When the World Trade Centre towers were first planned, a large area was set aside and marked off into more than three hundred hut-sized plots. As workers signed on, they received one of the plots and a sum of money with which to buy bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber. Each man then built his own house, assisted by family and friends. The sprawl of fragile huts spread outward like a shallow, tender root-system for the huge towers that were to come. Vast underground wells were sunk to provide water for the community. Rudimentary lanes and pathways were scraped flat. Finally, a tall, barbed wire fence was erected around the perimeter to keep out squatters. The legal slum was born.
Drawn by the regular wages that those workers had to spend, and no less by the plentiful supply of fresh water, squatters soon arrived and settled outside the fence-line. Entrepreneurs establishing chai shops and small grocery stores were the first, attaching their tiny shops to the fence. Workers from the legal compound stooped to crouch through gaps in the wire, and spend their money. Vegetable shops and tailor shops and little restaurants were next. Gambling dens and other dens for the sale of alcohol or charras soon followed. Each new business clung to the fence of the compound until at last there was no space left on the fence-line. The illegal slum then began to grow outward into the surrounding acres of open land leading to the sea. Homeless people joined in ever-larger numbers, picking out squares for their huts. New holes were stretched in the fence. Squatters used them to enter the legal slum to collect water, and workers used them to make purchases in the illegal slum, or visit new friends.
The squatters’ slum grew rapidly, but with a haphazard, needs-driven planlessness that was a disorderly contrast to the neater lanes of the workers’ slum. In time there were eight squatters for every person in the workers’ compound, more than twenty-five thousand people in all, and the division between legal and illegal slums became blurred, camouflaged by the crowding.
Although the Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the illegal slum, and construction company officers discouraged contact between workers and squatters, the people thought of themselves as one group; their days and dreams and drives were entangled in the ravel of ghetto life. To workers and squatters alike, the company fence was like all fences: arbitrary and irrelevant. Some of the workers who weren’t permitted to bring more than immediate family into the legal slum invited their relatives to squat near them, beyond the wire. Friendships flourished among the children of both sides, and marriages of love or arrangement were common. Celebrations on one side of the wire were well attended by residents from both sides. And because fires, floods, and epidemics didn’t recognise barbed-wire boundaries, emergencies in one part of the slum required the close co-operation of all.
Karla, Prabaker, and I bent low to step through an opening in a section of fence, and we passed into the legal slum. A covey of children trooped along beside us, dressed in freshly washed T-shirts and dresses. They all knew Prabaker and me well. I’d treated many of the young children, cleaning and bandaging cuts, abrasions, and rat bites. And more than a few of the workers, afraid that they might be stood down from work when they received minor injuries on the construction site, had visited my free clinic rather than the company’s first-aid officer.
‘You know everybody here,’ Karla remarked as we were stopped for the fifth time by a group of neighbours. Are you running for mayor of this place, or what?’
‘Hell, no. I can’t stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.’
‘That’s not bad,’ she murmured. Her eyes were laughing.
‘I wish I could say it was mine,’ I grinned. An actor named Amitabh said it.’
‘Amitabh Bachchan?’ she asked. ‘The Big B himself?’
‘Yeah—do you like Bollywood movies?’
‘Sure, why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered, shaking my head. ‘I just didn’t … think you would.’
There was a pause, then, that became an awkward silence. She was first to speak.
‘But you do know a lot of people here, and they like you a lot.’
I frowned, genuinely surprised by the suggestion. It never occurred to me that the people in the slum might like me. I knew that some men—Prabaker, Johnny Cigar, even Qasim Ali Hussein—regarded me as a friend. I knew that some others treated me with a respect that seemed honest and unfeigned. But I didn’t consider the friendship or the respect as any part of being liked.
‘This is a special day,’ I said, smiling and trying to shift ground. ‘The people have been trying for years to get their own primary school. They’ve got about eight hundred school-age kids, but the schools for miles around are full, and can’t take them. The people got their own teachers organised, and found a good spot for a school, but the authorities still put up a hell of a fight.’
‘Because it’s a slum …’
‘Yeah. They’re afraid that a school would give the place a kind of legitimacy. In theory, the slum doesn’t exist, because it’s not legal and not recognised.’
‘We are the not-people,’ Prabaker said happily, ‘And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living.’
‘And now we have a not-school to go with it,’ I concluded for him. ‘The municipality finally agreed to a kind of compromise. They allowed them to set up a temporary school near here, and there’ll be another one organised soon. But they’ll have to tear them down when the construction is finished.’
‘When will that be?’
‘Well, they’ve been building these towers for five years already, and there’s probably about three more years’ work in it, maybe more. No-one’s really sure what’ll happen when the buildings are finished. In theory, at least, the slum will be cleared.’
‘Then all this will be gone?’ Karla asked, turning to sweep the hutment city with her gaze.
‘All will be gone,’ Prabaker sighed.
‘But today’s a big day. The campaign for the school was a long one, and it got pretty violent sometimes. Now the people have won, and they’ll have their school, so there’ll be a big celebration tonight. Meanwhile, one of the men who works here has finally got a son, after having five daughters in a row, so he’s having a special pre-celebration lunch, and everyone’s invited.’
‘The Village in the Sky!’ Prabaker laughed.
‘Just where is this place? Where are you taking me?’
‘Right here,’ I replied, pointing upwards. ‘Right up there.’
We’d reached the perimeter of the legal slum, and the megalithic immensity of the twin skyscrapers loomed before us. Concreting had been completed to three-quarters of their height, but there were no windows, doors, or fittings on the unfinished buildings. With no flash or reflection or trim to relieve the grey massiveness of the structures, they swallowed light into themselves, extinguished it, and became silos for storing shadows. The hundreds of cave-like holes that would eventually be windows allowed a kind of cross-sectional view into the construction—an ant-farm picture of men and women and children, on every floor, walking to and fro, upward and down, about their tasks. At ground level, the noise was a percussive and exciting music of towering ambition: the nervous irritation of generators, the merciless metal-to-metal zing of hammers, and the whining insistence of drills and grinders.
Snaking lines of sari-clad women carrying dishes of gravel on their heads wove through all the workplaces, from man-made dunes of small stones to the yawning mouths of ceaselessly revolving cement-mixing machines. To my western eyes, those fluid, feminine figures in soft red, blue, green, and yellow silk were incongruous in the physical turmoil of the construction site. Yet I knew, from watching them through the months, that they were indispensable to the work. They carried the great bulk of stone and steel and cement on their slender backs, one round dish-full at a time. The uppermost floors hadn’t been concreted, but the framework of upright, transom, and truss girders was already in place and even there, thirty-five storeys into th
e sky, women worked beside the men. They were simple people from simple villages, most of them, but their view of the great city was unparalleled, for they were building the tallest structures in Bombay.
‘Tallest buildings in all India,’ Prabaker said with a gesture of expansive, proprietal pride. He lived in the illegal slum, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the construction, but he boasted about the buildings as if they were his own design.
‘Well, the tallest buildings in Bombay, anyway,’ I corrected. ‘You’ll get a good view from up there. We’re having lunch on the twenty-third floor.’
‘Up … there?’ Karla said through an expression of exquisite dread.
‘No problem, Miss Karla. We are not walking up it, this building. We are travelling first class, in that very fine lifts.’
Prabaker pointed to the freight elevator attached to the outside of the building in a yellow, steel framework. She watched as the platform jerked and rattled upwards on heavy cables with loads of men and equipment.
‘Oh, swell,’ Karla said. ‘Now I feel great about it.’
‘I feel great, too, Miss Karla!’ Prabaker agreed, his smile huge as he tugged at her sleeve and pulled her toward the elevator. ‘Come, we will catch the lifts on the next run. They are a beautiful buildings, yes?’
‘I don’t know. They look like monuments to something that died,’ she muttered to me as we followed him. ‘Something very unpopular … like … the human spirit, for example.’
The workmen who ran the freight elevator shouted safety instructions at us, gruff in their self-importance. We climbed onto the wobbling platform with several other men and women, and a wheelbarrow containing work tools and barrels of rivets. The driver blew two shrill blasts on his metal whistle and threw the lever that activated the powerful generators, controlling our ascent. The motor roared, the platform shuddered, throwing us at the panic-handles attached to the uprights, and the elevator groaned slowly upwards. There was no cage surrounding the platform, only a yellow pipe at waist height around the three open sides. In a few seconds, we were fifty, eighty, a hundred metres off the ground.
‘How do you like it?’ I shouted.
‘I’m scared out of my brain!’ she shouted back, her dark eyes shining. ‘It’s great!’
‘Are you afraid of heights?’
‘Only when I’m on them! I hope you got a reservation, at this goddamn restaurant of yours! What are we doing eating lunch here, anyway? Don’t you think they should finish the building first?’
‘They’re working on the top floors now. This elevator is constantly in use. It’s not usually available for the workers to use. It’s reserved for wheelbarrows and building materials and stuff. It’s a long climb, up thirty flights of steps every day, and it gets fairly tricky in places. A lot of the people who work these upper floors stay up here most of the time. They live up here. Eat, work, and sleep. They’ve got farm animals and kitchens and everything. Goats for milk, and chickens for eggs, everything they need is sent up to them. It’s sort of like a base camp that mountaineers use when they climb Everest.’
‘The Village in the Sky!’ she shouted back.
‘You got it.’
The elevator stopped at the twenty-third floor, and we stumbled out onto a concrete surface that sprouted clumps of steel rods and wires like metal weeds. It was a vast, cavernous space, divided by equidistant columns and canopied by a flat, concrete ceiling adorned with a creepery of cables. Every flat plane was an unrelieved grey, which gave a startling vividness to the human and animal figures grouped on the far side of the floor. An area around one of the pillars was fenced off with wicker and bamboo for use as an animal pen. Straw and hessian was strewn about to serve as bedding for the goats, chickens, cats, and dogs that foraged amid discarded food scraps and rubbish in the pen. Rolled blankets and mattresses, for the people who slept there, were heaped around another pillar. Yet another pillar had been designated as a play area for children, with a few games and toys and small mats scattered for their use.
As we approached the crowd of people, we saw that a great feast was being laid out on clean reed mats. Huge banana leaves served as plates. A team of women scooped out servings of saffron rice, alu palak, kheema, bhajee, and other foods. A battery of kerosene stoves stood nearby, and more food was cooking there. We washed our hands in a drum of water and joined the others, sitting on the floor between Johnny Cigar and Prabaker’s friend Kishore. The food was much more piquantly spiced with chillies and curries than any available in restaurants in the city, and much more delicious. As was customary, the women had their own banquet, laid out some five metres away. Karla was the only female in our group of twenty men.
‘How are you liking the party?’ Johnny asked Karla as the first course of foods was being replaced by the second.
‘It’s great,’ she replied. ‘Damn nice food. Damn nice place to eat it.’
‘Ah! Here is the new daddy!’ Johnny called out. ‘Come here, Dilip. Meet Miss Karla, a friend of Lin’s who has come to eat with us.’
Dilip bowed low with his hands pressed together in greeting, and then moved away, smiling shyly, to supervise the preparation of tea at two large stoves. He worked as a rigger on the site. The site manager had given him the day off to organise the feast for his family and friends. His hut was on the legal side of the slum, but close to my own across the wire.
Beside the women’s banquet area, just beyond Dilip’s tea stoves, two men were attempting to clean something from the wall. A word that someone had painted there was still legible beneath their scrubbing. It was the word SAPNA, written in large English capitals.
‘What is that?’ I asked Johnny Cigar. ‘I’ve seen it everywhere lately.’
‘It’s bad, Linbaba,’ he spat out, crossing himself superstitiously. ‘It’s the name of a thief, a goonda. He’s a bad fellow. He’s been doing evil things all over the city. He’s been breaking into houses, and stealing, and even killing.’
‘Did you say killing?’ Karla asked. The skin on her lips was tight, and her jaw was set in a hard, grim line.
‘Yes!’ Johnny insisted. ‘First it was just words, in posters and such, and writing on the walls. Now, it has come to murder—cold blood murder. Two people were killed in their own houses just last night.’
‘He is so crazy, this Sapna, he uses a girl’s name,’ Jeetendra sneered.
It was a good point. The word sapna, meaning dream, was feminine, and a fairly common girl’s name.
‘Not so crazy,’ Prabaker disagreed, his eyes gleaming but his expression grave. ‘He tells that he is the king of thieves. He talks about making it war, to help the poor people, and killing the rich peoples. This is crazy, yes, but it is the kind of a crazy that many people will agree with, inside the quiet of their own heads.’
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘Nobody knows who he is, Lin,’ Kishore said, his American-accented English, learned from tourists, flowing in a liquid drawl. ‘A lot of people are talking about him, but nobody I spoke to has ever seen him. People say he’s the son of a rich man. They say he’s from Delhi, and that he got cut out of his inheritance. But some people also say he’s a devil. Some people think that it’s not a man at all, but a kind of organisation, like. There are posters stuck up around the place, posters telling the thieves and the poor buggers in the zhopadpattis to do crazy things. And like Johnny said, now two people have been murdered. The name Sapna is getting painted on walls and streets all over Bombay. The cops are asking a lot of questions. I think they’re scared.’
‘The rich peoples are scared, too,’ Prabaker added. ‘They were rich people, those unlucky fellows, killed in their homes. This Sapna fellow is writing his name in English letters, not the Hindi writing. This is an educated fellow. And who painted that name here, in this place? The peoples are always here, always work or sleep, but nobody has seen who painted his name. An educated ghost! Rich peoples are also scared. Not so crazy, this Sapna fellow.’
‘Madac
hudh! Pagal!’ Johnny spat again. Motherfucker! Madman! ‘He’s trouble, this Sapna, and the trouble will be ours, you know, because trouble is the only property that poor fellows like us are allowed to own.’
‘I think we might change the subject, guys,’ I interjected, looking at Karla. Her face was pale, and her eyes were wide with what seemed to be fright. Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ she answered quickly. ‘Maybe that elevator ride was scarier than I thought.’
‘Sorry for problem, Miss Karla,’ Prabaker apologised, his face pinched in a solicitous frown. ‘From now, only happy talking. No more talking about killing and murders and blood all over the houses, and all that.’
‘That should cover it, Prabu,’ I muttered through clenched teeth, glaring at him.
Several young women came to clear the used banana leaves away, and lay out small dishes of sweet rabdi dessert for us. They stared at Karla with frank fascination.
‘Her legs are too thin,’ one of them said, in Hindi. ‘You can see them, through the pants.’
‘And her feet are too big,’ said another.
‘But her hair is very soft, and a good, black Indian colour,’ said a third.
‘Her eyes are the colour of stink-weed,’ said the first with a contemptuous sniff.
‘Be careful, sisters,’ I laughed, speaking in Hindi. ‘My friend speaks perfect Hindi, and she understands everything you’re saying.’
The women reacted with shocked scepticism, chattering amongst themselves. One of them stooped to stare into Karla’s face, and asked her loudly if she spoke Hindi.
‘My legs may be too thin, and my feet may be too big,’ Karla replied in fluent Hindi, ‘but there’s nothing wrong with my hearing.’
The women shrieked in delight and crowded around her, laughing happily. They pleaded with her to join them, sweeping her away to the women’s banquet. I watched her for some time, surprised to see her smile and even laugh out loud in the company of the women and the young girls. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known. It was the beauty of a desert at dawn: a loveliness that filled my eyes, and crushed me into silent, unbreathing awe.
Shantaram Page 31