Raka Sen

Khar Danda, Mumbai, India

As my car pulled into the dimly lit passage, the smell of fish was pungent. As usual this area teemed with people: the smell confirmed that we had arrived. It was as if the salty sea breeze had become permanently saturated with dead fish. I stepped out of the car and looked around. There was a very visible divide among what lay ahead of me. On the right a vast open field where the wives of fisherman were cleaning up the remains of the fish market. To the far left, life was winding up as workers from all over the city returned home.

All of a sudden, I heard a shout. I looked over and saw her smiling at me. Relief.  Her warm and loud welcome suddenly made it all less terrifying. A month earlier when I was writing my proposal for this research project, I had not envisioned this moment at all. When I wrote

about studying slums I hadn’t considered that I was studying slums. I felt the disconnect between

the NYU student reading and typing up research about slums on her Macbook pro and this slightly terrified, very curious girl who found herself experiencing the shocking and enticing world around her. This was the first time that I noticed the dichotomy between paper and practice, academia and field research. I loved it.

She briskly navigated us through narrow dark passageways I would never be able to retrace our path. Tai lead us towards the workers. Tai, by the way, is my uncle’s maid. She excitedly brought me to Khar Danda Fishing Village after I told her about my project, locating the middle class in Mumbai, a city where it is the extremes of wealth and poverty that are most starkly apparent. She had set up meetings with dozens of families. Without Tai, I doubt any of my other interviewees would have let me into their homes. But of all the families and all the stories I heard, the one that fascinated me the most was that of Tai and her family.

Tai lives with her sister-in-law Punam and her three nieces. Her husband and mother-in-

law had both passed away. Tai first took me to her brother’s home where I met her two nieces, brother and sister-in-law. She then led me up some makeshift stairs, to the room they had created for their mother. Tai’s mother lives with a girl from the community who was not yet married. Despite being only 35 and the sole income provider for his family of seven, Tai’s brother said that they were financially stable, didn’t have any problems sending their kids to school, loved their home and neighborhood and had adequate access to water and health care. Their home has

a bathroom to bathe and do dishes, but because it does not have running water, they go somewhere else for the toilet. Tai’s nieces told me that water comes at 2:00pm and that their job is to fill the water drum everyday when they take lunch from school. Tai’s family encapsulated many of the values that were echoed by their neighbors: community cohesion and simplicity.

In Khar Danda, I learned about the different types of slum dwellings and the nuances between them. In this slum there were pockets of accumulating wealth but even those with the means to move out of the slum were unwilling to do so. Tai explains that no one wants to leave their communities behind, and by “community” I feel she means “family.” As someone with an academic background in Urban Design and Sociology, I was shocked. How could groups of people with no access to a working toilet or running water not want to leave their home? My ethnographic research on the middle class in Khar Danda was fascinating, but the takeaway was personal as well. Tai’s excitement to show me her home was so simple yet so genuine. More genuine than that though, was realizing that their happiness stemmed from a place of simple human compassion and solidarity. Tai epitomized this breakthrough moment: all the puzzle pieces, both personal and academic, came together to teach me something much deeper than anything I could have learned sitting at my desk back home. And now when I am sitting at my desk, I am both the urbanist and sociological thinker who was trained at New York University as well as the curious, terrified girl who ventured deep into the slums of Mumbai.