Balls Deep…

I heard once that if you were to to drop an a-bomb smack in the middle of Dharavi, India’s largest slum (and the second largest in all of Asia), the shock wave wouldn’t reach any permanent home dwellers…

You’re abolutely right you smart Alec, there’s no way anyone could ever prove something like that, but the point is that Dharavi is enormous. There’s reportedly over a million people living there and it keeps getting bigger every year. I wanted to go, so we went.

As we walked through the swampy arteries of a labyrinth of shanty houses and trash heaps, children started to show up, smiling, running, following. I had reservations. I didn’t know what the politics of me entering this slum would be like. Would these people try to sell me stuff? Would they try to steal my bag? Would they ask me for money?

These kids were just laughing at us, talking amongst eachother, plotting some hi jinks that my rudimentary understanding of Hindi would never be able to grasp. What did they WANT?

They were probably thinking the same thing about us. We kept walking deeper into the slum, shimmying through narrower and darker passage ways, not knowing whether we were eventually going to end up at a dead end, or maybe find ourselves back to the main road, or maybe we’d end up in someone’s kitchen. One of the alleys was barely wide enough for me and my daypack to turn around 180 degrees. Every few feet I’d pass a threshold, and being the ever-curious voyeur, I would peer inside, maybe even stick my head in and snoop around while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There they were, the masters of the house doing what people do, cooking their food, washing their clothes, raising their children, (many of whom had been following us). As we kept moving through the maze, I realized that I was in an insular universe, packed into these tiny holes in the walls were homes of ten people or more, but also shops and business of all kinds- tea houses, tv repair shops, leather workers, barber shops, clothes, food, you could find anything in downtown Dharavi, you wouldn’t need or want to spend your money or your free time outside the slum. I’m watching some potters work the wheel in a 3 foot wide alley when a cow and a man riding a bicycle while carrying a large jug of water on his head both need to pass eachother, and I’m in the middle. I decide that I’m better off not moving, because these characters will just know what to do. Sure enough they pass me without slowing down.

I notice that hanging from the rooftops were strings lined with flags of all kinds of symbols and religious icons. Muslim flags, Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Christian- and though I didn’t find any sign of Buddhists, I’d guess there a few hanging out there. I took my camera out to snap a few shots of some of those pretty flags, and a group of the children who were following us ran into frame and crowded together so everyone could get in the shot. They never asked for money, they never tried to sell me anything, but they did want their picture taken as often as I would take them. They didn’t ask to see the photos or anything, they just wanted to be in the frame when I pressed the clicker on my antique minolta. Many of these kids were posing for the first photograph ever taken of them. Not bad at all for their first try.

The booming markets of a mumbai slum… it just makes you realize the extent of the scrapiness of Indian culture. Most of these people make whatever they can in the city and keep their money within the slum economy, so there’s a lot coming in, and very little going out. Shanty houses with sattelite dishes and dvd players aren’t hard to find. One guy we passed posed for us leaning against his sporty Honda coupe- it looked pretty new. And right near the shiny red car were walls of year old trash, children shitting liquid into a gutter lining main street, and through the heart of it all a river of sludge running thick and black, you could smell it from a mile away.

It’s important for the traveler to remember not to pity the world through which he wanders. Sometimes that’s nearly impossible, but the challenge is recognizing the beauty of the drama, the universal stakes of human survival and all the pages of themes that come with it. Parents raising their children. Boys meeting girls. Competition among pals. The beauty of struggle. We found some of it there in Dharavi.

Das