The temperature outside is a sweltering 38 degrees. Weather reports say this is one of the hottest October months Mumbai has witnessed in recent history. I’m ensconced, though, in my air-conditioned room at a pleasant 24 degrees on a Dussehra day listening to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel singing The Boxer. There is this part in the song I simply can’t get over. It plays over and over in my head.
When I left my home and my family,
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared, lying low
Seeking out the poorer quarters
Where the ragged people go
Looking for places
Only they would know
Every bone in my body understands the import of each word in the song. I guess it is because I know what it is like to be poor. Allow me to assure you, contrary to what popular books and cinema depict, there is no romance in poverty. When you are poor, the only thing you desperately want is to shake poverty off.
To wrap your head around what poverty really is, first ignore the stratification as defined by economists. Most of them don’t know of it because they pontificate from ivory towers. That is why I am glad these numbers are now under scrutiny, as a recent article by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan on Scroll articulates so well.
This ties in well with what I have always maintained. The whole song and dance about the great Indian middle class is a farce. What most people fail to get is that there are three layers to poverty. At the bottom of the pyramid are the absolute destitute that live on the streets. Just above them are those who can manage to find their way into a slum. And at the top of this pyramid—at least in Mumbai—are those who can afford to rent space in a chawl.
Chawls are of various kinds. Usually, they have 10’x10’ single rooms, with a makeshift kitchen and a small bathing area. Save some exceptions, the toilets are communal, where you queue up for morning ablutions. I was among the lucky ones who lived in one of these structures that had the luxury of an “attached toilet". Which meant we didn’t have to queue up some place.
The downside, though, is that because most chawls are illegal structures, drainage is non-existent and effluents can’t find their way into the city’s sanitation grid. Inevitably, at some point, particularly during the monsoon, these effluents come right back into the homes they were intended to be flushed out of. The accompanying stink and wretchedness can wear the hardiest soul out. We had to work our guts out to get the sewage out of our homes to make it habitable once again.
To make things worse, ceilings are makeshift affairs with a single layer of asbestos sheets. These sheets have a propensity to amplify heat significantly. So if it is 38 degrees outside, I suspect the temperature inside a chawl with an asbestos roof would be over 45 degrees. It is heat of the kind that makes most humans desperate to get out. In any case, we couldn’t afford air-conditioners. So, the all of us living in those hell pits would while our time away in the heat outside or seek respite in some public space until the temperatures were more bearable after sunset.
For me, though, that respite wasn’t good enough. I was always susceptible to heat. So, I would sleep on wet sheets spread on the floor.
The only upside to living in a chawl is that everybody is hungry and aches for a better life. So, those of us living there fought harder than most people. Until we got out, though, humiliation was par for the course.
During Navaratri, for instance, those who lived in “buildings" would organize dandia nights. We, from the chawls, couldn’t because we didn’t have the space to. And the “building people" wouldn’t allow us to participate because we were looked upon with suspicion.
Ostensibly, we had a predisposition to paw their women. So, the guards manning their gates had strict instructions not to allow anyone of us into their walled communities. We would watch from the outside, and oftentimes were shooed away with a lathi.
The only way out of this humiliation was to study as hard as we possibly could and wrangle a job somewhere; or think up some shortcut to the top—like a life with the underworld.
One of India’s most wanted gangsters, Ravi Pujari, studied with me at school before he dropped out and took to a life of crime. To be fair to my teachers though, the likes of Pujari were more the exception than the rule. They knew where we were coming from and tried their damndest best to encourage us to take to the books. In hindsight, they were heroes who battled the odds stacked against us.
That is why, much hard work later, and egged on by compassionate teachers, the likes of me found ourselves at some of the best institutions in the country—the passport to a better life.
But that said, the initial years at work were horribly tough. Most of us didn’t come from pedigreed backgrounds and had to prove our credentials.
Pardon me, but The Boxer interrupts my narrative.
Asking only workman’s wages, I came lookin’ for a job
But I get no offers
Just a come on from the whores on 7th Avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there
That is why, once again, I found myself at the bottom of the pyramid when I chose journalism over all else. For whatever reason, I was assigned to the desk and the graveyard shift. That means I had to be at work until the edition was put to bed. Inevitably, this would be late in the night—well past the hour when the last train to the suburbs had left.
Working at a nondescript newspaper in the mid-1990s meant the editors didn’t give a damn about how you got home. Only the larger newspapers offered perks like a home drop past a certain hour. With no money to hire a cab, the young ones like me would wait—and sleep on the platform at times—until the first train was ready to ply at 4am.
In hindsight, I haven’t worked this out. How did my brother earn a doctorate in the neurosciences from one of the world’s premier institutes? How did my cousin who grew up with us find his way into one of the big five consulting firms in a plush assignment?
How did MM, whom I met last week, find his way to Singapore, from where he now advises technology companies across the world? How did SM, a devout orthodox Christian boy with whom I used to hang out at the local gurudwara to partake of the langar to satiate our hunger, find himself at the headquarters of Sony, where he is high up the engineering ranks?
How is it that PB built a robust courier business and doubles up as a top-ranking functionary in a political party? How did MM take over his father’s faltering business and transform it into India’s pre-eminent machine tool outfit with outposts all over Asia? How did SV become an expert on derivatives in West Asia?
For that matter, what did I do right to earn the privilege of writing in this space and over the years gain access to the finest minds in the country?
I don’t know. Life happened while we were working. I could tell a ragtag bunch of poor boys did well for themselves when some of us from school went to visit our ailing Marathi teacher some time ago. Our math teacher was there as well. They hugged all of us, tears running down our faces, and assured us how proud they were of us.
The Boxer continues to play in my head.
In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
I am leaving, I am leaving
But the fighter still remains