Hutment

They squat on the beach, little brown bums in a tideline wasteland, bubbling refuse and rat-tails in drainpipes. This is harmony, though- human harmony. Here on the edges of Bombay, the crammed corners, the hutments nestled and squeezed to the edges of the Earth, where city meets sea. Human harmony. Naked kids exploring overturned boats, men playing afterwork table-games in huts with chai, women ariring out tiny tidy huts, starting stoves, sweeping doorways. Selling fresh-caught fish (the cats hide under the low tables, greedy fish-head mongrels, wiry and alert); vegetables for sale, men for evening shaves in plywood closets with cracked mirrors and torn barber’s chairs. There isn’t fighting or screaming or misery in the air in the poorest place I’ve ever seen. There is mainly activity. If people are still, they are alive with conversation. Otherwise they’re walking, cleaning, playing, laughing, buying, selling, smoking, spitting, shitting.. Every narrow alleyway between stalls and stalls of huts is a Christmas-in-New-York bustle with humid heat and smoke for dinner. Hundreds of thousands of people, stacked like broken teacups around the beachhead toilet garbage dump, all with joy and sorrow and lives and love, all puzzled into a space about the size of my high-school’s grounds, and they are in harmony. Clicking along. Another unintentional choir, singing strong.