Annawadi slum

Mumbai - India

Photo: Adam Cohn. Creative Commons

Mumbai. A city divided into two types of milieu: a global, modern and desirable city of glamor versus an old, poor and undesirable one. I was so excited as I descended into the crowded city of Mumbai at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. But my first view of the city was the Annawadi slum. 

It is an over populated zone of makeshift shacks next to the Mumbai Airport. I was in shock and lost my enthusiam. At the same time, there were so many high-rise luxury hotels all around. I never imagined seeing such a contrast in real life.

Annawadi is a slum of around 3,000 squatters packed into 350 huts, on the border of a vast sewage lake. The main industry there is the gathering and selling of airport trash. Since the rise of the city, slums have been a part of Mumbai's landscape; once known as Bombay. Indian slums form the largest concentration of poverty, a lack of basic human rights along with a symbol of negligence, inequality and a failing Indian state.

I had my expectations too high. An Indian movie producer offered me a role in his next movie and all I was thinking about while waiting for my flight in Switzerland, was to visit the iconic Taj Mahal and see Mumbai, the center of India's booming Bollywood film industry. 

My two Indian friends, Yaseen Qureshi, 32, and Arjun Bhatia, 30, who both live in Navi Mumbai came to pick me up at the airport. The facility was spotlessly clean with stunning art work. The paintings, sculptures and decorations brought out a great sense of culture. The vast amount of space, high ceilings and great lighting, all contributed to making it a great airport experience.

In the car on the way to Navi Mumbai, I saw a man from the slums walking around  into the traffic, selling flowers. As I was curious, I made eye contact with him. He came towards my closed window, made a hand gesture and gave me a desperate look asking me to buy some flowers.

“Ignore him! You will see a lot of them during your stay. Don’t talk to them and don’t touch them,” said Yaseen.

He said it with so much confidence as if it was very normal for him. I was just observing everything that was going on around me and did not have the courage to say a word yet. The whole trip towards Navi Mumbai was shocking. Due to a lack of public toilets, I saw some residents defecating in the open; near railway stations, on the roads and pavements. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that were walking around as they kept going on with their daily routine life.

I stayed in the New Mumbai area. This place is buzzing with youth, and its character is very cosmopolitan. The city is characterized by top notch hospitals, educational institutions, an IT hub, a massive exhibition centre, malls, big railway stations, wide roads and unrestricted power and water supply. 

I wanted to know what life is like in a Mumbai slum.  I challenged myself to undertake a slum tour.  My friends tried a lot in convincing me not to go. They told me that it would be a sensitive tour for a young girl who lives in Canada and that there are so many nice places to visit during my stay in Mumbai. But now, all I wanted, was to understand the impact of significant urban poverty and visit streets like those made famous in 2009's Slumdog Millionaire.

After three days in Mumbai, I visited the slum accompanied by Yaseen and Arjun. We left the air-conditioned car and started walking a small lane. The Annawadi slum is very different from the rest of Mumbai. This place has a voice and life of its own that is very much undeniable. I wanted to experience the truth of the people.  I felt India strongly in my nose. There was full of trash everywhere. To hear the noise and smell the dirt in an environment with so much air pollution was not easy to handle at first but I was ready to explore. I saw a group of teenagers playing music with some instruments that they probably made themselves. Kids were running around and they seemed happy.

The Niaz family lives in the Annawadi slum, in a tiny 10 by 10 foot hut they call home. 28 year old Husna Niaz, lives with her two daughters, her mother Nasreen and three sisters. When I met her, she just got back to her hut after collecting the next day’s supply of water. She was barefoot and was wearing a traditional worn-out yellow salwar kameez. She was a beautiful woman with long hair and had such a genuine smile as she said hello to me.

“I grew up here but I don’t remember since when I am here. My mom came to the slum with my alcoholic father. We are seven people living together and we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future,” said Husna as she invited me inside her hut.

There were two large shelves one above the other that served as a bunk bed for the family, a corner for food storage, kitchen and a small shower area all in one room. “We need to go elsewhere for toilet, the slum’s residents share the same toilet and we need to walk to go fetch water,” said Husna.

Poor families still want the best for their children in one of the 21st century greatest unequal cities. “I send my two daughters to the government funded slum school. I don’t want them to live like me. If they study well, they will have a good destiny,” said Husna.

“It is a rich city but the lives of poor people are an embarrassment to Indians, we can’t be touched and our deaths does not matter at all. We are one of the few Muslim families living here. Most of them are Hindus,” she said. Vengeful neighbor’s fights are very common and most of the time, they are fighting over scraps. “I fell in love with a guy who was selling scrap metals, we got married and he left me after a year. I’m alone raising my two kids. I gather garbage for recycle. So that’s how we work and feed ourselves. What else can we do? It’s our destiny to live that way. My mom gave birth to all of us on the pavements,” said Husna.

Bribery and corruption in India are extremely common and very destructive. Money overrides the law in the Annawadi slum.

“Some people living in the slums tells the government that they manage private schools to teach English to the slum kids but it’s fake. It is so corrupted here. These people get money from charities and they use it for themselves,” said Arjun Bhatia, a real estate developer.

“We lost a lot during the monsoon floods few years ago. We built our home again. I have hope but an old woman who used to live next to us, ate rat poison to escape the misery. There is also a big problem of prostitution in the slum,” said Nasreen Niaz.

The two daughters of Husna, Shameema, 8, and Salma, 7, enjoy going to school and spoke well in English. “I love pizza. Me and my sister we do find some pieces sometimes and it is so good! My mom tried to make it one time but it was not good,” said Salma. That was a reminder to me that real poverty exists. I asked Husna, her two daughters, three of the sisters that were there and four other kids that were in the hut to join me at the entrance of the slum the next day in the afternoon. 

There they were all waiting for me, sitting on the pavement under the burning sun. I had brought hot Pizza and cold beverages for them. There was a look of sheer satisfaction on all their faces. I was happy. They are brave, I felt compassion and helplessness.

Mumbai is a must visit place for anyone who loves to think ahead of adventure, glitz and glam and is more interested about people and life.

Annawadi is a shocking picture of a community facing hunger and malnutrition. A community where rats are fried for dinner and where people go to bed on an empty stomach. Suicide is common. It is a place where there is so much corruption, disease, dirt, violence and where sex is a commodity.

A day in the Annawadi slum changes a person. It is more than an area of concentrated poverty; it is an area of physical and social deterioration. Over-crowding huts are posing significant sanitary and social risks to the slum residents. Those who seek to better themselves and their family leave the area if they are fortunate to do so. Slums will be around until most Indians become conscious enough to demand a minimum quality of life which can never be found in places like Annawadi. "What if they saw the rat bites on children that turn into boils and then erupt with worms," said Husna.