By: Jonathan Manthorpe/Citizen Asia Correspondent BOMBAY There is a man dying against the wall underneath my hotel window here.
There is no need to be a doctor to tell the signs. The withered limbs, ‘The lassitude,
He has not eaten, that I have seen for three days. Occasionally a few people from the putrid squatter camp just down to the left as Look Out of the window come over and look at him, Sometimes they give him water.
He seldom moves. In the heat of midday, he pulls himself into the little band of shade close to the ‘Wall. There is garbage all around him, Mostly it’s food tailings from the Squatter camp. Goats come and forage. So do thin dogs.
They trample over him as they bicker for the best bits of rubbish, he doesn’t move. “Hundreds of people walk past him each day. Sometimes they stop 16 look. They are on their way to the beach. It is a broad beach with good Sand that might grace any travel brochure, the people promenade in the thousands Up and down the beach in the cool of the evening.
There are pony rides and dozens of hawkers selling food. Only the foolhardy go into the Sea, Pipes from the parade of shoreline hotels take sewage just out into the sea. There is a scum on the tideline.
In the squatter camp, there is a well. It is wide mouthed and men and boys come to wash and drink at it every morning. I have seen no women.
The water sloshes to the ground as the men and boys douse themselves. A family of pigs lives by the well and wallows joyously in the mud and puddles. ‘The pigs also defecate in the puddles and the sludge runs back into the well.
The squatter camp has an air of permanence. It and the hundreds more throughout this city of 16 million are unlike any others I have seen. ‘The camps in Soweto or Crossroads outside Cape Town, South Africa, were just bivouacs on the Toad to liberation.
Liberation was meant to have come here nearly 50 years ago, when the British left, Nowhere, not in the worst refugee camps of Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan or Ethiopia, have I ‘seen such passive acceptance of intolerable conditions. Nowhere have I seen such conditions accepted as a way of life. “It’s place of extraordinary contradictions,” said’ an old friend recently posted here. “India can pula satellite in space and it writes computer programs for (Caledonia’s) Silicone Valley. But it doesn’t give its people clean water.
“When I first arrived | was told 1 would be lionized’ by the upper class. I was told to throw nine out of 10 invitations away. | accepted a few invitations and it was awful.
“They just wanted to talk about the country’s high technology skills and how wonderful the education system is. But it has 50% illiteracy and all the people at these parties sent their children to Bnitain or the States to school, Now I throw 10 out of 10 of the invitations away.” It’s two hours” drive from the dying man into the center of Bombay, the hub of India’s hopes 10 be the latest Asian economic miracle.
At almost every traffic light along the way, beggars scamper out to Scratch at the windows of the cars, Most are children and many have only one arm. It seems strange. A birth defect, I wonder out loud to the driver.
No, he says. The children are managed by gangs of criminals who cut off their arms to make them more pitiable and therefore more profitable. Out of the window, now, the dying man is still. Asleep most probably. The thin dogs are nosing through the garbage around him, Promenaders are ambling back from the beach, chatting and laughing, as the sun sets into the sea.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 14, 1994
