Street Life

Life in Mumbai happens on the street. Every corner is lined with carts selling bhel puri, samosas, and sandwiches. Juice makers abound in this humid city; when I exit the train station, having pushed and shoved my way through the congested platform and emerged with my person and property intact, although drenched with sweat, there is a luxurious feel to the glass of sugar cane juice that I sip contentedly. The city abounds with the noises of people living: cars honking, rickshaws screeching to a heart-jolting halt, people holding conversations in a variety of tongues, hawkers selling their wares, as diverse a selection as one could find in any Macy’s. The goods range from cell phone holders to Qtips to underwear. Who needs department stores when a gamut of choices approaches you, in the form of a skinny man wearing a Nehru cap? He claims he’s got the best pirated movies in town, but I move away from the temptation of illegal goods and gravitate towards the colorful pyramids of fruit whose price and color cajole me into buying at least a few varieties a day.
My first few days in this metropolis, I didn’t know where to look. The overwhelming sights and sounds (not to mention the smells—fresh cow dung at 8 in the morning is a smell not to be forgotten) made me feel as though I could look and hear forever and still not absorb everything that Mumbai offered to its populace. If I blinked, I felt that I would miss a crucial piece of life happening that would never happen again. I wanted to capture the image of the fisherwoman who was transporting her basket of dead fish on the train and the beautiful six feet long saris that fluttered from every balcony in the city, left out to dry. I wanted to try all the food on the streets, from the coconut water (literally a straw stuck in the middle of a green coconut) to the Mozami (a cross between an orange and a lemon) juice to the real desi lassi.
Each part of the city had something different to offer. When my friends and I explored the area around the Gateway of India, I discovered a Mumbai that I had never imagined: a city with British architecture and an entire train terminal dedicated to Queen Victoria. The days of colonialism were firmly etched onto this city; the English architecture hid the marks of a beauty bought at a price so heinously high that it tore apart a subcontinent and spawned three countries still struggling to define themselves decades after independence.
However, everything is not so picturesque in this city in one of the poorest countries of the world. When I wrote that life in Mumbai happens on the street, I meant that quite literally. One day en route to a train station, I noticed that the entire sidewalk was covered in ramshackle houses made of tarps and plastic signs. The sidewalk had been colonized by the poorest of the poor, who couldn’t even afford to rent a one-room shack in the slums of Mumbai but had been reduced to squatting on the sidewalk. Children ran naked around the houses; women brushed their teeth on the streets and spit into a bucket; men bathed in plain view of all passerby. I was horrified by the indignity of poverty that I witnessed only a few blocks from where I worked amid palm trees and restaurants offering delicious food. People had been reduced to eking out an existence in front of everyone’s eyes. Although they had claimed a part of the public sphere for their homes, they were as marginalized and as ignored as the stray dogs that ran wild through the streets.
There is little I can do to reconcile the posh area around the Gateway, where poverty dare not encroach, to the sidewalks eclipsed by the insistence of the human spirit to survive. I remain horrified by the depth of poverty in this country where 80% of the population subsists on less than $2 per day, but at the same time, I admire the resourcefulness of people so determined to live. It brings to mind a key point in Jeffrey Sachs’ book The End of Poverty: give people a way to reach the bottom rung on the ladder of economic development, and they will climb up. His thesis is based on decades of research and government advising, but I can see its potential even in my limited experience as an observer of human nature here in India. The determination among this populace is so palpable that it will propel them to climb ladders, as long as the basic means of life are guaranteed. Only then will the disparities that have woven themselves into the streets of this city slowly begin to narrow.