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Days 117-120 : In India, I’ve been reading Rohinton Mistery’s A fine balance. Set partly in Mumbai, it’s a moving story about four characters whose livelihoods are bound together in an unlikely way. Struggling to make their way in the world, they’re living on the edge in every sense, with the slightest external shock having the potential to catapult one or all of them into homelessness and abjection. The title’s “fine balance” is the balance between hope and despair by which each of the characters live their lives.

Here in Mumbai I felt that balance acutely, especially when Kate and I took a highly recommended tour of Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. Millions of the permanent residents of Mumbai live in Dharavi, in an improvised but now well-organised community complete with local industries adjacent to family homes.

Much of the industry in Dharavi is related to recycling and reprocessing of various waste products. We saw small factories devoted to sorting and melting down collected pieces of household plastic for reuse. Others worked on reconditioning old oil drums for resale. Among the crowded streets there were also potteries, bakeries and corner shops. Our trip also took us past what was described as Asia’s biggest laundry. From our viewpoint hundreds of people were hard at work soaping and beating clothes.

According to our guide, the municipal authority’s medium-term plan is to reclaim the land, build apartments on it, and give to each family living in the slum before 1995 (an arbitrary cutoff date chosen for legal purposes) a flat measuring 225 square feet. It’s unclear what will happen to people in the interim, or how the city proposes to make accommodation for the cohabiting factories and industries which make up so much of Dharvati’s complex social fabric.

While a resolution is not expected in the short term, Mumbai’s many slum-dwellers will continue to live for years to come in that fine balance, until the issue is resolved one way or the other.

Thanks to Jerome recommending Rohinton Mistery’s outstanding work to us.