A day in Mumbai

from The Hub 2020 Spring

Take a transatlantic cruise

Story by Shauna Dobbie, photos by David Johnson

People who’ve been to Mumbai have either of two opinions. One, that it is a hot, busy cesspool they could not wait to leave. Two, that it is captivating city, teeming with aromas and colours and people.

I’d heard enough of the second opinion to make me long to go, but enough of the first to make me too nervous to sink much money into a tour. My husband David, who is usually far more adventurous than I, felt about the same. So, when we found a cruise itinerary that stopped for two days in Mumbai, it was the ideal way to get a taste of India.

We were there in January of this year, a couple of weeks before I write this. And it was magnificent.

The Dharavi slum was the highlight of the trip. Of course, we wanted to see it, after watching Slumdog Millionaire; remember the kids running through the garbage heaps at the beginning? That scene moistened my eyes, seeing those tiny children with tender bare feet surrounded by so much muck. Our children were appalled that we were planning to tour the slum. “You’re spending how much on a cruise then going to take a tour through a poor area?”

But our tour guide was from Dharavi, so it must be alright. Right?

On our first morning in Mumbai, we got off the boat and through immigration, into a crowd of our fellow cruisers looking for their tours. When we finally found ours, he was dressed in jeans and a ball cap and his stage name—“I’m a rapper”—was Maze. He led us to a little Suzuki, where our driver, Ali, was waiting, and we four set off in the heat and traffic in a well-air-conditioned car.

All the guides of what to do in Mumbai tell you to go to the Gateway of India, a 1924-edifice built to host King George V and Queen Mary, and that is where we started. What does it look like? I don’t know. It’s quite unremarkable. Now that I’ve read several reviews of the place online, I still don’t get it. Some mention that you can see the Taj Mahal Palace (not the Taj Mahal in Agra; that’s an 18-hour drive inland), which is a remarkable 1902-hotel with red domes and rooms that start at $450 per night.

We went to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, known as the Victoria Terminus when Mumbai was known as Bombay. This central train station is a gorgeous mixture of Victorian Italianate Gothic Revival architecture and classical Indian architecture. It’s truly remarkable.

We took a train a few stations from here to stand on an overpass and gaze down at the dhobi ghat, the area where 200 families live and wash 500,000 to 1,000,000 linens and pieces of clothing per day from hotels, hospitals, families and the textile industry. Most are washed by hand in big concrete basins and hung to dry without clothespins; the lines are doubled and twisted together so the corners of an item can be slipped between the individual lines.

We also saw the dabbawallas organizing to deliver lunch. Some 5,000 men in white shirts with white topi hats bring home-cooked lunches to 200,000 workers each day, 6 days a week. The dabbawallas pick up individual lunches at their clients’ homes each morning and use trains and bicycles to deliver them to the correct jobholder by one o’clock. They make fewer than 3.4 mistakes for every 1,000,000 transactions. It’s quite an impressive feat.

Maze was excited about taking us to Dharavi. The smells I was mentally girding myself for did not really appear that day; I cannot say why not. There are open sewers running down narrow alleys between houses, with bricks and blocks to walk on. We did walk down a couple of those alleys, which was very dark and only one-person wide. The couple of locals we met stood aside in doorways, smiling, to let us pass.

Most people in Dharavi have a job, and most of those jobs are done in the area. It’s estimated that the slum turns over $1 billion per year in commerce. Leather (sheep and goat) is a major profit centre; although the stuff is no longer tanned in the area, it is processed into all kinds of goods to be sold to high-end retailers. Recycling is another huge industry, employing 250,000 people in Dharavi. Production of snack-food is a third business in the area.

The jobs aren’t high paying though. A worker might get $240 per month. Rent here could be about $18 per month. For the rent you pay, you get a shack one to three floors high. You don’t get running water, which means no toilet, and electricity comes from a wire you string to the powerlines on the street. Water comes from a pipe down the street. Toilets are communal, with the most horrific estimates being one toilet for every 1,440 people. (Many people go en plein air.)

While we may shudder at the thought of these living conditions, many people continue to live in Dharavi long after they’ve got good jobs in Mumbai. It’s cheap; average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about $750 in the centre of the city. Dharavi is a community. Would you leave your community to pay 40 times as much just for running water? Probably not, if you knew how to live without running water.

The slums of India have many problems. Disease is one, fed by improper sanitation. Fire is another, without safety codes and fire hydrants. Crime is yet another; women and girls are too often assaulted when using public washrooms at night. Reading about Dharavi on the internet, there are reports calling it an eyesore in Mumbai’s “city of dreams”. It might seem this way, but how can you ever look at a place people call home as anything other than being full of life and hope and emotion?