Karla, Prabaker, and I bent low to step through an opening in a section of fence, and we passed into the legal slum. A covey of children trooped along beside us, dressed in freshly washed T-shirts and dresses. They all knew Prabaker and me well. I'd treated many of the young children, cleaning and bandaging cuts, abrasions, and rat bites. And more than a few of the workers, afraid that they might be stood down from work when they received minor injuries on the construction site, had visited my free clinic rather than the company's first-aid officer.
"You know everybody here," Karla remarked as we were stopped for the fifth time by a group of neighbours. "Are you running for mayor of this place, or what?"
"Hell, no. I can't stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there's no river."
"That's not bad," she murmured. Her eyes were laughing.
"I wish I could say it was mine," I grinned. "An actor named Amitabh said it."
"Amitabh Bachchan?" she asked. "The Big B himself?"
"Yeah-do you like Bollywood movies?"
"Sure, why not?"
"I don't know," I answered, shaking my head. "I just didn't... think you would."
There was a pause, then, that became an awkward silence. She was first to speak.
"But you do know a lot of people here, and they like you a lot."
I frowned, genuinely surprised by the suggestion. It never occurred to me that the people in the slum might like me. I knew that some men-Prabaker, Johnny Cigar, even Qasim Ali Hussein- regarded me as a friend. I knew that some others treated me with a respect that seemed honest and unfeigned. But I didn't consider the friendship or the respect as any part of being liked.
"This is a special day," I said, smiling and trying to shift ground. "The people have been trying for years to get their own primary school. They've got about eight hundred school-age kids, but the schools for miles around are full, and can't take them.
The people got their own teachers organised, and found a good spot for a school, but the authorities still put up a hell of a fight."
"Because it's a slum..."
"Yeah. They're afraid that a school would give the place a kind of legitimacy. In theory, the slum doesn't exist, because it's not legal and not recognised."
"We are the not-people," Prabaker said happily, "And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living."
"And now we have a not-school to go with it," I concluded for him. "The municipality finally agreed to a kind of compromise.
They allowed them to set up a temporary school near here, and there'll be another one organised soon. But they'll have to tear them down when the construction is finished."
"When will that be?"
"Well, they've been building these towers for five years already, and there's probably about three more years' work in it, maybe more. No-one's really sure what'll happen when the buildings are finished. In theory, at least, the slum will be cleared."
"Then all this will be gone?" Karla asked, turning to sweep the hutment city with her gaze.
"All will be gone," Prabaker sighed.
"But today's a big day. The campaign for the school was a long one, and it got pretty violent sometimes. Now the people have won, and they'll have their school, so there'll be a big celebration tonight. Meanwhile, one of the men who works here has finally got a son, after having five daughters in a row, so he's having a special pre-celebration lunch, and everyone's invited."
"The Village in the Sky!" Prabaker laughed.
"Just where is this place? Where are you taking me?"
"Right here," I replied, pointing upwards. "Right up there."
We'd reached the perimeter of the legal slum, and the megalithic immensity of the twin skyscrapers loomed before us. Concreting had been completed to three-quarters of their height, but there were no windows, doors, or fittings on the unfinished buildings.
With no flash or reflection or trim to relieve the grey massiveness of the structures, they swallowed light into themselves, extinguished it, and became silos for storing shadows. The hundreds of cave-like holes that would eventually be windows allowed a kind of cross-sectional view into the construction-an ant-farm picture of men and women and children, on every floor, walking to and fro, upward and down, about their tasks. At ground level, the noise was a percussive and exciting music of towering ambition: the nervous irritation of generators, the merciless metal-to-metal zing of hammers, and the whining insistence of drills and grinders.
Snaking lines of sari-clad women carrying dishes of gravel on their heads wove through all the workplaces, from man-made dunes of small stones to the yawning mouths of ceaselessly revolving cement-mixing machines. To my western eyes, those fluid, feminine figures in soft red, blue, green, and yellow silk were incongruous in the physical turmoil of the construction site. Yet I knew, from watching them through the months, that they were indispensable to the work. They carried the great bulk of stone and steel and cement on their slender backs, one round dish-full at a time. The uppermost floors hadn't been concreted, but the framework of upright, transom, and truss girders was already in place and even there, thirty-five storeys into the sky, women worked beside the men. They were simple people from simple villages, most of them, but their view of the great city was unparalleled, for they were building the tallest structures in Bombay.
"Tallest buildings in all India," Prabaker said with a gesture of expansive, proprietal pride. He lived in the illegal slum, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the construction, but he boasted about the buildings as if they were his own design.
"Well, the tallest buildings in Bombay, anyway," I corrected.
"You'll get a good view from up there. We're having lunch on the twenty-third floor."
"Up... there?" Karla said through an expression of exquisite dread. "No problem, Miss Karla. We are not walking up it, this building.
We are travelling first class, in that very fine lifts."
Prabaker pointed to the freight elevator attached to the outside of the building in a yellow, steel framework. She watched as the platform jerked and rattled upwards on heavy cables with loads of men and equipment.
"Oh, swell," Karla said. "Now I feel great about it."
"I feel great, too, Miss Karla!" Prabaker agreed, his smile huge as he tugged at her sleeve and pulled her toward the elevator.
"Come, we will catch the lifts on the next run. They are a beautiful buildings, yes?"
"I don't know. They look like monuments to something that died," she muttered to me as we followed him. "Something very unpopular ... like... the human spirit, for example."
The workmen who ran the freight elevator shouted safety instructions at us, gruff in their self-importance. We climbed onto the wobbling platform with several other men and women, and a wheelbarrow containing work tools and barrels of rivets. The driver blew two shrill blasts on his metal whistle and threw the lever that activated the powerful generators, controlling our ascent. The motor roared, the platform shuddered, throwing us at the panic-handles attached to the uprights, and the elevator groaned slowly upwards. There was no cage surrounding the platform, only a yellow pipe at waist height around the three open sides. In a few seconds, we were fifty, eighty, a hundred metres off the ground.
"How do you like it?" I shouted.
"I'm scared out of my brain!" she shouted back, her dark eyes shining. "It's great!"
"Are you afraid of heights?"
"Only when I'm on them! I hope you got a reservation, at this goddamn restaurant of yours! What are we doing eating lunch here, anyway? Don't you think they should finish the building first?"
"They're working on the top floors now. This elevator is constantly in use. It's not usually available for the workers to use. It's reserved for wheelbarrows and building materials and stuff. It's a long climb, up thirty flights of steps every day, and it gets fairly tricky in places. A lot of the people who work these upper floors stay up here most of the time. They live up here. Eat, work, and sleep. They've got farm animals and kitchens and everything. Goats for milk, and chickens for eggs, everything they need is sent up to them. It's sort of like a base camp that mountaineers use when they climb Everest."