How Many Legs In A Square Foot?

Back in the 120 square feet they call home, there are elderly parents, brothers, sisters and others from the immediate gene pool. All heaped under one roof in a single room, not because they are poor but because Mumbai has very little space and too many dreams. Half of the city lives in such one-room arrangements or chawls. The most historical among them, for reasons of time alone and not elegance, are the ones built two decades before Independence by the Bombay Development Directorate. Known only as bdd chawls, they are 207 identical three-storeyed buildings with 16,000 one-room homes from which "neither heaven nor earth could be seen", according to architect Claude Batley writing in the 1930s.

They were meant for the homeless and the poor but the construction was so bad that even tramps refused to move in, seeing no great purpose in forsaking the whole world in exchange for a dark room by a dark corridor at the end of which were six common toilets with a 50 per cent reservation for women. Unofficially called "Lloyd’s folly", as a tribute to the then governor of Bombay, the deserted buildings finally became useful, about 10 years after they were built, when the Englishmen converted them into jails to hold Satyagraha prisoners. It’s in such a place that 1,00,000 people live today. They are daily wage earners and executives, the abject poor and those who even own cars, all in their own little homes of 120 to 180 square feet that are now worth up to Rs 6 lakh in direct cash purchase or Rs 2,500 per month in rent.

Pipes burst sometimes. Stairways heave. Walls develop ominous cracks. But they go on living. Every day. With their huge families that shrink a bit when an old lady dies and grows further when a son gets married and brings in the stranger.

These are not sad homes. These are not sad lives. There is love, laughter, hope, fixed deposits and stunning space management: many homes here pack in a washing machine, 165-litre fridge, television, music system, god, his consort and even a wall-attached foldable dining table. Life spills out on to the terraces where people just sit around and chat, budding lovers exchange looks, fully knowing that there will be war between the second floor and the third floor if their parents come to know. There have been stray suicides too from the terraces. One man who failed the first attempt took care the next time to go down the three storeys head first. But there is something about the sheer human concentration here, it’s difficult for ghosts to distinguish themselves as the Others. There is not a single spooky story.

Boys and girls study at nights in a community centre beside a temple. They calmly show off their English skills when asked questions in Marathi. There is animated talk about what they want to "become in life". There is a quiet defiance that is essentially made in India. There is even sex, despite the pressure to keep the sounds down. Young couples sleep in wooden lofts reassured by the unspoken rule among the family below that nobody should look up. There are days when husbands and wives go spend a few hours in Parel’s Vijay Lodge or Vishnu Hotel, carrying empty bags to pass off as tourists. These are monthly escapades. The men here agree on the record and in private that sex is rare. Perhaps Indian middle-class women never had it so good. Many married men believe that they have found greater purpose though they miss the theoretical "normal" conjugal life. "It’s been a long time since I had sex," says librarian at Godrej, 45-year-old Samadhan Hari Chandorkar, as his wife Smita looks repelled by the confession and walks out of the room or the house which is the same thing. As she presumably paces up and down the corridor, her husband says, "It doesn’t matter. What matters is that my two teenaged daughters and 12-year-old son do not see anything in their house that will disgust them. The kids alone matter. Their future and their education".

Five years ago, he took his wife to the Worli sea face and made an important decision by the Arabian Sea. "Our daughters have grown up, I told her. We must stop living for our own pleasures." A look of naive surprise comes to his face when he recounts, "she readily accepted". This man, who makes Rs 14,000 a month, finishes his morning rituals in the office because he doesn’t have to wait outside a common toilet with a bucket there. "Some day I will move into a bigger home. A 600-square-ft space with attached toilets. Maybe far away from here. But this area is very convenient for the kids because there are schools and colleges nearby."

Apart from the education of his son whom he will try and make an automobile engineer and his daughters who he says are free to pursue any career, he has some immediate worries. "There is a woman who lives right opposite, just across this corridor, who does black magic." Samadhan has been collecting feng shui mirrors and placing them in such a way that the woman’s "evil" will be reflected into her own house. His wife re-enters because she cannot wait to start her work. She opens a cupboard. From beneath neat rows of ironed clothes, she takes out the rice tin.

Samadhan’s is a small family by bdd standards. Just five people live in the room. A few doors away, in watchman Praful Shantaram’s home, there are 11. He pays half his Rs 4,500 income in rent. How do so many people fit into such a small home? Shantaram looks as though nobody has ever asked him this. Then he says scientifically since he is not capable of philosophy: "Some of us sleep vertically and the rest horizontally. That way all of us fit in." When guests come, "I wait for them to leave". But even in such homes, guests visit not for minutes but for days. "When there is a marriage in the family," Murlidar Rane says, "relatives sleep in our homes. We go to the terrace and bitch about them."

The financial environment changes dramatically from room to room. There are people who buy three onions and two tomatoes every evening for dinner, or it could be the other way round depending on the recipe, and there are those with cars, like 36-year-old Kaka Lahoo Kamble. He giggles when asked why he lives with a wife and two children in their pre-teens in a house that is about twice as big as his Maruti 800. For the moment he is more amused by the ratio of car-is-to-house than the reason why he lives in such a home. "Things are better," he says, "compared to the time when I was born here." Three corners of the same room used to be kitchens that defined three different families. "About 12 people" used to live here, he says, after aborting an attempt to count the exact number. Riots used to break out in these chawls when fallen kites were not returned, or pet pigeons were stolen and at a more logical level, after a kabaddi match. "Now people are happier, more relaxed."

Kaka Lahoo Kamble with his "family" car

The employee of New India Assurance who makes about Rs 9,000 a month drops his kids to school in his car, owns a cooler and all the other famous domestic gadgets. Chairs are piled on top of one another unless it’s dinnertime. It’s like any other home, just that all scenes occur in the same room. Like a play. His wife owns the remote to watch serials beginning with K. After that his 11-year-old son watches wwf. "We are happy," he says, "but it will be nice if someone fixed the wall before it falls."

There is a plan to demolish these 80-year-old identical structures and create brand-new monstrous buildings. Hard bargains are under way. Builders have promised grand 250 square feet homes to these people. But many of them want 350 square feet. They are in no great hurry to transform for they do not believe they are in any unliveable misery. Many of them were born here, got married and raised their children here. Even prospered over the years. "Who wouldn’t want a big house but I don’t miss it too much," says 22-year-old Pradanya in one of those 120-square-foot homes from where architect Batley said "neither heaven nor earth could be seen". He may have been wrong about the heaven bit. For when Pradanya shuts off her Pentium-4 powered computer, there is a bit of sky on the monitor with the message, "Windows is now shutting down".