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…
‘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.’
‘The Village in the Sky!’ she shouted back.
‘You got it.’
