Us, them and a city

There's us and there's them. And there's Mumbai.

How often do we claim that they encroach on our city. My city? Since when did it become my city? When my grandparents escaped persecution in Pakistan during the Partition and settled in the refugee camps at Kurla. Or when they worked their way up to a comfortable existence in Mulund. Or when my family shifted out to Andheri? Does the journey across three suburbs and three generations make it our city? If this is indeed our city, how many of us speak its language - Marathi.

Then there's them. The millions of them, who escape persecution of a different kind - the abject wretchedness of poverty. Imposed by a social order that promotes centuries of economic imbalances deep in the hinterland and pushes the multitudes to the city. And they build their homes here, and capture their million dreams in them.

Why do we dislike and detest the slums so much? Because they remind us that our city is not Shanghai, that it will never be a Shanghai? Or because it reminds us of another India - an India that our cloistered, middle-class existence does not want to admit. Why would we not admit this reality? Their reality. Why would we not want to accept the slums and the people who inhabit it as having as much of a right to this city as we do?

Because they are filthy? Admittedly there is squalor at the periphery of the slums and on the slivery lanes that penetrate into the hearts of the slums. But step inside one of the fragile universes, and I bet it'll be cleaner and tidier than my room is right now.

Or because of the crime? Poverty breeds crime, yes. But so does a lot else. There is as much crime in the highrises of Andheri's Lokhandwala as there is in the sprawling slums of Dharavi.

And we sit in our air-conditioned cars on Ganesh Chaturthi and we curse the processions that hold up the traffic. And we fail to see that the greatest happiness is on the faces of the poorest slum-dwellers, who for those few hours have forgotten the curse of poverty and persecution and periodic demolishments to dance for a God that has all but forgotten them.

They built the flyovers we drive on. They built the towers we live and work in. They built it with their bare hands, carrying the cement in the unforgiving Mumbai sun. All they ask is to lead their lives with dignity, not on our dole, or our noblesse oblige.

If you are in Mumbai, get to the Gateway of India and take one of the tourist jetties out to the sea. As the wind hits your face, and the strong smell of the sea subsides, don't forget to look to your right. On the far right are the slums, and as your eye moves along the coast you see the buildings of what once used to be Mumbai's central business district. And on the sea are the smaller boats bobbing optimistically with the waves and further out are the large container ships moored concretely. And all of it simply belongs to this city - founded on opium money and built by sheer grit. But if you do this at night when there's a full moon, then you see the stars in the black sea, and the shining lights of the Queen's necklace as it embraces the ocean and holds back the city. And late at night take a drive from the Western suburbs to the highway, and then along the seaface onto Marine Drive, unimpeded by traffic. And that's when you realise why it is possible to actually love a city.