The Big Necessity (31 page)

 

 

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Shanti Nagar, Mumbai, India

(Author)

 

 

AQUA-PRIVIES FOR JESUS

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At the entrance to Shanti Nagar, off Mumbai's western expressway, you can learn all you need to know about slum life without having to look hard. In the bustling main street, leading up the hill away from the expressway, men in suits are going about their business, and women are carrying water containers, hurrying to fill them in the two hours that water comes, and the shops and doctors and quacks and barbers are doing good trade. It looks and sounds like any Indian street, though narrower and darker, and you wonder what makes it a slum. So you turn around, and see on the dusty roadside, as the cars zoom past, a series of little children's bottoms, perched nakedly and shamelessly in public, defecating with composure, before the children jump up and scamper down the embankment, disappearing back into the slum, and you notice that the roadside is dotted with feces, for as far down as you can see. You walk into the slum, and take any of the alleys that run off the main street, and these turn into other alleyways, narrower and murkier, until you feel like you are Alice in a slum wonderland, bewildered and overpowered by the crowds, the noise, the smell, until you feel like you've never been anywhere clean, and you remember how much you love soap.

Cities are supposed to make sanitation easier. They are denser, and their people are generally wealthier than rural inhabitants. It is easier to
lay pipe networks because the distances are less daunting, and people generally have enough money to pay for them. Sanitation is a central feature of the concept of the city, at least since the days of the nineteenth century when the medieval, chaotic urban environment was tamed by sanitarians and engineers, and the city came to be defined as a living environment that successfully separates humans from their waste. Historians refer to this new urban template as “the sanitarian city,” or, if they're more engineering-minded, the hydraulic city. Even the engineers don't call it the brick or road city, because it was sanitary infrastructure that was the mark of successful urban living. It made successful urban living possible.

Slums defy this logic. They defeat urban planners. They are so shifting, changing, and chaotic that experts don't even dare give them a firm definition. Some slums have infernal alleyways; others have sandy streets and banana plantations. Some slums are nice. Some are the worst human settlements imaginable. The compilers of the 1913 edition of
Webster's Dictionary
knew that a slum was “a foul back street of a city, especially one filled with a poor, dirty, degraded and often vicious population,” but the writers of the groundbreaking UN Habitat report
Challenge of Slums
chose instead “an operational definition.” This attempted to restrict itself to the physical, the quantifiable and the concrete, though actually it defines a slum not by what it is but by what it doesn't have: secure housing tenure, good-quality housing, and adequate access to water and sanitation. (The report also included one of the better acronyms in urban theory. BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.)

By some of these definitions, Shanti Nagar is not a slum. Some houses here are worth more per square foot than posh Mumbai apartments. They have two floors and lockable doors. Water is available through a community system: anyone who pays a membership fee gets to use a standpipe during the two hours a day water flows through it. The standpipes don't need to have taps, because water is either there or it is not, and the most popular containers to store water are old chemical drums that people buy from the recyclers, which can't ever be safe. But it is water, and it is available.

Shanti Nagar's location is also enviable. It is near a main road, a
station, a market, and schools. It is, for the servants and tradesmen and gardeners who live here, a convenient place, with good access to their places of employment. In fact, Shanti Nagar is a desirable place to live, except that not one house has a toilet, inside, outside, or anywhere nearby. The four thousand people who live in Shanti Nagar have to share the facilities of one community toilet block, which has twenty-six stalls. You'll have to ask directions if you want to see it, because smell is no guide when the whole place stinks, and when you can easily be lost down the unlit passageways where you stumble clumsily and where kind hands occasionally reach out and guide your head away from an overhanging tin roof, or move you out of the way of a pile of filth. Shanti Nagar is definitely a slum, because to live in a slum is to live amid shit, and it has plenty of it.

There are office workers and university lecturers living in these slums, too. There are houses that gleam with cleanliness. But step outside, and you cannot avoid dirt. It fills the drains, the streets, from the center to the periphery. But it takes a half hour to walk to the toilet block, a half hour in line, and half hour back, and there are always lines, and you've not been in there five minutes before someone starts knocking. It's easier not to bother. Women who live in slums learn to eat and drink less. Children learn to squat over open drains in the company of flies, crows, and vultures. Everyone learns to take a couple of bricks along when going for squatting, for a token elevation over the endemic, awful muck.

This is an extreme version of city living, but it is less and less unusual. We are now an urban species. At some point recently, it is thought, the majority of the world's population became city dwellers for the first time. A worryingly large part of that city dwelling in the developing world is in “unplanned areas,” “informal settlements,” or whatever terminology is chosen to describe places like Shanti Nagar. Already, there are nearly a billion slum dwellers on the planet, and Africa's slum-dwelling population is expected to double on average every fifteen years. In
Planet of Slums
, Mike Davis writes that 55.5 percent of Indians live in Shanti Nagars, and 85 percent of Kenya's population growth between 1989 and 1999 happened in its slums. Africa's slum areas are growing twice as fast as anywhere else. One hundred thousand people move to slums every
day. The cities of the future will include those made of steel and sophistication, but also living environments constructed from corrugated tin, plastic sheeting, open drains, and desperate determination.

Aid agencies have up until now concentrated on rural poverty. Slums are too chaotic, too troublesome. They are not neat. It is no wonder that slums defeat urban sanitarians, who still struggle with how best to dispose of human excreta in the most advanced cities of the world. Countless coastal cities—Vancouver, Brighton—have no better solution for disposing of their excreta than putting it in the sea. What's the hope for slums?

 

On the main street in Nehru Nagar, another slum built on bad land near Juhu beach, I go looking for Mr. Shankar. I'd met him a couple of years before on an assignment. Then and now I was accompanied by the Indian photographer Rajesh Vora, who lives in Mumbai, and therefore lives among slums, though if he weren't a photographer, he probably wouldn't visit them. Who would?

Shankar had founded Nehru Nagar's Humanist Movement, a local community organization that was secular and unaffiliated with any of the powerful local political parties. He was a good organizer because he was well known and liked, having lived in this slum all his life, since his father had arrived from some drought-stricken village. When I first met him, he was running a small restaurant where prices were a quarter what they were beyond the gates of the slum. He lived with his family in the alley next to his restaurant. They had one dim room for six people, smaller than the average American parking space, where the only light came from the gleaming tin tableware stacked on a shelf. The room was as pristine as the alley outside was dirty. The Humanist Movement was a way, Shankar had told me then, of organizing people. It worked, up to a point. The movement's members had marched through Nehru Nagar with a giant mosquito to demand electricity for fans that would keep the mosquitos away, and electricity was given. They asked for the
nala
storm drain around which the slum had first grown fifty years earlier, to be cleaned, but that wish wasn't granted. Nor were any toilets.

Two years on, Shankar's restaurant is not to be found, and all the alleys look alike. We keep getting lost. Finally, Rajesh stops outside the building where he thinks the restaurant used to be. A man sits inside a dark room, stripping copper wire, careful among tangles. He is a recycler, because slums are the recycling centers of most cities in the developing world. (In Cuba, I saw doorknobs made from telephones and hairdryers converted from Soviet fans and paint cans.) In poor places, nothing is wasted, because waste only comes with wealth, and waste can, in the flourishing informal economy of the slums, create it. The recyclers and 15,000 one-room businesses in Dharavi, a Mumbai slum that is the largest in Asia, create an economic output estimated at $1.4 billion a year.

The recycling man points into the room behind. There are abandoned tables and chairs, the signs of Shankar's restaurant, now closed. Please sit, the man says, while Shankar is found. The restaurant closed after the floods two years earlier. Most slums are built on land that is of no use to anyone else—bad, soggy, sloping ground. Nehru Nagar is inundated often, but these were bad floods made worse by the rumor that preceded them. When they came, it was soon after the tsunami of December 2004, and people stampeded. Twenty-two people were crushed to death in the alleyways by their neighbors' rushing, fearful feet.

“It was terrible,” says Shankar when he arrives, but he also shrugs. It is slum life. He either remembers us or pretends to—plenty of palefaces tramp through Mumbai's slum streets for one reason or another—and insists on taking us on a replay toilet tour. The block we had visited last time is closed now and surrounded by trash and shit. But nearby a new toilet block has been built. It is run by a woman named Rahamath Mathre. She says she is a trained architect, but jobs were scarce and running a toilet block earns her a decent living. Her toilet block is connected to a septic tank that drains directly into the
nala
. Even with Rahamath's services, Nehru Nagar still has only one hundred seats for a population of 45,000, figures at some remove from the Mumbai city authorities' target of one toilet per fifty people.

Shankar doesn't say why his Humanist Movement hasn't yet marched for toilets, but the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) might have something to do with it. This is the latest in a series of slum
redevelopment initiatives. It was launched ten years ago by Mumbai authorities and pronounced an enormous improvement. As the normal response of city authorities is to bulldoze slums (a tactic beloved of Delhi city officials) or to hope they go away, the SRA was certainly innovative. The SRA enables developers to buy slum land. They can construct apartment blocks on it, as long as some of the blocks are given over to rehousing the slum dwellers who were living on it. The other blocks can be sold for profit. In Shanti Nagar and Nehru Nagar, colorful boards have sprung up showing visions of SRA life: swanky apartment buildings, green gardens, an SUV parked outside, the modern Indian dream.

The reality, as I discover in the slum of Shambahaji Nagar, is different. These SRA apartments are dark; the corridors have no light, the water supply isn't working, and the elevators haven't moved for months. Stagnant pools of water in the hallway and cracks in the walls, though the building is only a couple of years old, are testament to cheap construction. Rajesh is not impressed with SRA projects, and neither are officials of the Maharashtra Anti-Corruption Bureau, who temporarily shut the program down in 2006. Yet in the apartment of Sumitra Ramchendra Darde, there is no dissatisfaction, though they had a slum house before which was better. It had two stories, while this has one. “We had everything but the toilet,” says Mrs. Darde. “That was the selling point.” Even if the SRA architects, seeming not to understand their own people, designed apartments with the toilets opposite the kitchen, an arrangement that most rural Indians—which many slum dwellers were, originally—would find shockingly unclean. It doesn't matter: Mrs. Darde had her toilet room moved, and she even bought a Western flush toilet, copying the ones in the houses she cleans every day. She is beamingly proud of it.