Nothing Dog- matic about it

It's darkness at noon at Dharavi, the world's biggest slum. And hope trickles like wounds simmering inside the labyrinth of hopeless inner lanes

Prabhat Sharan Mumbai

An actor reaches out a hand, the sun is there, a cloud moves and the whole story is changed- Orson Welles

Up above the sun-drenched pebbles and rags strewn 90-feet road, a huge canvas banner proclaims, "Dharavi glachit nahi hai, Dharavi Slumdog nahi hai...yeh udyogik nagri hai aur isko udyogik nagri ghoshit karna hamari maang hai," (Dharavi is not a hovel nor is it a Slumdog... it is an industrial area and we demand that it should be declared an industrial area.)

Like a corpuscle with a multiple cellular realities, the three main roads jostle with innumerable entry and exit points where even pale susurrations of agitated light tip-toes on cat's paws and uncertainly enter the hovels of Dharavi houses. The diesel smoke creeps along the dusty road swirling ridges and flickering dust on people's slippers, gratings and shutters. The air, a featureless curtain, greets everybody and everywhere, even in the dark as a tomb, the century-old Dhareshwar temple from which Dharavi, the hovel of Mumbai, derives its name.

The hot air makes the eyes water and carries the smell of tobacco, curry and sweat with rotting carcasses of living people who now hardly worry about rising prices (don't the?), rushing along like shadows on the rocks clutching desperately at the distances. The people here have homes everywhere and strangely they have no home to speak of. Ask anybody an address and no one knows it. A blank gaze with an amused look greets you, but with a genuine attempt to help you locate the address in the intricate geometry of the place.

The houses, like a patchwork box of rags, hover precariously along the gutter water, blackish, reddish and stale green. Call it tombs of poverty, worse, tombs of death, or call it the tomb of a spirit fighting against all odds.

Unlike the people who jump out of terminal stations like lost souls, for decades, the roads, dead-ends and inner lanes here are weighed down by bristling souls from so many regions. Life pulsates even as the stink of the fish from the fish-mongers half-chewed brown plank battles it out with the garbage stench and a million drops of sweat which explode on foreheads like grains from a shotgun, dense, heavy and itchy.

Every road, every lane is dotted with all kinds of workshops. Clichés acquire a reality and ‘Dharavites', if they can be called as such, have no time for romanticising their lives. Walking along the roads, reminds of a scene in Tolstoy's Cossacks, when mosquito bites suddenly becomes glowing love bites and the sportsman strides happily through the forest of his own self-reliance."

Twenty-year back, people from the suburbs used to take a detour, avoiding Dharavi. The media had given it an image of the Wild West with its citizens as "raving lunatics", who at the slightest ripple of annoyance, plunged knives into anybody's fragile body. The place was termed as haunted, and rumours of stabbings and killings abounded even as it attracted morbid tourists desperately seeking adventure only to leave the place puffed up with an undiscovered Columbus complex.

Strangely, during the 1992-93 Bombay pogrom against the Muslims, except for arson in the small-scale industrial units which abound, violence hardly occurred around the humble huts and thatched tenements, even though the localities continue to be divided into regional and linguistic grounds.