Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Three months after the riots, Durriya, working in her office, walked out to get some papers and there was a mighty blast; the ceiling collapsed in the room she’d just left. One of the bombs had gone off in her building. Her brother was working in the Stock Exchange building; when the next bomb went off in its basement, the glass of the viewing gallery shattered and fell on him, wounding him. She was not entirely displeased.

  “There’s no justification for the blasts,” Durriya emphasized. “An eye for an eye is a terrible thing.” At the same time, when the Muslims in her office traveled on the trains, they felt the Hindus were looking at them with new fear. They could raise their heads. “Their self-respect had been restored.” It was the old story: the powerful wish of minorities all over the world to be the oppressor rather than the oppressed. Almost every Muslim I spoke to in Bombay agreed that the riots had devastated their sense of self-worth; they were forced to stand by helplessly as they watched their sons slaughtered, their possessions burnt before their eyes. When the bombs went off, killing and maiming people indiscriminately, the Hindus were reminded that the Muslims weren’t helpless. On the trains, proving ground of dignity, they could hold their heads high again.

  THE RIOTS HAD ONE CONSEQUENCE their planners couldn’t have foreseen: They became a recruitment bonanza for the Muslim underworld. I met one such man, Blackeye, who became a professional hit man for the Dawood Ibrahim gang. In 1992, Blackeye, then fifteen years old, was living with his family in a large housing development named Pratiksha Nagar. One Friday, some Maharashtrian men—their neighbors, their friends—went around the complex marking the Muslim houses. They found out that there were about five thousand Muslims in the colony. The next day, a Saturday, they held a maha-aarti, a massive public puja, and the streets rang with triumphant temple bells and the blowing of conches. On Sunday morning, Blackeye was watching cartoons on television when there was a knock on the door. “We are from the government,” a voice said. “Open the door. We need to see your ration card.” Blackeye’s father immediately slung a rod across the door, from the inside. The men started banging on the door, harder, and then broke it and stormed inside. They took the iron rod and went at his father, in front of his family. “I saw the boy who was beating my father. He was my friend. He used to come to my home to eat at Eid. He used to play cricket with me.” So Blackeye folded his hands and begged. “You used to come to our house!” His friend just looked at him and told him to get out of there, because he was so small. Blackeye fled to his uncle’s house, screaming for him to come help. His uncle refused; he was afraid for his own life.

  Meanwhile, his mother and his sisters had locked themselves in the bedroom, clutching bottles of Tik-20, an insecticide; if the Sena men broke in, they would swallow the poison before they could be defiled. They weren’t touched, but the Sena men broke everything in the house after they finished assaulting Blackeye’s father. Afterward, the family abandoned the apartment and stayed in a transit camp for three days. The nearby eateries wouldn’t even give them water to drink, and they lived on rotten tomatoes. But the worst was yet to come. “After the riots we had to beg,” recalls Blackeye, his eyes reddening even now, years later. “We had to put our hands out—for biscuits, for clothes, from the relief agencies.” He grew up, dropped out of school, joined the Muslim gang, and started killing people, including the devoutly Hindu music magnate Gulshan Kumar. “After the riots most of the boys from Pratiksha Nagar joined the Dawood gang. It was my main reason too.”

  The Bombay Police see Muslims as criminals, much as some American police view African Americans. A newspaper headline from December 1996 read: HOME TRUTH: MUSLIMS MORE LIKELY TO BECOME CRIMINALS THAN HINDUS. The article stated that Muslims, who comprise just under a fifth of the population of the city, were responsible for a third of its crimes, based on a survey of various police stations. The cases registered against Hindus involved accidents, fraud, and theft while the ones registered against Muslims were more violent. An inspector from Cuffe Parade station was quoted: “Muslims are caught for crimes such as extortion, rapes and murders, gang wars and organized car thefts. Hindus are mainly arrested for cheating, eve-teasing”—sexual molestation short of rape—“fraud, theft and robbery.”

  “The police gave us good cooperation during the riots,” Sunil said to me. “Deshmukh, the Jogeshwari policeman, would say with pride, Bala-saheb called me.”

  Between January 10 and January 18, 1993, the activist Teesta Setalvad taped conversations off the police frequency as police squads on the road coordinated activities with the control room. This is some of what went out over the airwaves:

  DONGRI I TO CONTROL: Two military trucks have come carrying milk and other rations. They are led by Major Syed Rehmatullah. . . . A crowd has gathered. . . . Please send more men.

  CONTROL: Why the fuck are you distributing milk to them landyas [circumcised pricks, i.e., Muslims]? Do you want to fuck their mothers? Over there, bhenchod mias [another term for Muslims] live.

  A bit later that same day:

  DONGRI I: The people gathered to collect milk and rations have dispersed now.

  CONTROL: Who has milk been distributed to? Madharchod, do you get me, do not distribute milk to landyas. Have you understood?

  DONGRI I: These two trucks . . . are military trucks, and the major’s name is Syed Rehmatullah.

  CONTROL: Seize that vehicle. Search the landyas. Fuck his mother, fuck the Shahi Imam.

  From another location:

  V.P. ROAD I TO CONTROL: A mob has gathered outside Maharashtra garage, Ghasgalli, Lamington Road, with the intention of setting it on fire. Send men.

  CONTROL: Must be a landya’s garage. Let it burn. Shit, if it belongs to a Maharashtrian, don’t burn anything that belongs to a Maharashtrian. But burn everything that belongs to a mia bhenchod.

  ASAD BIN SAIF, an activist in an NGO that is fighting hate in the slums, took me to Radhabai Chawl, where the Hindu family was burnt. Like everything else about the schizophrenic city, it had two names: a plaque outside identified it as GANDHI CHAWL. A women’s group, Rahe-haq, had arranged a meeting for me; their office was in the very building where the atrocity had taken place.

  Before the women arrived, I was sitting in the room where an entire family was burnt alive, listening to an old Muslim man tell me, “Sir, please do something to remove the hate from people’s hearts, so that the Ganga and the Jamuna can flow together. You are young, do something. Some poison has entered.” The room had been turned into a library and community center by Yuva, an NGO, and this man, a neighbor of the family that was killed, was the librarian. The library’s collection consisted of an old trunk full of books with titles that explained why the library had only three members: “Building development projects in partnership with communities and NGOs: An action agenda for policy makers.” He was born in Bombay—“my matrubhumi,” he said, using the Hindu word for motherland. Then he started singing, in a quavering voice: “Sara jahan se accha, Hindustan hamara. . . .” I was unexpectedly moved; I felt my eyes watering. This man was not cynical. He had no sense of irony. He was a Muslim man working in a library in a Muslim ghetto that had no books in Urdu. And he was singing a paean to Hindustan.

  On January 17, 1993, L. K. Advani, then president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—the Sena’s coalition partner and the instigator of the Babri Masjid demolition—came to Gandhi Chawl to highlight this atrocity against Hindus. Arifa Khan went to see the famed politician. He had stepped out of his car and was looking around the slum. Arifa Khan was suddenly moved to speak. She called out, “Why did you come here now?” Then this short, pretty Muslim woman from the slums of Bombay said to the man who wanted to be prime minister, “If you didn’t do your kar seva, your rath yatra, this wouldn’t have happened.” Advani had no answer to Arifa’s remark, which referred to his stoking of mass Hindu rage through nationwide processions on a chariot in the weeks before the demolition. He got back in his car, and his entourage, commandos, and cars le
ft Jogeshwari to its fate.

  Arifa Khan, along with about twenty other Muslim women, was now sitting in the room, which also functions as a day-care center. There was also a Hindu couple. Then a couple of tough-looking Muslim boys dressed in lungis joined us uninvited. Asad introduced me, and the women started telling me about the troubles: their men shot and stabbed, by the police or the Hindus. The azaan rang out from a nearby mosque; the women covered their heads. The Hindus and Muslims now lived apart in the slum, out of choice. It hurt the women I was speaking to that during the time of the curfew Hindus would not let them buy food from their areas.

  Had they considered going to Pakistan? asked Asad.

  “This is our watan”—homeland. “Whatever it is, it’s our India.” One of the women claimed the right to live here by virtue of the fact that she votes. “If we don’t get them seats, will they get seats?”

  Bombay has one and a half times the proportion of Muslim residents as the country has overall; Muslims in Bombay comprise more than 17 percent of the city’s population. In India as a whole, Muslims number 120 million, 12 percent of the general population. That makes India home to the second largest Muslim population in the world. Half a century after Partition, there are still more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. By choosing to stay, they have voted with their feet. But most Hindus in the city did not believe that Muslims were nationalistic. They believed, as Thackeray put it in his party newspaper just after the Babri Masjid fell, “Pakistan need not cross the border and attack India. Two hundred and fifty million Muslims in India loyal to Pakistan will stage an armed uprising. [They are one of] Pakistan’s seven atomic bombs.” Further, “A Muslim, whichever country he belongs to, is first a Muslim. Nation is of secondary importance to him.”

  The Muslims of Bombay are the most diverse group of the followers of Mohammed in the country. It’s not just the division between Shia and Sunni; there are Dawoodi Bohras, Ismailis, Deobandis, Barelvis, Memons, Moplahs, Ahmaddiyas, and so on. The Hindutva parties spread fear of the Muslim horde, as if it were a monolith. The truth is that many of the groups, such as the Deobandis and Barelvis or the traditional and the reformist Bohras, often hate each other more passionately than they do the Hindus. But the riots united them too. The Dawoodi Bohras of Malabar Hill discovered what they had in common with the Bihari Sunnis in the Madanpura slums: a very public questioning of their claim to be citizens of India. They discovered their biggest crime was that they were Muslims.

  One of the angry young boys said his brother was killed in the riots and nobody had been arrested. But when the Hindu family died, eleven Muslims were arrested and given life sentences. A Sena corporator, an organizer, they had heard, took the handicapped girl’s corpse all around Bombay to get the Hindus inflamed. “One woman died in Radhabai Chawl,” the angry boy said. “Fifty of our people died and nothing happened. The law is theirs; they can do what they want. If you have justice, let it be on both sides or tell us to fight! We know how to fight.” Gradually, the boys took over the meeting; the women stopped speaking. The Hindu couple got up and left.

  After a while the boys got up to leave, but not before warning me, “Write correct things.” One of them laughed, without humor. “If you don’t write anything it’ll be okay too.”

  After the boys left, the atmosphere lightened precipitously. The women apologized for the boys. “They are angry,” one of the women said. “That’s why I didn’t want to bring them.”

  Another woman told me how much this time with me was costing her. “I am sitting here but my heart is at home. Will I get water? Will I have to wait two hours?” To get water in the slum, the women have to line up and take numbers. Each person, in groups of thirty, gets two buckets for the household’s needs. Your religion determines how often you will bathe, where you will shit. “In the Hindu areas each lane has a tap, here each eight or ten lanes has one. Over there, there are toilets everywhere. In our area the toilets have been stopped for one year.”

  Much of the slum is a garbage dump. The sewers, which are open, run right between the houses, and children play and occasionally fall into them. They are full of a blue-black iridescent sludge. When the government sweepers come to clean the drains, they scoop it out and leave piles of it outside the latrines. I couldn’t use the public toilets. I tried, once. There were two rows of toilets. Each one of them had masses of shit, overflowing out of the toilets and spread liberally all around the cubicle. For the next few hours that image and that stench stayed with me, when I ate, when I drank. It’s not merely an esthetic discomfort; typhoid runs rampant through the slum and spreads through oral—fecal contact. Pools of stagnant water, which are everywhere, breed malaria. Many children also have jaundice. Animal carcasses are spread out on the counters of the butcher shops, sprinkled with flies like a moving spice. The whole slum is pervaded by a stench that I stopped noticing after a while.

  They complained that neither their municipal corporator, a Muslim woman, nor their state legislator, a Shiv Sena man, listened to them. So Arifa Khan, along with a group of eight other women, started a group in the Jogeshwari slums. Rahe-haq—The Right Path—is an organization of around fifteen women, most but not all of them Muslim. They started with nine members in 1988 in response to the toilet problem. There are two million people without access to latrines in Bombay. You can see them every morning along the train tracks, trudging with a tumbler of water, looking for a vacant place to squat. It is a terrible thing, a degrading thing, for a woman to be forced to look every morning for a little privacy to go to the toilet or to clean herself while she’s menstruating. No city this rich should make its women suffer this way. The women of this slum were luckier. They had toilets built by the municipality, but they were full, and the municipality wasn’t doing anything about unblocking them. Every election, various leaders would come around to the slum and promise to do something about the toilets. The group of women got together and went to the municipal office. “We did bhagdaud,” explained the women. This term, familiar to anybody dealing with Indian bureaucracy, means to run around, to go from one office to the next with your petition till you get what you’re looking for. The women did bhagdaud, and finally some of the toilets were cleaned.

  Energized by the success of their toilet struggle, the women went on to water. Water comes here for a couple of hours a day, and there is a long line of women with buckets at the municipal tap. At the time, the municipal water connections were cut back. This was done at the behest of local plumbers. They stood to make money if the municipality cut its connections, so they bribed the officials involved to do so. The plumbers charged 16,000 rupees for a half-inch pipe of water; four households might get together and pay 4,000 rupees each to buy one such connection. Tangles of pipes snake along the alleys in the slum. The women of Rahe-haq made a pani morcha, a water protest march, to the municipal office. The municipality was forced to increase the supply.

  People in the slum started approaching the Committee, as the women call themselves, for other kinds of problems related to the riots. A widow who had gone mad after seeing the burnt corpse of her husband hanging from a tree was having problems getting compensation money that the government was giving to riot victims; the Committee interceded. The scope of their work became larger. Women who had been divorced by their husbands came to them; under Muslim law, a husband can part with his wife essentially by saying “I divorce you” three times. The Committee got a lawyer to provide these women with legal advice. A group of five women was set up to counsel couples between whom some shadow had entered. “We listen to both sides; we talk to orthodox people using religious arguments, then we get people back together. If the men are criminals we take them to court.” The women went on to sort out problems with ration cards, and in the last local elections they supported a woman from the slum under the Janata Dal banner.

  I asked the women if their husbands supported the Committee. There was a gale of laughter. “We have to hear their curses.” The local branch of th
e Muslim League party started spreading rumors about them: They were not modest; they were dealing with men every day in their work. They accused them of being un-Islamic and finally destroyed their office.

  The women set up a day-care center and ran it themselves, until the boys who had recently been sitting in the room took the center from them at knifepoint. They wanted the room to smoke charas—hashish—and ganja; after the riots, the hotheads were newly emboldened in the community. Now the women had to do with this much smaller room, this charnel house of 1993, as their day-care center. They would soon be going again to the Municipal Corporation, to press for a bigger room, with a lock. If there is hope for Bombay, it is in this group of slum women, all illiterate, and others like them. Issues of infrastructure are not abstract problems for them. Much more than the men, the women have to deal with such issues firsthand. If you want to make sure that the money you send to a poor place will be spent properly, give it to the women who live there.

  I asked one of the Jogeshwari women if she wouldn’t rather live in a decent apartment than the slum she lived in now, with the open gutter outside and the absence of indoor plumbing. Yes, there was a building planned nearby to resettle the slum dwellers. But people from her neighborhood wouldn’t move there. “There’s too much aloneness. A person can die behind the closed doors of a flat and no one will know. Here,” she observed with satisfaction, “there are a lot of people.”

  Be it ever so humble. . . . We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery. What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, the people have formed a community, and they are as attached to its spatial geography, the social networks they have built for themselves, the village they have re-created in the midst of the city, as a Parisian might be to his quartier or as I was to Nepean Sea Road. “I like this place,” said Arifa Khan of her home and her basti, her neighborhood. “This is mine. I know the people here and I like the facilities here.” Any urban redevelopment plan has to take into account the curious desire of slum dwellers to live closely together. A greater horror than open gutters and filthy toilets, to the people of Jogeshwari, is the empty room in the big city.