing jobs, but it’s slave-labour. The women make maybe 60 rupees a day, which Ravi says is ok, for a woman. I teach him the phrase “thin ice” – but he says, women also are responsible for home and family, and can’t work a full day. I watch a lady, harvesting the dried papad, and she drops one. It lands, half on the floor, half on her sandal, and she picks it up to stack it with the rest. Well, it needs cooking before eating, it’ll be fine.

Crossing the tanners’ sector, we interrupt a cricket game, but everyone’s delighted to break off, to come and shake hands. We stand, discussing the tanning industry, and the young cricketers drag along their even younger siblings to meet us - “This my sister, she say hello!” We see the machines, for buffing the goatskins, before they’re stretched to dry. The tanners are Muslim, mostly. Before the riots, in the early 1990s, Muslim and Hindu lived cheek by jowl. Hundreds of people died, during the fighting, and the two peoples had to separate, to co-exist. Now, Dharavi’s more segregated, but peaceful.

Ravi takes us to the school, set up by Reality Tours. English lessons are available to all. Some pay a nominal fifty rupees, Ravi says, because if they don’t pay anything, they think they don’t have to come. Others don’t pay at all. The classroom’s tiny, fourteen desks. A course in electronics is also available, for aspiring electricians. We fill in a feedback form (every time you buy a sandwich here, you have to tell them, in writing, whether you’re delighted or devastated, with not only your name and phone number, but your birthday and wedding anniversary...). I’m supposed to say what I think of my visit to the Pottery, but we’ve not been yet. Shall I assume, I ask Ravi, that it will be Very Interesting? “You keep the form,” he says. “See later.”

The potters – kumbhar – have more space, and more substantial housing, it seems, than the recyclers. Pot-throwing’s done in the morning, to give the pots time to dry out, in the sun, before being fired in the evening, when the heat of the day has diminished. The women sit under the awning, rubbing the clay under their thumbs, to take out small stones, which would destroy a vessel in the firing. In the house, the men use electric wheels to shape the clay into fat-bellied pots. Outside, the ovens are walled in, like pig-pens. The smouldering cotton, blanketing the kilns, produces a heat-shimmer, and the air’s thick with drifting waste. They can’t use sawdust or wood-chippings, because they burn too fast, and scorch the outside of the pot before the inside’s dry.

A potter takes my hand, and keeps it, while he tells me about his family and his business, and enquires about mine. I’m a chapatti away from exchanging email addresses with him, when Ravi drags us on to visit his mate, Dave, ex-tour guide extraordinaire, slum-dweller on the way up. His new job’s with a merchant bank, and he’s learning, via his two-week induction course, how to talk to clients. Ravi shares with us the tiny spiced mangoes he swipes from Dave’s Mum, who’s making pickle indoors. A bit of a magpie, our Ravi, but he gets away with everything. He’ll be a millionaire, before he’s finished.

This settlement couldn’t and shouldn’t be decanted into high-rise flats. The potters, and the tanners, and the recyclers, they all need floor-space. If you weren’t here before 2000, in any case, you’re not entitled to any compensation or re-housing. “Vision Mumbai” – designed to make a world-class city of Mumbai within five years – is, at best, naive. Less charitably, it’s opportunist profiteering.

Suddenly, there’s Monu, across the road, waving, and we’re back in the real world. Except, all the tin-polishers and rag-pickers and khari-bakers are still there, polishing and picking and baking, after their lives coincided with mine for a snatched minute. It makes you think.

Dharavi - The Heart of Mumbai

It’s 38 degrees today, which is a great pity, because there’s not a cat’s chance of aircon, where we’re going. The book says, wear covered shoes, and don’t take a camera. Monu’s clearly uncertain of the touristic value of our planned expedition, and refuses to leave us until our afternoon’s guide, Ravi, appears and introduces himself.

We cross over the railway bridge at Mahim Station, and step into Dharavi, the biggest slum in the slum-capital of the world, Mumbai. I’m almost frightened of what we’re going to see, but it turns out to be as breath-taking as the Taj Mahal. Not for the same reasons, obviously.

In the early days, Dharavi used to be a carbuncle on the very outskirts of Mumbai, but the city’s since spread to meet and encompass it. Dharavi now occupies the central square mile of the City of Dreams. If you’re thinking, real estate – and that’s precisely what the developers are thinking – it’s a gold mine, with open sewers. Location, location, location. The scheme in bud, is to rehouse Dharavi’s inhabitants upwards, thus using only half their current square footage. You may ask, where’s the wisdom in replacing horizontal slums with vertical slums? The other half of the cleared slum-site is then up for grabs for – you guessed – luxury apartments and shopping malls. Just what Mumbai needs, another mall...

Slum’s such a negative word, trailing notions of deprivation, squalor and disease. After half an hour in Dharavi, I go looking for alternatives, but reject polite euphemisms like “social housing” as being condescending. I come full circle, back to the word “slum,” which just needs redefining.

Ravi’s worked for Reality Tours, since the company was conceived two and a half years ago, by Krishna Poojari and Chris Way, who had exactly that redefinition in mind. It was a feat of imagination and daring, since Dharavi’s hardly a classic tourist destination. As you enter its precincts, there are no touts, trying to flog you pictures of it on postcards or mugs or t-shirts. It’s not to make a spectacle out of poverty, that this company was created, but to dispel received opinion, about slum-dwelling. Before crossing the threshold, I expect to feel pity and distaste. With my eyes and ears and – let’s be honest – nose full of Dharavi, I feel nothing but admiration and amazement.

As we swerve along the broad main swag through the district, past the mango-sellers and street barbers, Ravi fires facts and figures at us. Dharavi’s a hub of manufacturing and recycling, accommodating thousands of small businesses, with a combined annual turnover of more than £330M. Not so easy, to brush under the developers’ carpet, then.

We turn off the high street – watching our feet – into the rat-runs of tiny paths behind the shop fronts. Some of the alleyways are so narrow, you have to turn sideways, and walk like a crab, ducking jutting beams and swinging light-bulbs overhead, not to mention spiders of exposed cables, hanging free. A tricky place to come home to, I say, after a night out with the lads....

Ravi puts his head into a doorway. Inside, a man sits at a band-saw, slicing chunks off a block of wood. Ravi leans in, picks up a sliver, and puts it in my hand. Rounded contours are carved into it. “Heel for shoe,” he says. In the little booth, the saw sounds like a dentist’s drill, and the air’s thick with dust. On the floor, oblivious of drill and visitors, a second man stretches asleep, on a thin mattress – he’s the evening shift. The machinists need to sleep, but the machine doesn’t.

Dharavi’s the heart of Mumbai’s re-cycling industry. Nothing’s wasted. On the streets, you see old ladies, poking through the contents of rubbish-bins, with a stick. The waste-bins, in the park near our apartment block, are upturned every night, in the same quest. We put our recycling material in bags, in the stairwell, on the thirty-third floor, and the following morning, it’s gone. Someone’s prepared to collect it and hand it on, for a few rupees. Most of it ends up in Dharavi.

There are whole streets full of recycling factories. “Factory” gives you the wrong grandiose idea. These are buildings the size of a domestic shed, with hot machinery and even hotter operators. The plastic waste – water-bottles, drinking-cups, food packaging – is sorted by colour, then ground to cinder-like granules. At another “factory” the granules are melted, and extruded to make plastic spaghetti, to be cooled and chibbled into uniform chips, for onward sale and a new life. It’s hot, in the waste-strewn alley outside. Inside, with the molten plastic and furnace, it’s almost unbearable. The seven workers are all smiling, though, and happy to tip before and after samples into our curious hands.

Ravi asks, if we want to see the can-recycling street. We do. A swift right-turn, and we’re in Tin-Can Alley. On cue, a man walks by, with twenty or more shining two-gallon cans, balanced on his head. After use, the empties are greasy, rusty and dented. At home, they’d be fit for the tip. Here, they’re collected and painstakingly restored. Inside a steaming shed, men sit on the floor to scour the cans inside and out, with hot water and chemicals. I put my hand inside the hole at the top of a can, to see if it’s possible. It’s possible. With wooden hammers, they scrupulously tap out the dents, and the cans are sold back to the original owners, for reuse. Next-door, even more amazingly, they recondition paint-tins.

“Everything, re-use,” says Ravi, emphatically, and takes us to the cardboard-box revitalising suite. He picks up the top one of a stack of flattened boxes, and shows us the inside. Bisleri, it says. They take a used box, remove the staples, turn it inside out, trim it, and restaple it for Round Two. What a waste, I say, all those discarded old staples. “Staples,” Ravi says, “no throw away - collect, melt down, re-use.” Even after two incarnations, the box isn’t finished – there are chemical treatments, to remove industrial ink, making the box blank and available for service yet again. The conservation of particles, in everyday life.

We’re in the industrial quarter of Dharavi, where workers live above their tiny factories. Their wives and families live outside Mumbai, in the villages on the mainland. “You want to see residential area?” Ravi asks. “Here people living, but go outside to work, cab-drivers, factory workers, doctors...” “Doctors?” I say. “No big doctors in government hospitals, small, small doctors,” he says. “This way, come. Be careful, your feet.”

Ravi leads. We follow.