Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  Mr. Gupta said, "People work very hard here."

  We passed a man plowing. I said, "They're looking ahead. 'No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."

  "Who said that?"

  "Jesus. It's in the Bible"

  "Very nice."

  Night fell in the wide valleys, and here and there I could see candle flames in the little huts. A food seller came to the compartment and offered me the vegetarian special for 45 rupees—a dollar. So Mr. Gupta and I each bought a tray. While we ate and talked, another traveler joined us and took a top berth. He was a shawl seller, on his way to Mumbai to take orders.

  Mr. Gupta's phone kept ringing. "You will excuse me? Sorry for the disturbance, but my little girl, who is four, misses me greatly. I need to reassure her."

  He spoke to his little girl three more times before he turned in. He was another young man from the provinces joining the twenty million in Mumbai.

  By the small light over my berth, I read The Great Mutiny, then fell asleep and thrashed in mutiny-inspired dreams of bloody mayhem, religious fanaticism, revenge, and anarchy.

  In the morning, Mr. Gupta and the shawl seller were up and packed. They were getting off at Santa Cruz, while I continued the whole way, into the heart of the city.

  ***

  THE FRENZIED CAREERISTS of Mumbai seldom stopped talking about how the place was booming, as though having rid it of its old name, Bombay, they had founded a new city. Their obtuse pride was odd in a country infatuated with its past, obsessed with its own complexity, where nostalgia was a ruling passion. But the Indian craving to belong to the wider world is more than a billion strong—and not just to belong, but to have the world's good opinion of them, to impress with their history, their moralizing and disquisitional nature, their unembarrassed pleasure in speechifying, their love of the orotund and the sententious, and the enduring quaintness of their customs: how they avoided killing a flea, how they worshiped lingams ("It is penis, sar"), how they drank the river water from Mother Ganga, how they propitiated the goddess Lakshmi in order to acquire wealth, how they approved of the widow-burning practice of suttee and arranged marriages, while at the same time describing their progress in hedge funds, computer software, nuclear reactors, or astrophysics.

  "This is my husband, Arun," an Indian woman said to me later in Mumbai, her eyes flashing with defiance. "It was not a love match. Our parents arranged it. We hardly knew each other. We have been very happy. We have three children. We will arrange their marriages, after—of course—we have consulted astrologers."

  She was showing off, trying to bait me. I was on the point of saying, "Funnily enough, I picked up my wife in a bar," when her husband began boasting about how India led the world in corporate takeovers in the global steel sector. I did not say, "Why hire market analysts in India when you can hire soothsayers and astrologers?"

  Mumbai was India's boast, representing everything it wanted the world to admire. I could see the city was bigger. The limits of Mumbai had expanded for miles. They were around Mahim on my first visit; they were now at thirteen miles north of it, at Thana and Mahisa. But Mumbai the magnificent was also home to Asia's biggest slum. Commuters into Mumbai from the suburbs could spend hours on buses and trains. Both its airports had been swamped by this development, so their nearness to the center of Mumbai actually distorted the size of the city, sprawling north and east in immense low suburbs, which rose from the huts of the outskirts to the busy district at Colaba, with its tall buildings, its churches, and its municipal offices of the peculiar Indo-Saracenic architecture of the Raj, which was mocked as "disappointed Gothic."

  "When I got back to Mumbai from New York last week I saw that a new building had gone up," an American businessman said to me. "It's not Shanghai, but it's growing fast. Basically a new building every week or so."

  It is a shock to travel from the countryside, especially the desert provinces of the north, to the biggest city in India and one of the biggest in the world. Out of the yellow plains and through the dust and tiny villages to this enormous port, packed with people, its dark streets jammed with honking cars. The official population is seventeen million; unofficially it is in excess of twenty million, and still growing; and because it is hot and so much of its life is outdoors, entirely visible, Mumbai is like a city without walls.

  "Foreigners come and all they talk about are the poor people," an Indian woman said to me. She was an executive with a large company. "I want to say, 'What about the poor people in your country? There's more to India than poor people. "

  That's true, but there are quite a few poor people in India. Any way, Indian statistics, like Chinese numbers, are stupendous and ungraspable. When an Indian says, as one said to me, "There are two hundred and fifty million middle-class Indians, which is very nice, but four hundred million are living below the poverty line," how do you respond? Two hundred years ago, the French aphorist Chamfort described Paris as "a city of amusements, pleasures, etc., in which four-fifths of the inhabitants die of want." You could say the same of any city in India.

  If you dropped your gaze from the new hotel or the new call center, India looked as poor as it ever had. I was reminded of V. S. Naipaul writing in An Area of Darkness (1964): "India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value." But that's no longer true.

  It would be truer to say that poverty in India now represents a perverse kind of wealth: the half billion people earning a dollar a day are producing India's food surplus; the sweatshop factory workers are the backbone of its textile industry; and low-paid employees are the workforce of its high-tech sector. The whole Indian economy is driven by the poor, by low salaries, and of course by a tremendous work ethic, which in India is a survival skill and an instinct. "The high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon keeping a tight hold on the Empire," Orwell wrote. "In order that England may live in comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation." The desperation of the slum dwellers can be shocking; when Naipaul visited a chawl, or slum tenement, for a later book—India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)—he wrote, "I was so demoralized, so choked, driven so near to a stomach-heave, by the smell at the entrance, with wet mangled garbage and scavenging cats and kittens in a little patio, and then, in the sudden dark passage, by the thick warm smell, catching at my throat, of blocked drains..." And so on, making a meal of it. He is shocked, appalled, almost undone by what he sees, and seems to have changed his mind about discussing the Indian poor. But he is one of the few writer-travelers who in subsequent books on India retraced his own footsteps.

  Unlike the poor in Europe or America or even China, the poor in India are a constant presence. Where else do people put up plastic huts on the sidewalk of a main road—not one or two but an entire subdivision of humpies and pup tents? They inhabit train stations, sleep in doorways, crouch under bridges and railway trestles. They do it for safety and also convenience, since they are not parasites or lazy louts but underpaid workers, many of these squatters actually doing jobs in Mumbai. Among the poorest are the Koli people, descendants of the original inhabitants (the city takes its name from their patron goddess, Mumbai-Devi). Most of the Koli are fisher folk who live at the edge of the sea in black and battered shacks, near one of Mumbai's most expensive districts.

  With poverty so obvious and unmissable, the foreigner sometimes bursts into tears, until he or she learns the Indian trick of looking only at the background, where all those new buildings are rising. While I was in Mumbai the municipal council launched "a drive to clear hutments and shanties from the roads and footpaths." On the first day one thousand such shelters were pulled down and the occupants scattered. In one morning, more than six thousand people were made homeless.

  "Where will we go? The BMC has razed our houses," one of the victims said.

  "Our houses" was an interesting phrase. The structures were made of twigs, branches, waste lumb
er, bits of string, plastic sheeting with taped seams, cotton cloth, blankets, cardboard, splintered plywood, threadbare canvas; each one with a flickering lantern and a cooking fire.

  Squatters are so firmly established in every Indian city their seemingly makeshift camps are as deceptive as birds' nests, as well camouflaged, as tightly woven, and just as complex; and these people have counterparts in every city in the world. As the Indian woman said to me, "What about the poor people in your country?" Well, yes. New Orleans is a vivid example of a place where the poor were either hidden or unapproachable. It seemed that until they were flushed out by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina no one knew they existed, nor knew what to do with them.

  There is a depressing travel book to be written about the poor in America. The problem is, how to penetrate this world? The book is almost unwritable, except by someone who actually lives in such a place—though living in one slum does not license a person to live in or even visit another slum. The poor in America live in dangerous places; out of paranoia, or for protection, or because of neglect by the police or harassment by gangs, they have themselves mostly contrived this danger, to seal themselves off from authority, or from outsiders, anyone inquisitorial who would be regarded (with reason) as an enemy. I have never seen any community in India so hopeless or, in its way, so hermetic in its poverty, so blatant in its look of menace, so sad and unwelcoming, as East St. Louis, Illinois, the decaying town that lies across the Mississippi from flourishing St. Louis, Missouri. Yet I can imagine that many people from St. Louis proper would weep at the sight of Indian poverty. They dare not cross their own river to see the complacent decrepitude and misery on the other bank.

  The Indian poor are accessible, conversational, often congenial and friendly, and generally unthreatening. No one can travel among the American poor the way I could travel among the Indian poor, asking intrusive questions. What's your name? How long have you lived here? Where do you work? How much money do you make?—the usual visitor's questions. I got answers, and even hospitality. In the same sort of area in the United States—the decaying sections of Jackson, Mississippi, the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, the Anacostia district in Washington, D.C., and many other places—I would be threatened or robbed or sent away for daring to ask such things. What do you want here? It is an understandable response. But in India I was unexpectedly welcome in such places—the slums, the squatter camps, the stinking chawls, the reeking bustees.

  "This is the biggest slum in Asia—it said so in the paper," a young man named Kartik said to me in the area of Mumbai called Dharavi. The name is practically a synonym for desperation: 520 acres in the depths of the city, 600,000 inhabitants and grim statistics, though the celebrated Dharavi factoid of "one public toilet for 800 people"—the vision of a very long line of people hopping with impatience—is misleading, since it was malodorously clear to me on my visit that many people in Dharavi regarded a public toilet as a superfluous novelty.

  Dharavi was in the news, because with Mumbai's new prosperity the slum land had become valuable. Mumbai is essentially the gigantic island of Salsette, and most of it had been claimed. There was a move afoot to tear down Dharavi and put up expensive houses for the rising class in the new Mumbai. The idea of demolishing Dharavi was an example of the cunning greed of property speculators, because "slum" did not really describe it. Far from being a fetid precinct of despair, it was a self-sufficient part of the inner city, indeed a city itself, and parts of it did not look much different from any other part of Mumbai. The Chor bazaar district, for example, was just as ramshackle and grim, yet just as packed with thriving businesses and hectic households and the Indian mob. The Indian mob, here as elsewhere, was made up of shrieky young men and boys who seemed driven by a frenzy of sexual repression and high spirits—but sexual repression most of all, seeking release, with the grabby hands, squiffy eyes, and damp eager faces of scolds and onanists.

  Kartik's family history was typical. His father had come from the southern state of Tamil Nadu when he was fifteen years old. Some relatives lived in Dharavi. He shared a small room with five other boys and worked at a hotel, cleaning tables for the equivalent of $2 a month—this was, interestingly enough, at about the time I was on my Railway Bazaar trip, in 1973. After a year or so, Kartik's father got a casual job on Indian Railways, cleaning carriages and earning $4 a month. This led to a proper job and some training as a plumber and fitter, dealing with water tanks on the railway. He had started out earning 900 rupees a month (about $20) and now earned about 7,000 rupees ($150). In that time, over thirty years, he had married and raised a family, yet he had never moved from Dharavi slum.

  "He is happy. He is getting food. He is not begging," Kartik said. "But we were poor, and we are still poor. My brother is unemployed. I got a job because I managed to pass my driver's license when I was sixteen. There is plenty of work in Mumbai for a driver who is reliable and honest."

  We were sitting on stools in front of the shack his father had built against another shack. Kartik didn't want to show me the inside. He said he was waiting for some men to come and fix it, but I took this to mean that he was self-conscious about its size, just a hen coop really, with squalor all around it and an unbelievable racket that made its flimsy planking chatter and throb.

  "But software engineers also live here in Dharavi slum," he said. "They work for IBM and earn forty thousand rupees a month"—$900. "My friend is marrying a girl who is in the U.S. He is a Tamil, named Shekhar. She is from a wealthy family. Her dowry is one kilo of gold and two lakhs of rupees"—$4,500—"and a motorbike."

  "What about your marriage prospects?"

  "None. I would like to meet such a girl."

  There are other consequences of living at such close quarters. According to the Hindustan Times, a recent study of 3,600 girls in Delhi concluded that one in eight had been raped by a family member, and three quarters of them feared being raped by someone in the family.

  I left Kartik and walked towards the more salubrious part of Mumbai, keeping to back streets because of the crush of people and the traffic on the main roads. When I reached the Church Gate area, and was cutting through a wide lane that was closed to cars, an old woman in a blue sari walked quickly to keep pace with me and asked where I was from. When I told her, she said, "Welcome."

  Three children walked along with her: a small girl of about ten, a boy of about fourteen, and an older skinny girl, perhaps sixteen. They all looked undernourished; it was hard to tell their ages. The older girl caught my eye because she was graceful and was dressed in the thick gauzy skirts of a Gypsy. Most noticeable was the fact that her left forearm was missing.

  "Maybe we can help you," the old woman said. "What is your name?"

  "I'm Paul. Are these your children?"

  "I am their auntie."

  I had a pretty good idea what that meant. It was early evening, a coolness and a darkness descending, and I wanted to know what she was offering. If there is a difference between being a tourist and a traveler, this was it. A tourist would have been at a temple or a museum; I had been in a slum, and out of curiosity was strolling along with the soliciting Mistress Overdone, the bawd, and her three depraved-looking youths.

  "What do you want?" I asked.

  "Just talk, sir"

  "Go ahead, talk."

  "Better we talk in there"—she indicated a teashop.

  So she led the way to the shop, where I sat in a booth next to the skinny one-armed girl, with the old woman and the other two children on the opposite side of the table.

  "Chai, chai," she said to the waiter.

  "Do you want anything else?"

  The small girl wanted ice cream, the boy wanted a samosa, the one-armed girl said she was happy with tea, and she sipped it shyly, snuggling next to me.

  "We live just near," the old woman said and pointed out the window of the teashop. "Five minutes."

  I glanced at the one-armed girl, who was smiling anxiously at me. Her sunken eyes were s
trangely yellow, like those of a nocturnal animal, and the skin of her good arm, pressed against mine, was very dry and hairy, suggesting malnutrition.

  It was perfect, this secluded place, with the insinuating old woman who was, I was pretty sure, pimping these children. It was one of the pleasanter districts in Mumbai, and she must have had luck buttonholing foreigners like me or else she would not have been so confident. I wanted her to tell me what she had in mind—what activity, what price, what length of time, what sort of promises she'd make.

  She had told me how near she lived; now she began telling me how clean it was, how private. "So quiet, sir. Very good building."

  I had many questions. But what kept me from asking them was the flow of people into the teashop. The shop was a kind of snack bar, with plates of food in glass cases—buns and samosas and sandwiches. We were sitting near the entrance, and every person that entered—mostly men—stared hard at me. It was about six-thirty in the evening. I was the only foreigner in the place, and here I was, in a booth with a procuress and two sallow and debauched-looking children and a teenage whore.

  I wanted to ask, How much? And, What's the story?

  I started to ask them their names, but I realized that if I did that, the people around me would hear and instantly know what was up. I tried to pretend we were old friends.

  "He's really hungry!" I said. "Want another ice cream?"

  Three tough-featured young men walked past, then chose to sit in the booth opposite, where they could hear and see everything.

  I cringed, thinking how I looked there. I wanted to say: I'm a traveler. I'm writing a book. I'm just asking questions. I have no designs on these young children!

  "Let we go," the old woman said, perhaps realizing how awkward I felt.

  I said, "Look, I'm going to be around for a week or so. I'm pretty busy right now. We can meet again."

  "When?" the old woman said. "Where?"

  "Anywhere," I said evasively.

  "Tomorrow," she said. "What time?"