14 July: Polar Extremes
Dharavi list:
Met Sunny at train station. Had to wait for an hour (we thought there would be more to do while we waited: not.) Bought 2 Chetan Bhagat books, What Young India Wants and Five Point Someone. I am developing a reading crush on him, and will definitely push his work for Doug to use in class next year. Took train to Miham station, 10 up the line. Wendy and I were in the ladies car which fortunately allowed us to have seats. We were 7 or 8 stops in before a gaggle of scrappy pre-teen boys lurched into the car. They got duly told off by a few women but held their ground and stayed next to the door of the car. It was an example of "you gotta do what you gotta do" mentality in action.
Notes on Dharavi...2nd biggest slum in Asia after Karachi. 1 million people over 485 hectacres (or was it 435?) It's like 100 football fields, or half the size of Central Park. It's density is well above the city average...I can't remember the scale, but you could easily find it on wikipedia. 30% of the Mumbai police force lives in Dharavi (or maybe it and other slums around the city). They pay the city a hefty amount in taxes each year, but I've heard and read that the actual earnings are 2-3x what gets reported. Wendy and I went with Reality Tours and a cardinal rule of their operations is no photos allowed inside. I took 3 or 4 shots with the iPhone but am having trouble posting those to the blog. Check my FB page for them later today. Sunny took us first through the commercial area, starting with the heavier industry, then working toward cottage industries.
jobs:
heavy industry:
smelting scrap metal. Workers don't wear the protective gear they are given bc it is hot, gets in their way. We looked into this room and saw the oven which operates at 600 F (C?...no, can't be). Two guys wearing t--shirts and long shorts, sorting through storage bags, reminding us of how many little jobs support their big job (reminds me of a bartender prepping before the arrival of the happy hour crowd). Average age for slum 60-65, largely due to toxicity of jobs. TB, dengue, malaria, respiratory disease afflicts folks here.
Aluminum and plastic recycling. We saw the plastic crushing operation, couldn't believe how loud it was and there was a young man sitting on the machine, bare legs flopped carelessly over the main bar as he guided errant materials into the crushing device. I was taken aback right away: huge industrial machines operating at full tilt ("manned" by teenagers) in the slum?? The rag- and trashpickers earn 8-10 rupees/kilo selling to the (insert title here) who separates the raw plastics by quality and sells up the chain for 20-25 rupees/kilo. Then these guys sell to the big fish in the operation, the guys who melt the plastics down and form them into long strands, then cut them into pellets. Our guide, Sunny, gave me a handful. They looked like tiny bits of licorice. The owners of these operations no longer live in the slums, but they make serious bank off this system. The end users of the plastics are facilities in India, but newly in China. This is where so many of our cheap plastics come from. And the whole operation takes place in stages right in the slum. Katherine Boo does a good job of talking about the early stages in this process in Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. Her chief protagonist is a trash picker who specializes in plastics. Guys were bringing in big bundles of phone casings, the old style for push button and rotary phones, to the crushing place.
cleaning industrial paint cans: not heavy industry per se, but very toxic. They manually clean the interior of cans, then burn off the rest (can anyone say POISON?) These can be used 3-4 times by the manufacturer/packager until the cans are not longer tenable. Then the workers cut the cans open, pound them out and use them as corrugated siding for this structures in this part of the slum. For this reason, Sunny was careful to warn us about low roofs and sharp edges. He joked that if we ran into someone's house, we would have to pay for repairs. Actually, I don't think it was a joke. This was one day I was happy to be short. We had a tall Canadian man in our group. As worried as he was about hitting his head, I was about walking in my sandals. They're sturdy, but the recent rains had left the non-paved side passages wet. I put a premium on avoiding puddles, both in this "factory" area and in the residential section. I am sure you can discern why.
Light industry:
textiles: we saw dyeing operations (very toxic, pour residue into open drains) for cotton and silk. I watched a man enter the large room where vats of dye sat on the floor--these were half the size of a bathtub. He wore a faded turquoise undershirt and a pink/white lunghi (sp), or a wrap-around covering for the lower part of the body. His open and fluid body language suggested he might be Dharavi's version of Carson from Queer Eye. I know that smacks of stereotypes, but it was uncanny and spontaneous. Are the links in the fashion chain worldwide peppered (or dominated) by gay men? Speaking of men, the commercial section of Dharavi is certainly dominated by men. Sunny guessed 98% men, 1% women, and 1% families.
We saw large and small rooms with sewing machines, they issue first editions (wrong term?) in bulk of certain designers' work, then those get sent back out to the target country/company for the logo or stamp. Sunny mentioned Lee Cooper leather goods and Tommy Hilfiger in particular, but I've read about loads of other high end examples. Much of the textiles used to be hand-done, one item at a time by a single individual. Now with computers some garment workers in Dharavi can run 20 machines at once. I saw a long white bar with a dozen arms to which spools and programming boxes were attached, however I don't sew so I didn't know how to identify or categorize what I was looking at. I guess the takeaway is that as the world digitizes, so does Dharavi.
We saw a Muslim bakery that churns out puff pastry treats (I forget the name) for several major vendors in the city. Hot hot hot. Men's work. We went inside a family-operated cottonseed oil soap factory. We couldn't identify what the product was, a thin black-brown cake, semi-pliable, in great big stacks and bags. We guessed chocolate, tea, all manner of things. Cottonseed oil soap is especially good for cleaning cooking oil off pots and pans. Who knew? To cut the squares, the 3-4 workers share 2 tools that look like the paper cutters we use at school. The workspace was big, probably 12' ceilings, and painted white with cool geometric accents in burgundy. It's what I'd imagine a lower-tier Brooklyn loft to look like. An airy, almost pleasant workspace. Granted, they were all sitting on their haunches on the floor. In fact, much labor in the slum (and arguably across Asia) is done in the sitting-on-haunches position. I'm not sure many Americans could swing that posture in a productive way. Yikes (mental image...ouch).
The tanneries offered, according to Wendy, the worst smell of the day. Cows that die of natural causes or in traffic accidents get brought into this industry...how to phrase that morbid reality? Tanning leather is illegal in Mumbai, so the hides are sent out to Chennai, the #1 leather processing area (SW coast). Mumbai occupies the #2 position. Once the hides are tanned they are sent back to Dharavi (well over 1000 miles, I'd wager) for equalizing, meaning making it a uniform thickness to use for garments, bags, etc. This seems like a really odd and expensive arrangement and we didn't get a fully satisfactory answer of why leather operations work like this. By the time I had processed the info and formulated a question, Sunny had moved on (in all other respects, an amazing guide. This was more about me being a slow dot-connector and not him rushing us.) We saw goat parts--ears, I presume--salted and stacked, as well as a small hillock of hides, but these were in the initial phases of hide treatment...er, I guess. Maybe they process all the goat skins here in Mumbai and save the strict regulations for cows. Not sure. Anyway, this section was near the open water flow, except flow is too optimistic a word. The color of the fetid liquid actually resembles the shirt I'm wearing, a muted aquamarine or tourmaline. Now, you color sticklers might argue that those two are hardly neighbors, and that may be so. We can agree, though, that neighborhood water supplies are not supposed to look like that, all opaque and slick with islands of garbage strewn about like condiments. The most depressing sites for me were the garbage piles, not tall and contained, but spread out and still holding onto the recent rains. In fact, Wendy mentioned today that we probably saw Dharavi at the perfect time, two days after heavy rain. The waters had receded so we didn't have to slosh through, but most of the filth had had a good wash. And she's right. It is sad to think we saw it on a clean day, and I would never argue that people were held to the level of their physical environment. Perfect segue to residential sections:
The residential section was an adventure. We followed Sunny in a straight line as he took us first through the Muslim district, then the larger Hindu part which is in turn "divided" (my word, it's unoffical) into sections by majority ethnic groups, e.g. Gujarati, Tamil and others. Once you get off the main "roads"--about 12 feet wide, maybe a bit less--you enter a stultifying maze of super-narrow passages that turn right, left almost haphazardly, or so it felt. These passages are about 2' so two grown-ups can't pass abreast. We walked on vented concrete slabs that fit over/into a low concrete (or was it earthen?) drainage channel. There was open drainage running parallel to that, and I tried not to focus on it. Skeevy. There was some variation in topography, with the occasional stairway. You can tell people have built up improvements with little bridge areas, overhangs to protect from the rain. I remember feeling like I was in a concrete/sheetmetal Luberon, which is a narrow and beautiful gorge in the south of France. There wasn't a lot of light, at least in the Muslim area, because quarters were so tight and the houses went straight up.
Most dwellings appeared to be about 8-10 feet wide, all had doors, some with padlocks, some with decorations, and all appeared to be two stories. They had ladders reaching at a terrific angle to the upper floor, presumably the sleeping area. Keep in mind, these are makeshift; they've been cobbled together over time, but they were much sturdier than I anticipated. In fact, in one of the Hindu sections, we saw a second story being bricked by a real mason (i.e. guy with a trowel) with mortar and bricks. He seemed to know what he was doing, and I was amazed, first because bricks are expensive and we hadn't seen many so far, and second because they're so heavy you have to have a substantial substructure to support all that weight. So I took that as a sign of prosperity. Speaking of which, we saw lots of families watching TV, some kids even playing video games at makeshift arcades (with limited supplies, understandably...could this be where PacMan and Galaga go to die?) I heard that men and children wash themselves out in front of their houses, essentially in public. Women, though, use the washing corner of their lower levels to clean themselves. More than once I've heard that Hindu culture frowns on women working outside the house. Their place/role is home management (obviously this interpretation of gendered place varies widely with education). Exceptions are made for widows; who else will support the family? Women mostly work in sorting, that is separating refuse by category, according to Sunny.
It has taken me hours to get this tip-of-the-iceberg impression committed to the page, and I'm afraid in trying to capture everything, I'll blow a cranial gasket or overtax readers. Plus, I've written a bit about this experience to Chris, and now I can't remember to whom I told what. So please forgive me if I repeat myself. And I've been going back and forth between this and other tasks, so if I approached a theme of interest to you then digressed, send me your questions and I'll write a post specific to it.
Other observations, in no particular order:
1. I made eye contact with some women as we walked through, even those wearing full black body coverings where all you could see was their eyes. And usually when I smiled, they did too. The women are BUSY with kids, laundry (sudsy where possible, and pounded outside with a short heavy stick, by women and men who live alone).
2. My friend Jay in Amritsar called yesterday and when I told him we'd been there, he said the best slum labor was done by Muslims, that they were consistently the best artisans, etc. In one of today's (7/15) lectures, we heard that Muslims in fact own most of the property in Dharavi. You'd think that would give them an exalted position, that they'd have the better homes, living spaces, etc. Such is not the case. There was a pretty clear difference between Hindu areas (generally more spacious, airy and cleaner, further away from the squished center of the slum, closer to the few toilets) and the Muslim areas. I guess you have to take each bit of info as one piece of the mosaic that ultimately leads to a "true" picture.
3. We must've seen 8-9 cricket games in progress, many with just a bowler, batsman and a few fielders. Some were elaborate with full teams. It was a Sunday, so more kids were out than normal.
4. Vehicular traffic was nuts. N-U-T-S. But that seems to be the Indian way.
5. There are ATMs, clinics and schools, even a hospital operated by the government. There are restaurants and bars, lots of small markets, even a large market street. There are community centers, computer repair shops, cell phone stores, all kinds of specialty businesses...in short, everything a city needs except consistently running water, adequate sanitation and privacy. I'm not sure there is a way to solve those problems.
6. 10-12 families share a public tap which is turned on for 2 hours a day. The ratio for toilets is far worse, however: about 1700 people per toilet, and they're not always functional. Plus, I've read that they can be monitored by men who shake down people for money or harass women who go there alone. For this reason, I've heard that most women go to the bathroom sparingly and in groups, either first things in the still-dark morning or at night, and they go by the railroad tracks, a fair distance to travel. That has got to be a huge bummer.
7. They have their first full service grocery, like a mini-supermarket that stocks a wide variety of items rather than specializing. We bought cold drinks and were very grateful for the service.
8. Vendors cut pineapples into spiraled works of art, and they and the pomegranate vendors burned thick "cigars" of incense to keep the bugs off the fruit. We didn't buy, though the gorgeous fruits looked tempting. I was wondering--why cut so many dozens of pineapples in the middle of a summer (and monsoon!) afternoon? Perhaps because it's Ramadan and people want to celebrate and be festive at the end of another long day of fasting.
9. We saw a lovely little girl of about 6 or 7 sitting on her stoop (the step into her house) writing her English capital letters carefully into a thin notebook. It was adorable. Families want to educate their children. They are all thinking about survival, yes, but also about upward mobility. As Dharavi changes, more and more of the inhabitants here are migrants from the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. They come from agricultural lives that are economically insecure, so they bust their butts in tough jobs here in the city, send money home (often making just 25 rupees/day for 10-12 hours work) and spend a few months home each year maybe helping with the most challenging farming jobs, harvest perhaps (you can tell I don't know farming).
10. Perhaps most surprising, the rents in Dharavi are not dirt cheap. The cheapest average 300 rupees/month, and rent can go up to several times that for a larger or better situated space. This is one of the factors that personal money managers warn about, and it's one of the reasons we'd never move to Manhattan or San Francisco. Who can afford to spend more than 50% of your earnings, even 75%, on housing? The Gujaratis have a lease with the city, secured 100 years ago, wherein they own not only their property but also their land. This will have to be renegotiated in 2030, and who knows what kind of price they'll have to pay. The other slum dwellers own their property but not their land. We'll see if that leads to the eventual demolition of the slum, though I doubt it.
End note: We took the train back to Churchgate, then a taxi to the Taj Mahal Hotel, down at the waterfront beside the Gateway to India (think the sumo wrestler version of the Arc de Triomphe). We were physically hit by the difference in sound, smell, tone...everything (duh, right?) and proceeded to spend almost 3000 rupees on lunch/dinner. I put it in stark terms like that--rather than describing the full buffet of Maharashtrian street food for tourists, cakes and finger sandwiches--to own up to my casual ability to lay out $25 for a meal, even one in a grand and storied setting. It would be several months' rent for some families in Dharavi. And that's tough to swallow.
If you're interested in helping NGOs there, check out the website for Reality Tours, Dharavi. They have top marks from Trip Advisor and a few other agencies who cited their ethical tourism work. They will have more information and links on how you can help. Thanks.
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