The highs and the lows
We enter Dharavi along a tarred road that passes through shops and makeshift stalls with all kinds of items for sale, blue canvas awnings, houses with clothes hanging, meager and dark, but mostly made of brick and cement. Rahul rushes forward, showing us there’s nothing to see, just another market street. I know he’s right, we have to venture into the backstreets. I convince him to go down through one of them. Streets become narrower, messier, dirtier, buildings smaller, cement replaced or supplemented by wooden extensions, corrugated metal plates, tarpaulins and plastics. People notice us without stopping with their errands, except for children, who wave or jump around us asking for pens and chocolates.
We stop at a junction between several alleys with a small statue. I read the sign, Ambedkar again. Rahul talks excitedly about the independence movement, neither Ambedkar, nor Nehru, nor Gandhi, his favorite figure of those times is Sardar Patel, the iron man who after the British retreat persuaded the over five hundred vassal principalities that remained to merge peacefully with India.
A group of four bolder kids approaches. They open a plastic bag with a broken papadum, we take a piece each and eat it. The kids laugh with Rahul, talking in Hindi. They want to show us something. We follow them along an oblique path, walled in with patches of boards and plastic. They bounce barefoot, we walk carefully down a narrow channel where black water flows, I don’t want to know where it comes from. We lower ourselves to pass under a dark tunnel. On the roofs of the houses are more papadums laid out to dry, and after several bends we come to a blind alley, blocked by a crumbling wall.
In a niche in the ruined wall is a small orange-painted figure with a small lit candle. The kids show us a postcard with an engraving, a man dressed in white, a white beard, a skinny leg crossed over his knee, and a gaze of deep commiseration. The image that can be seen everywhere, in restaurants, shops, buses, Sai Baba of Shirdi, one of the most popular saints in India.
“Is it the same as the one in Sadhna’s house?” asks Sara, recalling the man on the photos in the living room, with the same name and yet looking so different.
“Sadhna’s is more recent” I explain. “He used to say he was a reincarnation of this one.”
The kids are thrilled to have us in their sanctuary, they laugh a lot and talk to Rahul, who makes them laugh even more. The blue canvas protects us from the sun.
“OK, let’s go back?” asks Rahul after a few minutes.
I accept we cannot go any further. I have to settle for a hint of what I was looking for in the boys’ smiles and generosity. They drop us off at Ambedkar’s bust and we navigate with difficulty to the main road.
“Now let me take you to Bandra, one of my favorite places” says Rahul, as we enter the taxi.
On the walk to the sea we pass the mansions of politicians, cricket players, Bollywood stars. Consciously or not, Rahul shows us the reverse side of the city. A street food vendor prepares three paper plates for us, with chickpeas, round biscuits and other crunchy things, drizzled with spices, yogurt, mint and tamarind chutney, so fast that Sara has to guess the rest of the ingredients in the explosion of textures and flavors, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, spicy. We eat as we walk and sit on the rocks to finish.
Families and groups of friends carefully descend the large, irregular and dark boulders, randomly thrown, advancing along the almost flat rock that enters the sea. Some kids come dangerously close to the edge of slippery rocks licked by the water, and position themselves for a photograph with the Bandra‑Worli suspension bridge in the background. Vanished behind the gray curtain of smoke, like very straight weeds planted on the bridge deck, the needles of the skyscrapers stick out. More than a dozen couples are pressed together, holding hands and sitting on the rocks like us.
“Very relaxing. I used to come here when I was studying” says Rahul when he’s finished eating, and drops the empty plate on the rocks.
“Rahul!” protests Sara. “Don’t throw that here!”
“Hahaha! Why not?”
“Come on, you never did that in Amsterdam.”
Rahul picks up the paper plate. “No no, this is our tradition, you have to adapt to local customs! Look”.
Without taking her head from the boyfriend’s shoulder, a woman tossed a glass over her back, which joined the white and colored debris among the rocks. Others pieces of trash fly away and end up on the road or the sea. Disposable water bottles, papers, packages and plates.
“Where are the garbage bins?”
“I told you, the whole of India is a giant toilet! No bins needed.” Once more Rahul threatens to drop the plate on the floor.
“No!” Sara finds a plastic bag in her suitcase to store the garbage.
With the fresh smell of the sea, we enter through the stone gate of what is left of the Bandra Fort, an old Portuguese bastion. Inside the derelict walls is a garden with more couples, sitting on the long staircase, on the stone walls and benches, shaded by palm trees, while others favor the more hidden corners. Their gestures are innocent, fingers interlaced, heads resting on a shoulder, an arm tossed across the back, tender whispers. If some are completely absorbed in their passions, in others we can sense the weight of secrecy, anxiety, guilt.
“Why are there so many couples here?” I ask. “Are they dating in secret? Against their families’ wishes?” I heard several stories of forbidden love, lovers of different castes, religions, social strata, which always end in tragedy. There must also be others less heroic and less violent, made of these fearful encounters that fall apart without enough blood to reach the public attention. There had to be a place for marginal lovers to meet, I just didn’t expect it to be so in the open, in a romantic garden by the sea. Rahul clarifies it to me.
“Maybe, but many of them are married. The houses in Mumbai are small, people live in one-room houses with paper-thick walls, which they share with the whole family. Newly married couples have to come outside to have some privacy. Normally in India you can’t be so intimate in public, but in some places the police turn a blind eye. Those who are not married take the opportunity to bring their girlfriends. Or whores. It’s very handy!” Rahul laughs vigorously at his own pun.
Leaving the fort behind, we walk leisurely between the sea and the mansions. We stop to eat again, many of Rahul’s favorite street vendors park in this area. The vendor gives us each a paper bowl. He takes a hollow sphere of fried dough, punches a hole in it with his finger, fills it with a vegetable paste, and dips it into a bucket of greenish-brown liquid. Sara gets the first ball. She waits for the man to finish two more, then we eat at the same time. The dough breaks into a thousand pieces, releasing a fresh mint liquid with hard grains and a bittersweet and spicy aftertaste. Sara is delighted. With her chin stretched over the bowl so as not to drip onto her clothes, she instantly devours the six balls she is entitled to, and she could go on.
“I’ve never eaten anything like this!”
It gets dark quickly. On the way, we bump into several religious parades with wind and percussion bands or loudspeakers blasting very loud music. The vans advance slowly, with colorful statues of Durga in papier-mâché in the cargo box that are to be dumped into the sea to mark the end of the festival. Behind follow processions of men dancing.
We arrive at a large mosque built on an islet. In the night of unlit stars, the walls, the domes and the minaret illuminated in white, surrounded by palm trees, rise from the darkness of the sea like an enchanted palace. On either side of the bay, skyscrapers gleams. A few moored fishermen’s boats hover between the coast and the island, only closer can you see the rubbish floating against the rocks, religious offerings thrown into the sea in the rituals. On the narrow isthmus leading to the mosque, many beggars, destitutes and amputees exploit as best as they can the pious feelings that tend to be stronger after religious visits.
Perpetual Motion is a serial novel. Go to the Table of Contents to read previous posts.
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