Spreading The Elovephant

Mansoor and Mumbai

After reading travel journal after travel journal on India, it always seemed like the writers exaggerated about how no one left India unchanged. However despite staying there less than a week, I left it understanding how brutally true they were.

I met Monsoor the first time when we hailed his taxi down. His good humored nature was immediately recognized when we haggled about the price it would be to take us around Mumbai for a couple of days. What was even more serendipitous was that he knew exactly where to take us.

Mumbai is known for being the city of contrasts. The rich reaped the wealth of the country while the poor struggled to survive. This was blatantly obvious by the views of the city: the grand Taj hotel existing next to a compound of slums; Porches waiting in traffic next to frail men pulling carts of coconuts.

Coming from Norway, a country known for equality, it was hard not to feel slightly outraged when hearing about the rich Indian’s lives compared to those in slums.  Mumbai is the second most populated country in the world. Competition for any job is severe, since there’s queues of hundreds waiting for work. If someone protested to their boss about unfair conditions, they could lose their job and be replaced within seconds. With this knowledge, Indians avoid confrontation and try to excel in their work to stay safe. Perhaps this was why when being served at a restaurant I would get a waiter topping up my drink after every sip I took with exuberant enthusiasm.

Learning about these harsh conditions after conversations with people I met, I began feeling restless. I lived in a bubble of safety in Norway and was beginning to become unfamiliar with concept of hard work.  Now I was in Mumbai, staying at a 5 star hotel, being overfed and pampered. After a while the euphoria of sipping chai and back massages was being replaced by guilt.

This was why Monsoor was such an important element to my trip in India. I felt it was necessary to be humbled by reality. I had experienced the upper class lifestyle of Mumbai, but I wanted to see the other side. No one I knew there was neither willing nor interested in seeing it with me, apart from Monsoor. After we met and instilling some trust in him, we set off to explore in his taxi, with me sitting in the front seat.

It seems slightly ridiculous that I was going out of my way to see poverty, and almost as if I was exploiting it for my own benefit. But in all honesty, I was just curious. It was saddening to see it all, but I was not expecting to feel awestruck. Yes, these people were living in slums, but how they coped with it was amazing. The walls of the slums were built with junk material, but I saw balconies and windows with curtains. I saw little boys joyfully playing cricket by the sewers, taking the game as serious as any professional athlete.

As the time passed while driving around I started to make conversation with Mansoor. He was shy at first but began opening up. He told me he had a daughter and a son that he had to send to a private school, because the public schools had poor conditions. Surprised to hear they went to a private school, I asked him about work. He had to travel for two hours a day from outside the city to get to his taxi that was parked outside of my hotel. He then would wait around for 10 hours a day to get a customer, which would normally an average of four. He then went home late at night and the routine would happen again and again, without a proper weekend. After hearing the sum of his girl’s monthly school fee, I calculated in my head how much Mansoor would make in a month.  The money that was left to spare was really nothing.

But here Mansoor was, not trying to overcharge us like other driver, as well as trying his best to entertain us. MaraInk generously gave me a budget to spend for a worthy cause that I came across in India, and I felt that Mansoor’s daughter’s education was one.

By the end of the trip we took Mansoor out to dinner in a somewhat upper class Indian restaurant.  At first when he asked he declined. It took us a good ten minutes to convince him to eat with us. When he finally agreed, he walked in the restaurant slightly awkwardly, wary that the waiters would be judging him for being there. I remember thinking that he had no reason to feel smaller, as a man with such a good heart should defeat any social class barrier. After the meal we told him we wanted to help him to pay for four months of his daughter’s education with MaraInks money. He walked out the restaurant noticeably bolder than before.

By Sofia Shamsunahar