Last night, I saw a documentary about the slum kids of Mumbai on Channel 4. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/episode-guide/series-46/episode-1
While it shocks most Westerners, I’ve seen these things a million times. I’ve spent 28 years of my life in Mumbai. And whichever part of Mumbai you live in, you cannot escape the slums. It’s such a part of your life - there’s usually one right next to your home or work. You know someone from the slums or are involved with them in some other way.
Yet last night’s documentary shocked me. Not because of the levels of degradation that these poor kids lived in. My shock was more personal. In spite of living in Mumbai all those years and seeing these kids and their desperate lives day in, day out – I was so removed from all of this when I lived there.
I’ve probably passed a kid selling me crumpled roses at a traffic light. And pretended they didn’t exist. Or ignored some poor woman with a baby straddled on her back, pushing magazines in my face. If I didn’t see the despair in her eyes, I didn’t have to deal with it.
Mumbai gave me my life. It’s is the city that gave me an education and a job. It introduced me to my dearest friends, people I can still connect deeply with. It opened up my mind to books and art and my senses to fine food and poetry. And, most importantly, Mumbai gave me a chance to make a life for myself– one that was better than what my parents had.
I grew up in a tiny one-bedroom flat within a family of five. We were not rich, neither were we poor. So while all three of us kids were crammed into the pull-out sofa in the living room which was our bed – we never went hungry. We went to school, got an annual family holiday at our grandparents’ and were loved by our parents. The highlight of our week was a trip to a little restaurant, where our total bill was the princely sum of less than a pound. So, we were so much luckier than the millions of less fortunate kids growing up at the same time in Mumbai.
Of course, Mumbai is not all dark and dismal. The inhabitants have the biggest hearts I’ve seen anywhere – they are incredibly generous while having so little. The festivals they celebrate are the biggest, brashest, loudest. Everyone laughs a lot, and all the time. It’s the city of glittering dreams, where impossible ambitions are actually possible. Mumbai envelops you, brands you and you’re never quite the same again.
Living in Mumbai means developing an extremely thick skin. Or even an un-seeing eye. So while you see a beggar on the streets with rotting limbs or some poor tattered kid sleeping on the street – you learn to block it all out and just get on with your day.
Maybe it’s a survival thing. Because you do not and cannot allow yourself to get involved. With millions and millions living off the street and even more starving each day, maybe the sheer magnitude of the task makes it too overwhelming to consider.
Or maybe there’s something deeper, darker. There’s a sense of desperation that coats the air in Mumbai. Everyone hangs on to what they have for dear life. You’re trying so hard to claw your way to survival in this gruelling city, that leaving yourself open to sympathy for those less fortunate, could be lethal for you.
You see, the divide between the haves and the have-nots in Mumbai is very, very thin. One day, you could be going to work, earning a living. The next day, you could be on the streets with the other hungry millions. There’s no social security, there’s nothing. Maybe that’s why, I ignored the hungry cries and the dejected eyes for all those years. Because I knew I could not drop my guard for even a second, get off that treadmill even for a minute. The risk of losing it all, was too great.
But whatever it was, watching that documentary last night made me feel ashamed. That I was capable of living in that desperate city for all those years, without really feeling. I went to school and went to work. I went to parties and had great times. I went shopping and had fun. All the while, carrying on with my life as if none of the degradation around me existed.
The saddest thing is - it takes a British documentary about the city that I called home for 28 years – to make me sit up and really think about it. To allow my thick skin to thin a little bit and feel a tiny bit of the pain that exists in the city of dreams they call Mumbai.
