making keychains

For the past couple of days, I have been shadowing Muna Apa, a social worker with the organization Apnalaya (meaning 'our house' in Marathi).  Apnalaya is really involved with the issue of ration cards, so I'm getting a good look at how this part of Mumbai's identification system works, in theory and in practice.  I basically follow Muna Apa around as she makes house visits in the slums and goes to the ration card office to help people with their applications.  She is really good about explaining the minutae of things to me.  She herself has lived in a Govandi slum-- Shanti Nagar-- for decades, and she has been working with Apnalaya for like 15 years.  So she has an insider's view of things.

These pictures are from one of the house visits we made... Muna Apa was there to help one of the children get admission to a school.  The grandmother of the household was assembling keychains.  It was a five or six step process of putting together a very cheap little plastic bug that makes a clicking noise when you squeeze it.   She had large burlap sacks full of plastic pieces to put together. 

For making 12 dozen keychains, she gets 1 rupee  (roughly 40 rupees = $1).  At first, I thought she meant to say one dozen.  So I asked again:  you get 1 rupee for making 12 of these things?  She clarified, 12 dozen.  One hundred forty-four.  She is able to make about Rs. 15 per day doing this work. 

We had to sit around and wait for about 15 minutes while one of the parents found some documentation Muna Apa had asked for, so in the meantime, I tried my hand at keychain assembly. I used a pair of pliers to fix black beads into eye sockets. As we were sitting around making keychains together, the grandmother gave me a really good interview about her thoughts on voting and politics!

 

route to class

Three times a week, I teach English to some members of the women's labor union that is helping me with my research.  The class meets in Dharavi, and I really have to go through a maze of alleys to get there.  The first time Indira took me to the meeting place, I told her, there is no way at all that I am going to remember how to get back here.  But now its no problem.  Here is my route:

1.  From the Dharavi T junction, go to this group of buildings:

2.  Enter this alley between two of the buildings (and say hello to any passing children):

3.  At the snack stall, make a left:

 

4.  Then down the alley and another left at the blue door:

 

5.  A right turn, then down this alley (being careful to step to the side if someone is approaching in the other direction, because there is only room for one person to get by):

 

6.  The last alley empties out into this street, called V.K. Wadi:

 

7.  Every once in a while I encounter something interesting on this street.  A couple of days ago, one of the men had saved a cockatiel (or some such bird) from a crow attack, and was playing with it.  He put it in my hands and took a picture:

 

8.  Arrive at the classroom, just a short way down V.K. Wadi:

 

anna's blog

Anna's comment on my journal reminded me that I haven't been to her site for a while.  So I went... and there are so many new things!  The "easel blog" with notes and pictures about her painting process is really cool.

While you're on the site, you should check out the lovely painting of Karachi that was commissioned by my parents!

visiting Dharavi slums

Yesterday I got my first real sense of life in the Dharavi slums.

I tagged along with Nitin, Indira (both NGO workers), and Bano Apa (labor union president) as they made their rounds to various union group leaders' houses.  They briefed them on the upcoming meeting and urged them to get their group members to attend. 

Today's area of focus was Rajiv Gandhi Nagar, an area of Dharavi with roughly 12,000 people.  In total, Dharavi has somewhere between 600,000 and a million residents, spread out over roughly 0.67 square miles.  By way of comparison, Manhattan has a population density of about 66,940 per square mile.

The entire area of Dharavi is full of shops and vendors.  Walking along a main road you see lines of small stores on either side.  Often, there are lanes between the stores, sometimes only about 3 to 4 feet wide.  Until now, these narrow gaps hadn't even registered as alleys or paths in my brain.  But if you walk into one of them, any one, you enter a vast and dense network of walkways and slumhouses.  The houses are basically rows of boxes made out of concrete and brick.  They are usually one room, which includes a kitchen space and a small drainage area. 

Among the ones I visited today, the smallest was about 45 or 50 square feet.  We all piled in, sat on the concrete floor and talked about union-related stuff for about 20 minutes.  Bano Apa asked the lady who lived there whether her husband was tall or short, because she wanted to figure out if the guy is able to stretch out and sleep.  This particular hut didn't have electricity, and since we went at night, there were two thin candles that lit the place.  In one corner, there was a stove, water containers, and a smattering of kitchen implements.  Her rent is 1,000 rupees a month, which is really an astronomical figure for a space like that; and also for someone with her income. 

The most spacious house we visited was also one room, but L-shaped, and I would guess about 100-120 square feet.  There was a small bed, a wardrobe, and a bit of other furniture.  Our host took out fancy glasses from a cabinet above the bed, told her son to go buy some bottled drinks from a nearby store, and served us, an indication that her finances were probably doing ok.  She also had the trappings of a more lower-middle class existence... a stereo, a mobile phone, bottles of nail polish, several clothes hanging up to dry, cabinets and mirrors.  (Visiting a one room house is such an invasion of privacy, in a way.  You know exactly what that person has and doesn't have.  You see their underwear drying on the clothes line above the kitchen counter).

On the other hand, like everyone else in that area, she didn't have running water-- everyone has to buy it in large containers-- and also has to travel kind of far to use the bathroom.  All of the people in her particular block of houses either have to walk a bit and then cross a busy road to get to the public latrines or go in the creek behind their hutment colony. 

But people can bathe in their homes.  All of the houses have drains that empty out into the network of alleys.  There is maybe 3 to 4 feet of space between lines of houses, and the drains empty into open gutters in this narrow space.  The walkways are built over the sewage.  To walk in this area, I would place my feet carefully from cement, to concrete tile to an occasional stone-paved section.  Sometimes you put your foot on one side of the gutter, sometimes the other, depending on what looks the least crumbled.  Navigating through these passages felt like kind of a ridiculous dance; meanwhile, the children who lived there would race past us confidently, and almost all of them had bare feet.  Children around these areas are often sick.  I haven't met anyone yet who hasn't had to deal with a very sick child in the family at one time or another.

 

caste and religion stories

As people often note about Indian society, caste and religion are very intricately mixed up.  I had two experiences recently that highlighted this point.

The first was on the train today.  Seating on trains is arranged in benches that face each other on either side of the aisle.  Which means that you can easily size up or talk to the six to eight people that are sitting in your immediate vicinity.  Today, a somewhat elderly woman across from me asked if I had any water for her grandson (a side point:  people often ask each other for water on the train; its no big deal to ask or share).  She had to ask me several times because I didn't understand her particular dialect, so everyone around us knew exactly what she wanted.  I didn't have any, but the girl next to me asked a woman across the aisle if she had some.  

That woman was wearing a black burqa, so it was obvious that she was Muslim.  The elderly woman muttered, "I can't take water from her."  Another woman near us told her, "What does it matter, for your grandson?  Just give the child some water."  The elderly woman relented but she did ask the Muslim lady if the water was clean.  The Muslim woman thought that was pretty funny.  She rolled her eyes and shared generously and everyone seated around me discussed this little exchange.  I quietly asked the girl next to me why the elderly lady refused the water.  She just sort of shook her head. Then I said, "Its because she's Muslim, right?"  And she nodded.  So I said, "But I'm Muslim too."  The girl thought that was amusing... she shook her head, and whispered it to her companion, and they both giggled.    (I should clarify that all of this took place in the women's compartment of the train... every train has two or three designated women-only cars, and there is normally a lot of conversation and comraderie that I don't think would be there if men were also present).

Anyway, this mentality of thinking that food or water from certain other people is "dirty" is definitely a caste thing, but socially, there is so much overlap between religion and caste that it becomes a religion thing too.  For example, a lot of the women in the labor union I am researching are cooks and maids in other people's homes, and many of the Hindu women won't work in Muslim houses, and vice versa.  For the Muslim women, especially, this makes it harder to find work, because there are many more well-off Hindu homes than Muslim ones in Mumbai.   But the same prejudice also goes for the employers and who they will hire.  Even among my family here, some of the people in the older generation won't eat Hindu-made food... though none of the kids bother with that restriction.  

My other story related to this stuff took place yesterday.  A woman I was interviewing, in the slum in Cuff Parade, asked me my caste.  It was the first time I had been asked this question and I didn't know what to answer.  I told her I didn't really think I had a caste, and said that I was Muslim, and Bohra.  She didn't know what Bohra meant, but figured it out after I described the clothing.  For her, those two identifications were enough to get a handle on my caste.  She informed me what the hierarchy was:  First Sunnis, then Syeds, then Shias, then Bohras (she threw this one in for my benefit... I don't think Bohras would have come into her calculations otherwise), then she named some other groups of Muslims that I don't remember.  It was nice of her to put me toward the top, right next to Shias.  

For those who aren't familiar with the various groups of people I just named, the categories in her hiearchy don't make much sense... for one thing, they're not even discrete groups.  But these were her impressions of the layout of Muslim communities.

One last thing that comes to mind on this topic:  one of my standard interview questions is "What do you like about living in Mumbai?"  Many many people have answered something along the lines of:  there are people from everywhere here, you can be friends with anybody, caste doesn't matter.  They contrast it to their villages, where it really structures their work and social life.