In fact, many men accepted the risks of that hard and dangerous work for no other reason than to gain the security of one of those shelters.
The companies were happy enough to comply with the laws that made land and huts available because the arrangement was eminently suitable to them in other ways. The kinship fostered in workers' slums guaranteed a sense of unity, familial solidarity, and loyalty to the company, which served employers well. Travelling time to and from work was eliminated when men lived on the site. The wives, children, and other dependants of employed workers provided a ready source of additional labourers. They were hired from that pool and put to work, from day to day, at a moment's notice. And the entire work force of several thousand people were much more easily influenced, and to some extent even controlled, when they lived in a single community.
When the World Trade Centre towers were first planned, a large area was set aside and marked off into more than three hundred hut-sized plots. As workers signed on, they received one of the plots and a sum of money with which to buy bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber. Each man then built his own house, assisted by family and friends. The sprawl of fragile huts spread outward like a shallow, tender root-system for the huge towers that were to come. Vast underground wells were sunk to provide water for the community. Rudimentary lanes and pathways were scraped flat. Finally, a tall, barbed wire fence was erected around the perimeter to keep out squatters. The legal slum was born.
Drawn by the regular wages that those workers had to spend, and no less by the plentiful supply of fresh water, squatters soon arrived and settled outside the fence-line. Entrepreneurs establishing chai shops and small grocery stores were the first, attaching their tiny shops to the fence. Workers from the legal compound stooped to crouch through gaps in the wire, and spend their money. Vegetable shops and tailor shops and little restaurants were next. Gambling dens and other dens for the sale of alcohol or charras soon followed. Each new business clung to the fence of the compound until at last there was no space left on the fence-line. The illegal slum then began to grow outward into the surrounding acres of open land leading to the sea.
Homeless people joined in ever-larger numbers, picking out squares for their huts. New holes were stretched in the fence.
Squatters used them to enter the legal slum to collect water, and workers used them to make purchases in the illegal slum, or visit new friends.
The squatters' slum grew rapidly, but with a haphazard, needs driven planlessness that was a disorderly contrast to the neater lanes of the workers' slum. In time there were eight squatters for every person in the workers' compound, more than twenty-five thousand people in all, and the division between legal and illegal slums became blurred, camouflaged by the crowding. Although the Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the illegal slum, and construction company officers discouraged contact between workers and squatters, the people thought of themselves as one group; their days and dreams and drives were entangled in the ravel of ghetto life. To workers and squatters alike, the company fence was like all fences: arbitrary and irrelevant. Some of the workers who weren't permitted to bring more than immediate family into the legal slum invited their relatives to squat near them, beyond the wire. Friendships flourished among the children of both sides, and marriages of love or arrangement were common.
Celebrations on one side of the wire were well attended by residents from both sides. And because fires, floods, and epidemics didn't recognise barbed-wire boundaries, emergencies in one part of the slum required the close co-operation of all.
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?"
