I’ve been to the slums of India.
And I love the slums of India.
Two days ago we all took a trip to a walking tour of Asia’s biggest slum – Dharavi. We were split into two groups, and a nice slum tour guide took responsibility for each. We descended down the stairs into the area below the huge expanse of corrugated metal roofs, and we began.
We couldn't take pictures inside, but this is a photo of the wall outside Dharavi.
Over the whole trip I went from nervous, to guilty, to something else… I don’t know what it was. See if you can find the right adjective...
The entire world’s recycling operation runs out of Dharavi. They have a different hut for sorting plastics. A different hut for crushing, and a different hut for melting. One hut had to wash and dry the plastics… so they took us up to the roof where blankets with mosaic tiles of plastic remnants were drying in the sun.
The view from there was like this: a plastic Mecca. There were towers of random discarded plastic items. Air conditioner facades. Shells of old TVs. The computer keyboard I spilled milk in when I was small. And all of the roofs had plastic tiles plastic tiles plastic tiles. And towers of somewhat sorted plastic things.
And in between that, sarees drying on clotheslines. And behind that, a beeaaauuutttiiiiffffulllll green mosque. All on top of these metal ruffle-chip roofs. It looked like a collage of different parts of the world.
While we were on the roofs, there were 2 white men who came up with another tour guide. They stood there in their sneakers with gym socks pulled up and their hands on their hips right above their brown Italian leather belts. They stood, stood, admired the view. Asked a few questions. Nodded and squinted at the distance in response. That’s when I felt guilty. I didn’t want to feel like the slums were a spectacle… something that one can go and say “Ohh… that’s so sad,” and then run back to the air-conditioned hotel. But in that moment, that’s what it felt like. I felt strange being there. Like I was seeing something I didn't deserve to.
So we kept walking, and we kept getting stared at on every road and alley. It was fine. The people were curious (Italian men, you remember, were just sleazy when they would stare). The children were the best. They would come up laughing, ask us our names, shake our hands, and run ahead of us through the alleys they knew so well.
I loved the children the best. Annalisa and I took a turn at playing cricket with some of the kids in one of the roads, and over the course of the walk, I pet a goat named Simba (whom the kids treat as a personal pet), picked up a little tiny kitten, and bock-ba-gocked at some chickens in the road. I saw a woman whose hands were painted with henna (and she was laughing at how amazed we were), and had some mango juice for less than a dollar.
The thing I began to notice was how happy all of these people seemed. They did their jobs for very little pay, the living conditions weren’t safe, they melted plastics and recycled metals without gloves, masks, or glasses, and there was garbage in their backyard (in fact, Dharavi was built on 19th century British garbage). They don’t care about the Pakistan/India conflict because they have their own wellbeings to worry about. There is chaos from far away… but like I said in my last entry, it works.
And Hindus, Muslims, and Christians can all go pray at the same place. There is a cube with Hindu gods, Muslim gods, and Jesus Christ all painted on it, and people go and pray there together. In this one section of the world, there is religious peace.
Where many of us live in the states, we don’t know our neighbors well. We worry about things that happen halfway around the world, and we just want to get more and more STUFF. We worry about Muslims, Communists, and Osama Bin Laden.
People tie strings to the gates at the Haji Ali - some say they're for wishes.. some say they're for prayers. I just like them.
But none of that seems to apply in the slums. It is a small town within a town. Everyone knows each other. Everyone seems sort of ignorantly happy.
Ignorance is bliss in the most beautiful sense.
And that’s why I liked the slums.
Yesterday we went on a tour of the British colonization section of Mumbai (we live in a suburb here… so we went to see the main city).
We walked to a mosque on the Arabian sea called the Haji Ali. It's a Muslim prayer site… and it's also a tomb.
There was a very particular feeling... like there was in Assisi when I went… like I could feel the weight of everyone’s emotions.
No matter where you are in the world, spiritual places feel the same (in varying degrees). I recognized the emotion that I felt at St. Francis’s in Assisi… it was not as strong, but it was there.
We went to the Taj Hotel (the one that was bombed last year), we met with a theater director, and we met Tula’s teacher from when she was in university.
South Bombay is very posh. No auto rikshaws! There is usually a buzzing in the background that was missing from South Bombay.
I shopped. I haggled. I’m getting better… but because I’m white it’s not so easy here. They think the whities are gullible.. and they take advantage. Usually.. they win!
Today I’m going to get a haircut. My internship doesn’t start until tomorrow. So… a day on the town. Hazzah!!!