Broke but Unbroken by Augusta Dwyer

Author:Augusta Dwyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

• 6 •

Women Together

Laxmi Naidu is back in her old neighbourhood of Nagpada, collecting cash into the small cloth bag hung within the folds of her flamingo-pink sari. She is a small, dark woman of fifty-one, with a slight overbite and a manner that comes across as both animated and self-possessed, the demeanour of someone who has lived through a great deal. We have taken the train from Mankhurd, travelling in the ladies car, second-class, for a four-rupee fare. It is jam-packed, hawkers worming through us all with boxes of hairclips and packets of bindis, the double row of ancient ceiling fans whirring away like crazy, but imperceptible nonetheless in the clammy heat. Emerging at Byculla station, we take a short taxi ride through the crowded streets with their building-supply stores and cheap eateries, past a street of closet-sized rooms, each with a bed inside, their doorways flanked by brightly garbed women with oiled hair, their faces painted as vividly as plaster saints. “This red letter district,” Laxmi explains with her courageously erroneous smattering of English.

We stop at Peer Khan Road and walk into a squalid colony of pavement dwellers, 248 families whose huts encircle the walled yard of a school compound. Beyond a large and fetid heap of rotting garbage, hopping with crows, a compact line of jerry-rigged huts begins, one hard by the other, so that as soon as I take a step past one family at their open doorway I am already at the door of another. It is as if the trash has followed us, to cling to the mottled walls, scatter itself around the doorways and pile on to the roofs of these mostly wood-slat hovels, except that everything I see — the bits of clothing and battered pots, the tattered bedrolls and old plastic barrels — has some value for someone.

Inside are dark spaces that would make a bus stop seem roomy; while there may be an elevated shelf of electrical appliances and fans, there is little these can do to dispel the claustrophobic heat and depressing obscurity of the interiors where they belong. Right beside the garbage dump an old woman is sitting outside on a cart beside two lolly-gagging grandsons. I ask how long she has lived like this, and one of them translates the bleak response, “All her life.”

Laxmi, meanwhile, is occupied, standing calmly, notebook and pen in hand, within the milling population of the slum. Housewives in saris and skinny young men in long-sleeved shirts and cotton trousers run up to her waving bills; they have been expecting her. She puts the money into her cloth bag and opens her notebook, carefully writing down who has given it, whether it is for repayment of a loan or deposit in a savings account. Around a corner, the row of shacks and their accompanying visual mayhem continues. A diminutive, worried-looking man named Mohammed Ansari hands over one hundred rupees, paying down a loan, he says, that he used to buy the equipment needed to start up a pattern-cutting venture.

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