‘Not Dharavi slum,’ said Malika. ‘It is five-star.’
‘It depends what you mean by bad,’ said Shruti.
‘I thought all slums were bad.’
They laughed again.
‘How many have you been to?’ Malika wanted to know.
‘I’m sorry.’ Annie was embarrassed. ‘I don’t mean to offend, but where I come from a slum is not somewhere that has an option to be good.’
‘You have slums where you come from?’
‘No, I mean slums in India. I thought they were terrible places to live.’
‘That Mother Teresa,’ Shruti said. ‘She has a lot to answer for, eh?’
‘Calcutta — giving all of India a bad name!’
‘Do not tease,’ Heavenly said. ‘Have you been to the slum here, Mrs Hugh Jordan?’
‘No, of course not.’ The very idea of it turned her stomach.
‘That wiped the smile off her face, did you see?’ chortled Priyanka, but not unkindly.
‘So then, tell me,’ Heavenly said. ‘What do you think of with this word “slum”?’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m putting my foot in it.’
‘No! Your foot is where it should be. But tell me what you think when you hear this word.’
Annie’s cheeks, already flushed by the sun and her mortification, coloured further. ‘Well, I think of poverty, I suppose. And dirt. And open drains. And beggars. And sickness. And crying babies. Just … misery.’
The women nodded enthusiastically in agreement. ‘Yes, this is what most Westerners think,’ agreed Heavenly.
‘Although rich white babies cry, too,’ said Malika. ‘I sat next to one on the plane when I went to Chennai to visit my auntie. Ay ay ay, that tiny little thing could scream.’
‘Yes, yes, of course, I don’t mean just the crying part,’ Annie said. ‘With the babies. It’s the hunger. And anyway, it’s just what I think. I’m sure I’ve got it all completely wrong.’
‘Would you like to get it all completely right?’ Heavenly asked.
‘Of course. The last thing I want to do is upset anyone.’
‘Good. Is your taxi driver coming back for you today?’
‘He’s sleeping in the car just down the road.’
‘Excellent,’ said Heavenly. ‘Would anybody else like to come with Mrs Hugh Jordan and me to Dharavi slum?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t!’ Annie said. A slum! That was her worst nightmare — the very reason why she’d never wanted to come to India in the first place.
‘Good idea. I can visit my niece,’ said Shruti. ‘I need to get my eyes checked.’
‘She is a doctor at the hospital there,’ Priyanka explained to Annie, not seeming to notice her panic.
‘I tried to get them checked at the fancy-pantsy hospital in Colaba, but they put me on a waiting list a mile long. At Dharavi hospital I just go in and pester Shriva until she does it.’
‘The slum has a hospital?’
‘And schools, and a university, and it is where you will find the best poppadoms and samosas.’
‘And the prettiest girls!’ piped up Ashor.
‘And the tastiest goats,’ added the grinning man sitting next to him.
‘I can see that you are perhaps a little reluctant to see this for yourself,’ Heavenly Hirani said, reaching for Annie’s hand, taking it in hers again.
A lump rose in Annie’s throat. Heavenly’s touch seemed to transport her right back into the figurative arms of her mother. She had the same gentle but assured approach. Even coming from a yoga teacher she barely knew, it felt so much like love it was uncanny.
‘What are you afraid of, Mrs Hugh Jordan?’
‘I’m not afraid,’ Annie said. ‘I just wasn’t expecting …’
‘But some of the best things in the world are not expected! Were you expecting to discover laughing yoga when you came to Mumbai?’
‘No, I wasn’t even expecting to come to Mumbai and I didn’t know there was such a thing as laughing yoga.’
‘Were you expecting to watch the sunrise on a golden city beach every morning?’
‘I didn’t know there was a beach.’
‘Do you think you will not be safe with us? Do you think we will not take good care of you?’
Annie looked around the group. Now she had figured it out, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed they were seniors. For a start, they were so small. Sandeep was the tallest and he only came up to her shoulder, but Pooja and Suraj barely made it to her waist. If she was going to get set upon by angry beggars, this crowd was not going to be much help.
‘You have a lot to do today?’ Shruti asked, innocently. ‘Back at the Taj Lands End?’
‘There is a very nice pool at the Taj Lands End, I think,’ said Malika.
‘And three restaurants,’ chipped in Priyanka.
‘Expensive restaurants,’ added Ashor.
‘But I think the Indian one, Masala Bay, is very good, is it not? My brother’s next-door-neighbour’s driver son worked there and said it was very good but that a glass of wine costs fifteen hundred rupees.’
‘Your brother’s next-door-neighbour has a driver?’ asked one of the men.
‘He is the driver. We are talking about my brother, not Mukesh Ambani!’
‘So, what are you going to do today?’ Sandeep asked Annie, not interested in the adult banter.
Annie’s plan for the rest of the day had, in fact, got no further than taking care of her laundry, which involved putting it all in a canvas bag, ticking off on a list what she wanted done to which, and calling housekeeping to come and collect it.
She had nothing to cook, nothing to clean, no one to talk to, nowhere to go other than the pool, and she happened to know it was Babu’s day off. She’d thought Valren might be about to chat with at lunch and … Well, she had to go to the business centre in case Hell had frozen over and Daisy or Ben had answered her emails.
Then she had assumed she would while away the hours until her husband came home so she could watch him fall asleep at the drop of a hat.
It was a schedule that, on reflection, had very little going for it. But still — a slum?
‘We are very proud of Dharavi,’ Heavenly said. ‘Or we would not wish to take you there. But it is a very wonderful small city within a very wonderful big city, and I promise you that after you see it you will not be afraid to visit again. You will also never complain about having a small house.’
‘Or about working too hard,’ said Priyanka.
Once more Heavenly squeezed her hand. Annie still did not want to go.
And yet, here were these smiling faces looking at her, their heads wobbling like dashboard dinguses. She supposed that all the pale-faced tourists who had come to laughing yoga after reading Pasta Ponder Hanky Panky had jumped at the chance for a guided tour of a bona fide slum.
But they had come to India hoping to ‘find’ themselves and she hadn’t.
Not really.
Although strangely enough, Annie had to admit that she was already somehow a slightly different person. Heavenly was right, she hadn’t expected to be doing laughing yoga with a gang of geriatrics as the sun came up on Chowpatty Beach.
Yet she had, and she had loved it. Today she had even let go and leaned as far as she could go into the shoulder next to her without worrying about falling over, without worrying about anything.
She thought of Ben, quiet like his Dad, but a rock climber and a surfer, a spirited debater, a sensible kid who nonetheless took risks, someone who would eat hot chillies and have steam coming out of his ears before he would complain, who stood up for his friends when they were being bullied, who didn’t believe in being cool, to such an intense degree that he ended up with a cool all of his own.
Ben would have leaned into those laughing yoga shoulders the first time around. Ben would not hesitate for a moment at being asked to go to the Dharavi slum.
‘OK, then,’ she said. ‘I’m in.’
Chapter Four
teen
After much to-ing and fro-ing it was a group of five that ended up going to the slum — Annie, Heavenly, Shruti, Pooja and Suraj. And as Annie had a taxi driver on standby, it was decided that Pinto should take them.
Pinto did not seem impressed. ‘Ma’am, I am not that sort of taxi,’ he said as Heavenly and Shruti climbed in the back anyway.
Suraj had something to say to him about that, as did his wife, and judging by the tone and the level, it was shaping up to be a right old ding-dong.
Annie stood nervously on the kerb while they argued. ‘I don’t think he wants to take us,’ she said, but Heavenly just motioned for her to get in the front.
‘He is a taxi driver, this is a taxi, we are wanting to go somewhere, so he will be taking us,’ Heavenly said. ‘It makes perfect sense.’
Pinto couldn’t argue with that, although he certainly looked as though he wanted to. ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he said to Annie.
She wasn’t sure what for. She was luxuriating in the space of the front seat while the other four were crammed like doughnuts in a box in the rear.
‘This is very nice taxi,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘Very nice taxi usually only take three peoples.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, we could get twelve more in here, at least,’ Shruti said.
‘Maybe in one of your old dirty city taxis, but not my cool cab,’ Pinto said. ‘This is very nice taxi.’
‘She is teasing you,’ Heavenly soothed. ‘Come on now. We promise not to let anyone else in.’
Pinto pulled out into the traffic, which was getting heavier now the city was waking up. The Ganesh elephant god glued on a spring to the dashboard was bobbing every which way, as was the crew in the back.
Every bump in the road — and there were many — led to an eruption of laughter.
‘Sudden movements at my age — oh dear,’ said Shruti. ‘Suraj, you need to get your elbow out of my ribs.’
‘He could not find your ribs if he tried,’ Pooja said, looking at the rolls of flesh tumbling down Shruti’s middle beneath her tunic. ‘Mind you, he cannot find his own bum some days.’
This made them laugh even harder.
‘Oh, sudden noises, too,’ hooted Shruti. ‘No more. No more.’
Annie’s right leg quickly grew numb from braking on the carpet in front of her. The traffic had grown to a frightening level, the honk of every horn like a hundred fingernails down a single blackboard.
I’m going to die, she thought, as they hurtled around corners and sped past other speeding traffic, the motorbikes swarming around them like bees, a woman pillion passenger in a burka on one side, three laughing boys concertinaed together on the other. Scarves flapped from necks, and packages dangled from panniers and passengers. They whisked past colourful trucks and bus after bus, half of them stopped in the middle of the road so passengers could pour out like porridge.
If Pinto crashes the taxi, the passengers pulled from the wreckage will be described in the Hindustan Times as ‘a group of elderly Indians and one middle-aged Western woman’, Annie thought. Hugh could read a firsthand account of the smash in the paper and not even know it referred to her.
That was if he even noticed she wasn’t at the hotel when he got home. He would probably just lie down and go to sleep and perhaps even get up and go to work the next day before it occurred to him that anything was amiss.
There would be no photo of Annie in the paper, like there was of poor Preeti. Annie’s passport and driver licence were sensibly in the safe back at the hotel. If everyone else in the car died without first whispering to the paramedics at the scene ‘What has happened to Mrs Hugh Jordan?’, then she would be alone in a Mumbai hospital bed until who knew when? Her family wouldn’t be gathered around, devastated, trying to figure out how to pay the bills. They would be oblivious.
How long would it take Hugh to find her? Did he even read the Hindustan Times?
It was definitely he who would have to notice she was gone, who would have to look for her. If anything happened to him — if he was in another car crash in whichever bit of India his machinery had disappeared in, or got on the wrong train and couldn’t get back from some remote province except by riding a donkey which might drop dead at any moment — she could lie dying in a slum hospital for weeks before the children noticed they hadn’t heard from her. But then, she could lie at home, dying, for that matter, without them knowing, or thinking to check up on her.
She thought about the time the year before when she had bumped into a friend who’d casually mentioned Daisy was in town for her own daughter’s birthday celebrations. Annie had smiled and fudged it in the store, but cried in the car afterwards, although when she checked her phone there was a message from her daughter saying she’d made the last-minute decision to come to the party. But still, it hurt.
‘Am I such an awful mother?’ she’d wailed to Rhona. ‘Have I being getting it all wrong?’
Rhona! Rhona would notice my death, she realised, as a BMW cut off their taxi with only millimetres to spare. Oh, the relief. Even with four children and a weird-acting husband, Rhona would come searching for her.
‘Are you feel all right?’ Pinto asked, the taxi stopped for a red light, his face creased and anxious as he looked at her, the occupants of the back seat silent.
‘Yes,’ she said, without much conviction.
‘You look like cow who ate cheese,’ Pooja said, earning a slap and an earful of Hindi from Suraj.
‘This is not right,’ Pinto said, agitated. ‘Cow who ate cheese? What is this?’
‘I know what you look, you look pale,’ said Shruti. ‘This is funny for us because, you know, in India it is very good to look pale. It is very compliment. We like to look pale.’
‘But the tourists like to be in the sun to make their skin darker,’ Heavenly said. ‘For them pale is not good. This is an upside-down world, eh?’
‘You are all right for me to keep driving, ma’am?’ Pinto’s concern was heart-warming.
Annie forced a smile and nodded. It was an upside-down world.
They were driving down the Mumbai version of a high street now, with shanty-style shops on either side, the usual ebb and flow of colourful pedestrians blurring the street’s busy edges.
In front of them she could see nothing but taxis, a sea of black and gold and blue-grey cool cabs. She felt as though they had been driving forever.
Then Pinto jammed on the brakes and, to her surprise, the occupants of the back seat opened the doors and started getting out.
‘We are here,’ said Pinto.
But the scene into which the colourful group was disgorging seemed no more slum-like than many of the other parts of the city through which Annie had driven on the way to and from Chowpatty Beach.
‘I wait,’ he said, repeating it louder to make sure Heavenly could hear. ‘I wait for madam here.’
‘I’ll text you, Pinto,’ Annie said. ‘In case you want to get another fare, or do your exercises.’
‘No, ma’am, I wait for you. I always wait for you.’
Annie followed her friends as they navigated the other pedestrians on the main drag, soon turning off down a smaller side street.
It was as though the same number of people, objects, sights and sounds had suddenly squeezed into a fraction of the space.
Chaos reigned on either side of the lane, where tiny makeshift stalls were selling anything and everything. A cow stood outside what appeared to be a butcher’s shop, right in front of a wiry young man wielding a cleaver and hacking at a large rack of meaty ribs on a wooden block.
Next to that, a minute, very dark-skinned woman was selling used pots and pans; next to her a boy was hawking what looked like wedding invitations. Across the lane, a flower stall and a spice stall complemented each other’s colours perfectly, while a pile of only-just-removed sheepskins broke up the party, bringing with them their very own village of flies.
The lane smelled ripe, thanks mainly to the fleeces, but it di
d not reek as Annie had expected. The further she got away from the skins, the more she could pick up other, spicier aromas — cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg — intercepted every now and then by a whiff of jasmine or the odd cloud of laundry detergent.
In between a handcart loaded with a towering stack of what looked like tea towels and a pile, literally, of motor-scooter parts, three small children were sitting in the gutter playing with a stick. They stopped what they were doing to stare at Annie. ‘Hello!’ the little boy shouted with a grin.
They were beautiful children: two girls with pixie crops and the shirtless boy — three pairs of black eyes above tiny white teeth in perfect brown faces. They were not begging, far from it, they seemed engrossed in their game. In fact, they had all their body parts, seemed well-fed and, despite the dust between their toes and the bedraggled chicken that played peekaboo behind them, happy.
‘Hello,’ Annie said and waved, at which the two little girls hid their faces behind their hands, peals of laughter soaking into the shoddy walls around them.
‘They’ll be candidates for the laughing school in another sixty or seventy years,’ she said to Shruti.
‘Not so scary for you now, Mrs Hugh Jordan? Think you will survive here for a couple of hours?’
A couple of hours! Heavenly saw the look on Annie’s face, but just smiled.
‘Mrs Hugh Jordan, you must learn to relax.’ And with that she reached for Annie’s hand once more and pulled her off the narrow lane into the darkness, leaving the other three to follow.
DHARAVI SLUM WAS A MAZE, with tiny topsy-turvy alleyways leading this way and that, disappearing around corners and criss-crossing each other seemingly ad infinitum. The buildings were only two storeys high and appeared to have either been dropped from space or been haphazardly added so that nothing was quite flush or the same height or even made of the same materials. If she hadn’t known they were houses she might have thought they were just piles of discarded building rubbish.
In places, the alleys were so narrow that Annie could not see how the light would ever get in — but then with the light, she supposed, came heat. There was certainly no air-conditioning in this corner of Mumbai.