A morning in Dharavi

In the morning I had signed up for a group tour of Dharavi. The meeting point was the Third Wave Cafe, and my guide, Subhan, arrived on time. He noted without particular concern that I was the only person who had shown up. What had been advertised as a group tour became, by default, a private one.

Dharavi has a reputation built partly on two films. Slumdog Millionaire was filmed here; Shantaram is set here. They are a useful starting point if you are arriving from outside India, though they serve their own purposes and are not the same as seeing the place. What I was not prepared for, walking in from the street, was the scale of the work.

Two million people live and work in Dharavi on an area roughly half the size of Central Park. The density is extreme. Residents come from all over India, drawn by employment, and some return to their home states at harvest time before coming back. The rest stay year-round. They work every day of the year. There are no weekends in Dharavi.

The industries inside are more varied than I expected. Plastic recycling is one of the largest: waste plastic from across Mumbai comes in, is sorted by type, washed, granulated, and sent back out again. Hotel soap is another operation entirely. Used soap from city hotels is collected, melted down, remoulded, and repackaged. Further in there are clothes manufacturers, leather workshops, ceramics. Each trade tends to occupy its own stretch of lane, which gives the place a low-key internal logic that is invisible from outside.

The daily wage is 300 to 400 rupees, around three to four dollars. Food is handled communally: lunch and dinner for the equivalent of about twenty dollars a month, with chicken included once a week. You work on the ground floor. You live on the one above.

Subhan moved through the lanes without hurrying. He knew which workshops were open to visitors and which were not, when to explain and when to let something register on its own. His English was fluent. His manner was matter-of-fact. He had grown up here and was not performing anything for my benefit.

At one point we stopped at a ceramics workshop where two men were working at wheels near the doorway. Subhan said something to them in what I assumed was Hindi. We watched for a couple of minutes. Nobody looked up for more than a second.

The tour ran to two and a half hours. Afterward I took an Uber back to Colaba and spent more time than expected finding a working ATM. Finding somewhere to eat took almost as long. I eventually sat down at Cafe Paris, a small restaurant near the hotel, ate chicken, and then went back to the room for half an hour before the afternoon.

Two million people. Three dollars a day. Chicken once a week. Everyone working, all the time.

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