Parvez

Portraits

Photos by Srinivas Kuruganti

Street Life

Photos by Deepak Turbhekar

Landscape...

Photos by Ravi Shekhar

New Years Day 2010

Photos by Anuja Gupta

Carroms

Easter Celebrations in Dharavi

Photos by Sudharak Olwe

Episode 2

Dharavi does not suffer from vertigo. 

People living in a slum cannot afford to be vertiginous. The lack of space makes building upwards the only alternative. And once again, because space is a luxury that cannot be wasted, the stairs that lead to the upper storeys are little more than steep, narrow, modified ladders. With years of negotiating these stepladders, the people have little fear of loosing their footing. They climb upwards nimbly, and without hesitation.

But higher and steeper than the climb to their upper storeys is the climb to relative prosperity. A climb that the people of Dharavi are constantly engaged in. Because they cannot afford to be vertiginous.  

Anjana Kale’s knees are inflamed.  

It has been a long climb up the ladder for the 40-something Anjana. As she moves around the tiny living room-cum-kitchenette in the lower level of her house in Dharavi, her bearing is warm and yet regal. As we ask her how work is these days- Anjana prepares and supplies dabbas for PWD employees in BKC, which nets her a minimum of Rs 6,000 every month- she informs us that the officials want her to cook within the office premises and provide tea in addition to lunch, something she flatly refuses to do unless they give her a gas connection and a separate room to cook and serve in. 

Anjana has always lived life on her own terms. 

She also has a very strong sense of protocol. So she firmly tells us ‘tea first, talk later’. We are affectionately treated to tiny glasses of delicately flavoured tea and puranpolis as Anjana keeps up a steady banter of small talk. But tea over, Anjana peremptorily says, “Ab bolo, kya baat karne ke hai.” Her attitude is a little sharp,a little wary. And you know that Anjana has had a lifetime of looking out for herself, and won’t be taken for a ride. 

Obviously, that is not our intention. 

And once Anjana is convinced that all we really want is to know more about her, she opens up. She talks about her various jobs over the years- vegetable vendor, sari saleswoman, and for several years now, caterer. The food is prepared in the tiny room where we are seated, and her husband-who she fondly addresses as ‘seth’-helps her carry the tiffins over the bus ride from Dharavi to BKC. Her delicious meals, vegetarian through the week except two days on which she offers a side dish of chicken or fish, are appreciated by the health conscious among the office-goers as well. “I don’t use much oil and none of my dishes are too heavy. Even the puranpolis I served you were made of wheat, and not refined flour,” she proudly informs us.  

But Anjana’s not-so-secret pride isn’t her status as a successful entrepreneur.  

Mention you’ve heard that she is respected in the community for her status as a successful mother, and Anjana’s face suffuses with pleasure. Her older children, a daughter and a son, are married and settled with their own families, the youngest child-another daughter-is still in school. The weddings of her older offspring were conducted with much lavishness, as Anjana’s treasured photo albums reveal. There are photos too of a family vacation in Mahabaleshwar, the affection between mother and children evident despite the self-conscious poses.  

But this too, has come to Anjana the hard way. 

Whether it was annulling her marriage with a philandering husband whom she was forced to wed when still a child or raising the two children of the man she later married - over the years, Anjana has fiercely fought for, and found, her happiness. “When I married seth, his wife had been dead four years. The children- a teenaged girl and a 9-year-old boy- had no one to look after them in the proper way, to guide them. They weren’t very receptive to me initially, but I knew that if I didn’t forge a bond with them right then, it would become impossible later,” she says. 

And as Anjana smilingly forces us to have another of the deliciously crumbly nankhattais that she has ordered just for us, her earlier wariness forgotten, her seth-who has a story of his own-hovering lovingly in the background, the miracle is this- that her spirit hasn’t been submerged in the struggle to stay afloat.  

Anjana has successfully climbed the ladder. 

-Rohini Nair

Christian Wedding Celebrations

Photos by Anuja Gupta

Cosmopolitan to the Core

One cannot help but notice the amalgamation of different cultures and religious values that exist on the lanes of Dharavi; Tamilians, Kolis, Gujratis, Catholics and Muslims - its a secular state in itself. The Koli’s were the first ones said to have inhabited this 18th century swamp island for their fishing business. When you pass through the narrow streets of Dharavi, you come across an amazing mix of cultures. What is remarkable is the harmony that exists between them.

But the true essence of Dharavi lies in its business sense, with different kinds of people belonging to different facets of life; who work day in and day out to make a living and earn their daily bread. Their dedication shows in their remarkable effort to work their best in rooms smaller than 4feet by 4feet.

Dharavi entertains a diversity of business activities; one comes across potters, scrap dealers, zari makers, cloth merchants, tailors and drug dealers. I was still so hesitant to communicate with the inhabitants as the notorious history it carries. However, my comfort zone eased when I started interacting with the locals. Their gracious attitudes and the curiosity to interact with us was heart warming. No selfish reasons and no boorish behavior, but only the soul reason to interact.

Mumbai as it is popularly known as is the economic capital of India and a lot of it's contribution comes from these 450 acres of marshy land. As I walked in these narrow lanes, I wondered: Anyone can work in an air-conditioned room filled with all the essential tools and appliances, but working in the most aggressive environment with unavailability of such comforts is an achievement in itself.

-Ushma Jani

My first steps...

Walking on alien streets all by yourself is not as daunting as walking on the streets of Dharavi for the first time. It was for the first time, last week; I walked on the most hostile roads of Mumbai. The experience was quite intimidating especially for a person like me - born and brought up in the same city and yet unaware of this crude mass of commercial settlement, `Dharavi'.

When I first landed at Mahim station, I encountered an unlikely environment, prone to civil conflict all the time. Mahim station- a host to a temple on one side of the road, and to its diagonally opposite, proudly stood a mosque. As I walked towards my destination, dharavi police station on the 90 ft road, I was welcomed by a mass of lewd comments, comments that were vulgar and funny at the same time. I think I heard someone say to me ‘seh-xy danger’ it almost broke me in to giggles. While I made conscious efforts to ignore it and walked towards my destination, I was dismayed with the experience of walking on these roads all by myself. My only goal was to reach the journey’s end as soon as possible and take the shelter of comfort from my other team members.

An experience not so pleasant to share, but what kept me going was the anticipation of a career I had been wanting to pursue, the eagerness to know my own city better and to see Asia’s largest slum.

-Ushma Jani

Photo by Sudharak Olwe

Photo by Sudharak Olwe

Photo by Vishal Olwe

Photo by Anuja Gupta

Photo by Ravi Shekhar

Episode 1

Early one chilly January morning, Anuja Gupta, Vishal Olwe and I stand on a paver-block pavement fronting a vast stretch of hutments, part of the Mahim stretch of Dharavi. This is where the scrap and plastic recyling units, which contribute significantly to Dharavi’s famed economy, are located. Anuja has been working in the area for over a year, Vishal too has charted it for a considerable time. This is my first visit. I don’t quite know what to expect. Or maybe I do, fuelled by the ideas of Dharavi that have become part of our consciousness through the images of garbage and filth most often seen in the media. But as we step into the narrow alley that leads into the unknown expanse ahead, the first thing I smell is washing soap.

The alley is faced on both sides by tall sheets of corrugated metal. As we walk down this bounded passageway, I catch glimpses of young men sleeping in the little available space in rooms that double up as workshops. Some of them are just beginning to rouse, washing up in the space outside the rooms, in the passage itself. A few are engaged in sweeping. That this is a Sunday makes no difference. It’s just another working day in Dharavi. Most of the rooms are piled high with white sacks bulging with scrap. In another section, the piles are of rubber tyres.

“People here mean business,” says Anuja- a message that I soon discover the truth of in subsequent trysts with Dharavi. People here for the most part are brisk and busy, and time indeed is money. But for now, she’s taking me to meet a man who was done with the ‘business’ phase of his life, and who has seen Dharavi grow around him. We find Hariram Dilliwalla seated on a charpoy in the lower level of his two-storey house, looking through the morning papers. Behind him, against a rough brick wall rise the ubiquitous white sacks, attesting to Dilliwalla’s profession as a scrap dealer.

“I came to Dharavi in 1973,” he says in chaste Hindi, recounting his journey from Haryana to Mumbai. “I taught P.T. at a school in a small village. I was appointed headmaster because I was a graduate, but there was a lot of pressure from the parents of students to pass them in subjects and so on. We’d be offered bribes-ghee or wheat or milk-but I didn’t want to be a part of that. My uncle was here in Mumbai, running a scrap business from Kherwadi. He wanted someone who could help him and take care of the accounts as well. So I came here.”

Dilliwalla’s first years were spent traversing Maharashtra, Gujarat and Karnataka, sourcing scrap. When that became unprofitable, he confined his operations to Mumbai. The decision to set up home in Dharavi was a pragmatic one. “All the scrap dealers were here, and they opened shop at different times. Rather than move back and forth from Kherwadi to Dharavi, I decided to live here itself. My first ‘home’ was cane matting wound around four bamboo poles,” he smiles.

Built in that same location-incidentally on a plot that was reserved to build a primary school-Dilliwalla’s home now has two rooms on the ground floor and a flight of steep stairs leading to the quarters above, from where we hear the sounds of his family just beginning to wake up. It has even survived the wave of demolitions that took place under former BMC deputy commissioner G R Khairnar, an event which set Dilliwalla onto his second innings as social activist. He joined the People’s Responsible Organisation of United Dharavi (PROUD) and soon became the local area representative. This morning, he dispenses quick advice to a woman who comes in asking how to renew her ration card as per the new governmental directives.

Dilliwalla was a firm supporter of the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan when it was first announced, but has grave doubts now. “When they talked about redeveloping the area by dividing it into five sectors, we were assured that only big builders would take up the project, which would have ensured a certain standard of work and uniform facilities across sectors. But with the subdivision into 32 clusters that the government is now proposing, smaller players will come in. And each cluster will definitely not have all the utilities, whether it’s a hospital or school or park. That can create a lot of problems for residents,” he points out.

In the children’s fable Rumplestiltskin, a young woman is locked into a room and forced to spin hay into gold. Dilliwalla has, quite literally, made gold from scrap. “In the days when everyone used fountain pens, the nibs were sometimes made of gold. I saved each one I found and took them to the goldsmith and got some jewellery made for my wife,” says Dilliwalla who sorts the scrap by hand and can identify 15 different qualities of plastic by touch, only occasionally needing to use chemicals. His earnings from the scrap business have helped him raise a daughter and two sons, who now want him to “retire”. Dilliwalla struck a compromise-he works just as much as he wants to. “I tried not working for a while, and relied on my sons to support me. But I like to have a little money in my pocket. I have a lot of friends whom I enjoy treating to tea, and I like spending my own money for that,” he says to us, grey eyes twinkling over steaming cups of tea.

-Rohini Nair