A story is emerging, I tell myself—maybe not a neat one … at least not the usual fare of those that paint the world as an obvious war between the powers-that-be and the little people. I am reminded of Avery Gordon’s chastising remark, reminding me that “even those who live in the most dire circumstances possess a complex and oftentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing them as victims or, on the other hand, as superagents.”1 Could I discover deeper nuance as I listen for story? Perhaps as I gain insight after insight, a hush would stroll into my field of vision—and I can do the prayer rites.
Let’s get back to Kutti.
Though considered the lowest of the low, his work keeps Chennai running like a more laid-back Swiss clock: setting out around 6 p.m. every evening, Kutti rides his three-wheeler vehicle through slender streets, picking up passengers and dropping them off, navigating tricky terrain and reaching places inaccessible to cars—even to the popular small cars motor factories have flooded the streets with. He will often work on the streets till the wee hours of the morning, getting home exhausted to his wife, his young children, his in-laws, and those who come in to spend the night in his shack—a trend that may explain his fondness for chewing the stimulating ingredients of a paan mixture.
In light of the rapid urbanization of Chennai (as is the case with other metropolitan cities in India) and an uptick in rural-urban migration—due perhaps to modern schooling, the loosening of cultural ties and imperatives, and the increasingly tenuous promise of jobs in the city for those who can make it there—there is hardly room anymore for people like Kutti. The bumps and grooves of the lands his grandparents might have learned to communicate with as home have now been flattened and filled up by mega-ambitious residential projects designed for the rich. Land spaces that have belonged to families for generations, and which many families often refuse to sell away, are very often appropriated by wealthy corporations with additional support from banks and bribed court officials. Kutti and his kin must survive along with the many others that India’s envious rush to heaven cannot account for and has no space for. They must live in these borderlands in the middle of the city, as refugees of a protracted war against things. Against dust.
And yet Kutti is not a “victim” or subject of modernity’s eliding power in the totalizing sense of the word; there is a complexity to this “slum,” to him (as Gordon considers in her remarks above), which is borne out in the ways these practices of huddling together undercut the capitalist extractivist rationality of “scarcity” and “never enough.” Because the self—that rusty screw that holds the chug-chug-chugging machine of modernity and its manifesto of estrangement together—is so closed up, so ontologically distanced from everything else, modernity produces an exhausting verticality, forcing upward movement or transcendence by denying the significance of our connections with others. Over here, something more than mere proximity is at work. There is an abundance here, in this mishmash reliquary of humans and nonhumans, in the modesty of this crevice. I have heard the rumors—a whisper here and a whisper there in the shadows of the fat pillars that uphold the regimes of the familiar—reports of other worlds pressingly close to ours where the usual laws of social mobility and ascension are suspended, as it were. What does Kutti know of these realms?
Later, we take a walk through the slum. I had expected the place to be a broken china plate in a sink filled with grime and spit. I am mistaken. Even though the slum shares a fence with a large sewage dump—an unmoving cesspool of fecal matter, plastic bottles, boots, cans, nylon bags, carcasses of unknown animals, and unfathomably large rats hovering over the deep like holy ghosts, all melted into a viscous semisolid chemical river of shadow, gloom, and black poison—there is an attention to hygiene and a keen desire to take care of those that visit. This is evidenced by the rows of water jugs outside the homes, which Velu tells me are used to clean one’s hands and feet before entering. A few women are sweeping their surroundings as I squeeze my way through the housing rows. A very narrow passageway, no wider than two feet across, snakes through the entire area. The rows of homes are all capped by overlapping asbestos sheets, sloping down on either side into the passageway, so that at one point there is hardly room enough for a decently sized neck to glide through. On the roofs, there are cats licking their paws, abandoned clothes, browning sacks of whatever, a Sky satellite dish, potted plants and flowers, bamboo mats, and the outdoor units of split air conditioners. No hushes, no epiphanies—just this gravity of objects in this remarkable species of home in the between-places.
Kutti prances on, introducing me as his friend to everyone we meet—women washing their cement floors, washing their dishes, tracing out the geometric patterns of kolams with chalk, men sitting with their grown children indoors watching television, and a chained albino dog barking its protest when I get too close.
Kutti wants me to take pictures; I had felt using my phone’s camera might be rude, inappropriate, and objectifying, but he insists—at times worrying that I am not capturing as much as I could. No one seems to care that I lift my device to take photos of them in front of their homes. A woman holds her little child, probably two or three years old, and urges her to give me a high-five. Some do not feel welcoming or responsive when I say hello, while others suppose that some kind of procession is ongoing, and want to tag along—just to know why I am here. An eighty-four-year-old man, missing many teeth, and carrying planks on his head, comes close to me and starts to tell me something. Velu and Kutti wave him off, and speak with him—and then ask me to “come, come.”
The camera, an extension of colonial visuality in the way it freezes movement into an officialized snapshot and initiates photographic archiving, becomes my digital hand of friendship. Or, in ways I cannot yet access, my distancing rod, affirming my place of power over these people. I “capture” everything I can—sometimes meeting the pixelated versions of those human bodies before we find each other in voice, skin, toothed smile, and the customary steel cup of water—or tea. When we get back from our tour, Kutti’s aged mother is sitting on the stone steps of a neighboring shack, with younger women surrounding her. I had met her during previous visits, and learned that she was married off to a man when she was seventeen years old, and had seven children for him. Her hands had served many homes, scrubbed many floors, fed many babies, and taken care of her children. Her hair is a shimmering white. Her smile, a cunning and yet affectionately cordial invitation to come closer. Kutti curls up to her, like a cat to her amused owner, hugging her, holding her fingers that are bent from too much handling, and drawing her attention to my lens. I am content just to watch mother and son, but Kutti, again, insists I record the moment. So I do, as the other women look on. I am struck with how intricately dense, connected, and abiding the relationships in the slum are. How anonymous the city feels in contrast.
Density. Enfoldments and entanglements of thick lives in thick lives. A democracy of objects. A wild place of skin, white hair, stacked pots, calloused knuckles, and knowing glances. For those recovering from the fantasies and insanities of flight. This Indian slum, hidden behind a phallic Samsung glass building, cordoned off by asphalt, shushed by the traffic of cyborg saints seeking glittery heavens to go marching into, and forgotten in the headlines that tout India as a fast-developing nation with abilities to launch satellites into space, tells a revisionist story about the dark places modernity supposedly saves us from—a story that presses the modesty of our occupations to live on earth. This place seems like the wild lands where the eloquence of the modern breaks down and splinters into the cacophony of many gasps—where humans and nonhumans, in chaotic and oftentimes risky configurations, are learning to press closer and closer to each other and live with each other.
At the risk of romanticizing Kutti’s conditions—and I hope I do not—this place feels to me to be a sanctuary of sorts.
As the dusking sky turns a shade darker, Kutti and I walk through a park not too far away
from the slum, both of us mostly silent. I do not know what to say to him, or how to say it if I did know. Velu is now gone, after receiving a call from his office. It is just me and this familiar stranger who has opened his home to me. A few inches shorter than me, Kutti walks some paces ahead, his dirty beige uniform—traditionally worn by rickshaw drivers—engulfing his small frame. We walk past a large public compound where several water tankers underneath overhead pipes are lined up, and some men—assumedly the tanker drivers and other operators—are pulling on fat hoses, fetching pails of water and washing big tires. There is a blue notice board painted with contrasting white Tamil fonts alongside the English words Metro Water. “Metro water,” Kutti says to me, pointing at the busy compound. “Have bath, water,” he adds, confirming my suspicions that this is where he gets water for his family to have baths, among other things (but where is the bathroom? He hasn’t shown me that yet). He meets a few people coming out the compound—big, husky men with their sweaty protruding bellies—shakes their hands, and points at me. I can only make out “friend-eh” from what he says to them—the rest of what he says is as undiscernible to me as the rest of this remarkable day away from you and mama.
We arrive at a small kiosk where he insists I must have a cup of tea or a cigarette if I’d prefer the latter. I decline both, but—after wondering if I am hurting my host’s cultural sensibilities in rejecting his offer—request the small paper cup of tea. The cigarette is not even an option.
Meanwhile, the mosquitoes are relentless in their thirst for blood—and Kutti notices I am quite preoccupied with slapping and kicking them away from me. So, we walk the short distance to his home, where he picks up the keys to his auto-rickshaw, calls upon his son and daughter—Vicki and Nandini—and then takes us to where his vehicle is parked, just across the street. The first thing I notice is how much care and attention Kutti has put into keeping his auto in pristine condition. Unlike the others I have been in, Kutti’s auto has padded leather seats, under-car LED lights and neon-lit tires, colorful graphic inscriptions on the yellow chassis, and insufferably loud sound speakers. Soon, Vicki, Nandini, and I are zipping through the streets with Kutti at the handle—a steady pulsating stream of local music blaring from the bug-like vehicle. I know a good many countries I have been to where we would have been locked up and reprimanded with sunken brows and an outrageous fine. Not in India. Not here. This place, these people are a fierce river—and though that river is now bordered by reinforced concrete riverbanks, so that the once joyful splash of flowing water is now the bovine mumbling of a gutter, Shiva—that subversive god that mocks all gestures of arrival—still roams these parts.
Vicki grabs my camera-phone from my pocket, focuses it on his little sister, takes a picture, and edits it—draining it of its color and settling for an aesthetically mature grayscale result. I commend him for his keen eye and photographic sensibilities. When we come to a stop, we meet other auto drivers, strategically parked outside a wedding ceremony to whisk guests to their homes when their partying is done. They shake my hand, and tell me their stories—they tell me about paying their electricity bills, taking care of their families, and ask what kinds of South Indian dishes I enjoy eating. After an hour or so, Kutti receives a call from Geetha, and we ride back home, where Kutti’s mother is seated in her little space, coughing and bent over in pain. As I wait outside her room to help her into the vehicle, a big rat gambols past me, oblivious to the frightened human standing just a few feet away. Kutti and I help his mother (and little Nandini, who has a cold or some other ailment that is making her cough) into the auto, and drive to a nearby hospital. Many doctors in Chennai situate their practices in their residences, allocating lower floors in their duplexes for consultations. Kutti tells me—in the best way he possibly could … with chunks of almost-one-tongue words held together by a flurry of gestures, sighs, and head-tossing laughter—that taking care of his family’s health care needs is easy for him to do: drugs are cheap, and there are shared homemade remedies among people living in the slum.
When we get home, there are others in the house. Many others. I find out that we all are going to spend the night in this tiny room—seven adults and two children in a space that is the size of a kitchen storage room in some of the new homes and apartments offered in the market. I am not alarmed by this—perhaps because Geetha has already whipped together a promising mixture of rice flour. She pours the fermented mix in her medium-size tava on her cooker, lightly greases the flat frying pan with generous drops of ghee oil, and then pours the mix in the sizzling pan, flattening the batter in spiraling hand movements. She offers me two golden pieces on a steel plate—and would offer me a dozen if I didn’t gently say no.
It is night outside, and a mob of stray dogs are arguing with each other under the rising moon—their throaty growls and treacherous motives as mysterious to us as Kutti’s attempts at conversation are to me. From what he says, I can make out “6:30,” and suppose he is saying we have to be up early. I am in agreement. I lie down in the “kitchen” on the spread of wrappers, which Kutti and Geetha have laid on the floor for me. Tucking myself into the thin layers of clothes, my every shrug attended to by a murmuration of mosquitoes, I try to shut my eyes—not before thinking of you and wondering if I would eventually meet any hushes.
I spring up from the ground when I hear faint voices at the edges of my fuzzy awareness. Kutti is folding his wrappers away, and—out of view—Geetha’s aunt is saying something inaudible. I check my phone: 6:23. Outside, there is no canine altercation, just that peculiarly soft warm shade of blue sky that recommends that you do not take things so seriously—the one before the stoic whiteness of daylight impervious to nuance or negotiation. I am not sure how to think of my short experience here, but I do feel at home in a strange sort of way. Of course, I have only come one day, and have the luxury of returning to more familiar (and comfortable) circumstances—but, at this moment, I say good morning to Kutti. He smiles, asks me if I slept well (to which I give an enthusiastically positive response) and says “Have bath, water,” performing that endearing head wobble as he does. As I search my backpack for my bath kit and towel, neatly arranged by Mama, I imagine there is a public bathroom somewhere provided for the slum-dwellers—perhaps a little hut where one can have a little privacy. At least I am hoping this is the case.
Kutti leads me out of the shack and onto the street. We pass the motorcycle workshop in front of the slum, cross the street, and walk into Metro Water’s graveled compound. No one’s there—just the yellow tankers set against the light blue of morning’s slow yawn. We stop behind one of the tankers, and Kutti says here.
Here. Here in the open is where I have a bath.
As if to demonstrate the viability of his baffling proposal, he gets behind the tanker, grabs a heavy red lever attached to a greasy ball valve, and cranks it open. A pipe shudders and spits, then pours out a single thick column of cold angry water. He shuts it off. “Soap?” he asks. “I have it … here,” I say, as I bend over to search my bath kit, looking for something more obvious than soap and less alarming than the next few minutes I am to live through.
When I eventually get in the crosshairs of that hollow pipe (while Kutti stands in the corner watching), and just after I squeeze the lever a full ninety degrees to the right—suddenly overcome in a rhapsody of splash, morning blue, and mechanical coherence—I feel something ungraspable I cannot fully account for. Something profound. I gasp as the water deals a blow to my body, making me buckle under its hydraulic wildness. A homecoming of a very fleeting sort.
Mind you, dear, I am not speaking about some kind of ecstatic state or moment of “self-actualization.” I do not suddenly feel “at one with the universe,” nor am I granted a revelation of the pureness of things or greater clarity about why I am with Kutti at this point. This is not a piercing light blinding that angry traveler on the road to Damascus. I am not levitating a few feet off the ground in weightless glory. My head is not orbited by a hal
o of hushes. This is not an epiphany. And yet, there’s not much more to turn on; it seems the more I struggle to grasp it, the more it withdraws from being fully held—so that I am almost limited to writing to you about it solely in terms of what it is not.
Are you wondering what I’m prattling about, dear? I’m sorry. Words fail. It’s so difficult to characterize. It is like describing the color red to one who is blind. How do you do that? What particular configuration of words is enough to grant one direct empirical access to the distinctness of red? I am momentarily lost, with no cardinal direction, with every orifice on my body trembling with animal alertness. Perhaps it might suffice to say—to speak about this in positive or productive terms—that this feeling, which I do not suppose is new or extraordinary, is a chimeric thing. It is one part an intoxicating expansiveness achieved by touching the virgin newness of a moment; another part a desire to kneel before the ferocity of that which has been encountered, and must be approached with hesitation.
My chest expands, my breathing intensifies, my pupils dilate. My body becomes a trembling antenna, the excited needle of a compass, or—better yet, a vibrating tuning fork in resonance with another body. The wild rush of water on my bare skin rekindles memories I did not myself create. It feels like an exhilarating adventure. And yet it feels like meeting a bellowing monster. It feels like being stopped in one’s tracks. As if behind this tanker, in the direct line of this pipe’s intervention, I have met the universe halfway. Or I have been met halfway.
As we cross the street, heading back home, I recognize that I have lost my voice. It’s as plain as that. I’m shivering from the cold, but my warmth is not the only thing displaced. The whole experience is breathtaking, in the literal sense of taking my breath away—and my “soul,” like Peter Pan’s shadow, has been exorcised and now roams free in the littered wilds. The narrative I had anticipated I would write you—this story about my journey to Kutti’s home, about his beautiful children, about the close others that press in and are entangled in his performance of selfhood, about the giant social project of modernity that rendered him a refugee even in his mother’s womb, about the complexities of the conditions in the slum about modern power, about complex identity, and building a home in small places—has been intercepted by the intelligence of veteran gravel and rushing water and hulking tanker and suede-blue morning. The unstoppable force of story has met the immovable object of vital matter. And my words must now nod toward the unspeakable that stands in the way of my becoming lost. A full account is no longer possible. I have met an obstacle in the force of that burst of truck water and the breakdown of my inner playwright—and a different sort of eloquence is now needed: the eloquence of a gasp.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 9