Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Unlike the poor in Europe or America or even China, the poor in India are a constant presence. Where else do people put up plastic huts on the sidewalk of a main road—not one or two but an entire subdivision of humpies and pup tents? They inhabit train stations, sleep in doorways, crouch under bridges and railway trestles. They do it for safety and also convenience, since they are not parasites or lazy louts but underpaid workers, many of these squatters actually doing jobs in Mumbai. Among the poorest are the Koli people, descendants of the original inhabitants (the city takes its name from their patron goddess, Mumbai-Devi). Most of the Koli are fisher folk who live at the edge of the sea in black and battered shacks, near one of Mumbai's most expensive districts.

With poverty so obvious and unmissable, the foreigner sometimes bursts into tears, until he or she learns the Indian trick of looking only at the background, where all those new buildings are rising. While I was in Mumbai the municipal council launched "a drive to clear hutments and shanties from the roads and footpaths." On the first day one thousand such shelters were pulled down and the occupants scattered. In one morning, more than six thousand people were made homeless.

"Where will we go? The BMC has razed our houses," one of the victims said.

"Our houses" was an interesting phrase. The structures were made of twigs, branches, waste lumber, bits of string, plastic sheeting with taped seams, cotton cloth, blankets, cardboard, splintered plywood, threadbare canvas; each one with a flickering lantern and a cooking fire.

Squatters are so firmly established in every Indian city their seemingly makeshift camps are as deceptive as birds' nests, as well camouflaged, as tightly woven, and just as complex; and these people have counterparts in every city in the world. As the Indian woman said to me, "What about the poor people in your country?" Well, yes. New Orleans is a vivid example of a place where the poor were either hidden or unapproachable. It seemed that until they were flushed out by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina no one knew they existed, nor knew what to do with them.

There is a depressing travel book to be written about the poor in America. The problem is, how to penetrate this world? The book is almost unwritable, except by someone who actually lives in such a place—though living in one slum does not license a person to live in or even visit another slum. The poor in America live in dangerous places; out of paranoia, or for protection, or because of neglect by the police or harassment by gangs, they have themselves mostly contrived this danger, to seal themselves off from authority, or from outsiders, anyone inquisitorial who would be regarded (with reason) as an enemy. I have never seen any community in India so hopeless or, in its way, so hermetic in its poverty, so blatant in its look of menace, so sad and unwelcoming, as East St. Louis, Illinois, the decaying town that lies across the Mississippi from flourishing St. Louis, Missouri. Yet I can imagine that many people from St. Louis proper would weep at the sight of Indian poverty. They dare not cross their own river to see the complacent decrepitude and misery on the other bank.

The Indian poor are accessible, conversational, often congenial and friendly, and generally unthreatening. No one can travel among the American poor the way I could travel among the Indian poor, asking intrusive questions. What's your name? How long have you lived here? Where do you work? How much money do you make?—the usual visitor's questions. I got answers, and even hospitality. In the same sort of area in the United States—the decaying sections of Jackson, Mississippi, the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, the Anacostia district in Washington, D.C., and many other places—I would be threatened or robbed or sent away for daring to ask such things. What do you want here? It is an understandable response. But in India I was unexpectedly welcome in such places—the slums, the squatter camps, the stinking chawls,

the reeking bustees.

"This is the biggest slum in Asia—it said so in the paper," a young man named Kartik said to me in the area of Mumbai called Dharavi. The name is practically a synonym for desperation: 520 acres in the depths of the city, 600,000 inhabitants and grim statistics, though the celebrated Dharavi factoid of "one public toilet for 800 people"—the vision of a very long line of people hopping with impatience—is misleading, since it was malodorously clear to me on my visit that many people in Dharavi regarded a public toilet as a superfluous novelty.