Discomforting Mumbai

I’d seen poverty before. I’d seen it in New York, I’d seen it in Rome, I’d seen it in Chicago, I’d seen it in Belize, I’d seen it in Wichita and Denver and Atlanta and Santa Fe and Minneapolis and Memphis and San Francisco and just about every place I’d ever been. I’ve used the adjectives “destitute” and “abject” and “squalid” to modify the poverty I’ve seen. But there are no adjectives to adequately describe the poverty in Mumbai (Bombay). Indeed, “poverty” is hardly an adequate term. Drive along the Western Express Highway, and as you rise up onto a flyover you’ll look out over a checkerboard of crowded tin-roofed rusted shacks, inches separating them. Take an off-ramp and you’ll pass uncomfortably close to rows of tarp lean-tos against the gray concrete walls, the clog of traffic forcing you to see, dogs and cats and rag pickers foraging through the garbage. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph it – poverty porn – and I’m somewhat uncomfortable putting up here a couple of photos I got from the Internet. But I can’t describe the squalor that these people live in, and somehow survive in, without visual evidence:

But what is most discomforting about the poverty in Mumbai is the vast spectrum of wealth that the country’s caste system still exerts, from those in the poorest of slums to those in the most lavish of grandeur to the many scattered somewhere along the axis. On our first day in Mumbai, our driver (yes, we had a driver, putting us somewhere toward the lavish end of the spectrum, though nowhere near the grandeur end) pointed out the $1.8 billion, 27-story “home” of the wealthiest person in India (and the fourth wealthiest in the world). Our own accommodations, the ITC Maratha Hotel (which we weren’t paying for, and couldn’t pay for), forced the disparity uneasily home for us:

We wouldn’t have even been in Mumbai, of course, if we couldn’t have afforded it (helped immensely by company funding), and so wouldn’t have felt the embarrassment or sympathy, at least as much as we could manage to wring out of our shock (the guidebooks call it “cultural shock,” but the shock doesn’t really need modification). We very much enjoyed our time in Mumbai, the sightseeing, the food, the art, the history, even the elegant chaos of traffic congestion. But there is in the city always the undercurrent of inequality that lines and spreads out from the Western Express Highway, a dingy gray carpet of uneasy inhumanity.