Feeling the Vibes (15 page)
Authors: Annie Dalton
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could get Parvati and her kids to a Bollywood studio?” I said impulsively. “Bollywood stars have hearts. If they knew what was going on in Deva Katchi, they’d want to help, I know they would.”
“Oh, please!” Brice sounded contemptuous. “These kids need clean water. They need a school which will still be standing a year from now. They don’t need freaking - Bollywood dreams!”
I felt a tiny bit crushed. “I guess not.”
After her neighbours had gone home Parvati lit a stick of incense, placing it on her altar. Her dead husband’s photo had survived, though the glass was cracked from top to bottom.
When she’d finished praying, she checked her sleeping children, murmuring a blessing over them as she did every night.
Her petrol soaked sleeping mat was useless. She wrapped a shawl around her head and lay on the bare earth floor next to her kids.
I heard low voices outside. Zooni’s husband and other men from the slum were keeping guard in case Razak’s thugs came back.
I mentally replayed something Anjum, the newbie angel girl, had told us. Like me, when she first arrived and saw how these slum dwellers had to live, she’d felt overwhelmed. It was obvious there weren’t nearly enough angels to take care of so many desperate humans.
After a few days, though, she’d noticed something surprising. More often than you might expect, the humans of Deva Katchi just quietly took care of each other.
N
ext morning, seeing his mother and sisters still deep in an exhausted sleep, Ravi silently took both the water containers and went off to queue as usual.
He came back empty handed. He urgently shook his mother. “
Ammi
, wake up! Someone cut the pipes and filled them with concrete. I couldn’t get the water,
Ammi
!”
Parvati was instantly on her feet. “Razak wants to drive us out.”
Ravi was thinking fast. “Ammi, is it true what Zooni-auntie said? Did some hotshot Bollywood star really help the people in Dharavi?”
Parvati went to hush Karisma, frightened awake by the commotion. “It was in the papers,” she said wearily. “Who knows if it’s true?”
“I am going there,” said Ravi, clenching his fists. “I am going to the studios and I shan’t leave until I have spoken to a big star.”
“Hrithik!” said Asha sleepily. “Say you want to talk to Hrithik Roshan!”
”
Ammi
, a hotshot film star won’t be scared of Razak; they’ll stop him. I know it!” Ravi was totally aglow.
Obi was so excited he clapped! “That’s a really good idea, isn’t it, Melanie!”
I carefully avoided looking at Brice. To be honest, my fluffy fantasy did sound a LOT more convincing coming from Ravi.
I was disappointed when Parvati quietly put her foot down. “I know you want to take care of us, Ravi, but that is actually my job. Last night I felt hopeless, it’s true, but Krishna must have whispered to me in my sleep. This morning I know exactly what to do.”
“What?” Ravi said sulkily, obviously deflated.
Parvati’s eyes sparkled. “The foreign women who are making the bags, no one denies they have kind hearts, but Zooni says their designs are quite hopeless!” She pulled a face. Despite himself Ravi looked interested.
“I am going to get Zooni and some other women together and we are going to make really beautiful Indian designs.” She playfully pinched her son’s cheek. “Then we will not be ragpickers any more,
beta
! We will be designers and craftswomen!”
Ravi jumped up and down. “When we are rich, will you buy me a keyboard? Just a cheapy-cheapy one,
Ammi
, then I will write a beautiful song just for you!”
That evening, after work, women came to talk to Parvati about her idea. On the floor of the shack they tried out different designs. A few days later they had produced eight totally gorgeous styles and Parvati sent a message to the American women.
They came at the weekend, walking through the slum, clutching bottles of mineral water, saying polite
namastes
and
salaam aleikums
to fascinated slum dwellers as they passed.
Genuinely good people, you could see it in their faces. It just hadn’t occurred to them the Deva Katchi women had their own ideas.
Parvati set about boiling Indian-style
chai
for their visitors.
Seeing Asha beautifully arranging little snacks, the older woman looked uncomfortable. “Parvati, you shouldn’t go to so much trouble.” She knew how poor this family was.
“My parents used to say a guest is like a god,” Parvati told them smiling, “and you give a god all you have.”
“I suppose Razak must think he’s a god then,” said Ravi not quite under his breath.
Parvati shot him a look like,
Don’t push it, Ravi
.
“Oh, so you know Razak!” said the younger woman, sounding pleased. “We’re having a meeting with him later. He’s so excited about what we’re trying to do in this community…” Her voice trailed off as she saw their appalled faces. “Have I said something wrong?”
Parvati was the only one of the women who dared to speak up. “When people from our community have ‘meetings’ with Razak, they generally end up paying a price,” she explained quietly.
“We usually find them floating off Chowpatty beach!” Ravi was glaring at the Americans now with absolute contempt.
“You make him sound like - like a
gangster
,” stammered the younger woman. “But he was so -charming.”
“He was not so charming when he sent his
goondas
to smash up my children’s school,” said Parvati. “The water for the
chai
you’re drinking, we have to fetch from two miles away since Razak had our pipes filled with concrete.”
The women had a murmured conversation in English, struggling to absorb this information. Clearly shocked and embarrassed, the older woman said, “It’s obvious we still have a lot to learn. We will disentangle ourselves from this man, Parvati, I promise.”
“You won’t be able to!” Ravi burst out. “Razak won’t let you! Razak is like Ravana. Cut off one ugly demon’s head, two more will surely grow.”
”
Bas
!” Parvati scolded her son. “These ladies have come from the other side of Mumbai to see our work. Don’t embarrass me, please.”
The American women LOVED the Deva Katchi women’s designs.
“These will just jump off the shelves at home,” said the younger woman. “It’s crazy we didn’t think to ask you before. May I photograph them, Parvati?” She started snapping with her camera.
Suddenly all the light was blotted out. Mohit was blocking the doorway, looking wilder and madder than ever. He pointed a shaky finger at the Americans. “You foreigners think you can change what the Lords of Karma have written in their book! But these upstart rag-pickers are tempting fate and they will have to pay!”
He stumbled away, mumbling to himself.
Zooni just laughed. “I personally have been paying my whole life,” she said cheerfully. “I am prepared to take my chance with the Lords of Karma. How about you, Parvati?”
Parvati looked distracted. “Where’s Ravi got to?” she asked her daughters suddenly.
“Where’s Obi?” I said at the same moment.
P
arvati’s nightmare had come true.
She ran through the slum, calling Ravi’s name, stopping to question
beedi
sellers, snack
wallahs
, anyone who might have seen her son.
I was ninety-nine per cent certain that wherever Ravi was, Obi was too, but not knowing for sure sent me into headless-chicken mode. We must have run around Deva Katchi for two plus hours.
Brice is a great angel, a fabulous angel actually, but he’s seen a LOT of lurid stuff. In those two hours he had Ravi locked up in a warehouse, sold into semi-slavery to some sweatshop owner and I don’t know what. Plus we’d been in Deva Katchi long enough to know these things do really happen to slum kids every day.
One of the cool things about Reuben, though, is he continues to think like an angel whatever.
“If you were Ravi,” he said, when Brice and I finally stopped chasing our tails long enough to listen, “and you’d just heard the local slumlord was planning to move in on your mum’s new business, what would you do?”
A teeny light bulb pinged on in my brain. “I’d go back to Plan A.”
“So would I,” said Reubs.
Brice looked blank. “What the hell was Plan A?”
“Find a hotshot Bollywood star,” Reuben said with a grin.
As this sank in, Brice actually laughed with relief. “The sneaky little…!”
Not trusting the foreign women to stand up to Razak, Ravi had gone straight to the people he considered to be the most powerful beings in Mumbai. Obi, who’d been on a mission to help Ravi for some reason since the day we arrived, had almost certainly gone with him.
Helix thought so anyway, judging from the invisible hot potato sending out heat rays in the middle of my chest.
Since we had no clue which of Mumbai’s many studios Ravi had gone to, we beamed ourselves directly to Obi.
We found ourselves shimmering into a vast shiny studio complex. It seemed we’d guessed right on both counts. We morphed from studio to studio hunting for an undernourished twelve-year-old and his loyal, shimmery companion. It was a total madhouse, people shunting movie props from room to room, shouting into hands-free headsets.
We caught tantalising glimpses as we whooshed through. In one room a fight scene was being rehearsed, disappointingly lame without BIFF-KERPOW type sound effects.
Next door a young actress was in fits of nervous giggles. “So sorry,” she kept saying in English, while a bored director looked at his watch.
Two doors down a stern old lady in bifocals was running through a love song with some sound engineers. Karmen had told me loads of times that Bollywood movie stars didn’t sing their own songs, but I had deliberately forgotten this disturbing info - I simply didn’t care to know that an old lady with bingo wings was belting out all those songs of passionate longing!
In another unbelievably crowded room a middle-aged actor was getting ready to shoot a scene. So many people were helping him it was unreal. Not just the make-up girl and the costume people, but someone to hold the mirror, help him on with his boots and whatever.
In the middle of all this mayhem was Ravi. At his side, to our huge relief, was a calm, shimmery little boy.
Brice pretended to shake his fist. “You broke your promise, Obi Wan.”
“No I didn’t! I didn’t go off by myself,” Obi pointed out truthfully. “I went with Ravi.”
“How did this little street rat get in here anyway!” the actor was bellowing. “Someone call security!”
Do you know what really upset me? At the film studios Ravi looked exactly like what the world outside Deva Katchi believed he was: a half-starved rag-picker’s kid from the slums. Seeing him so out of his depth, I felt helpless.
To my surprise and delight, the make-up girl spoke up for him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone would mind. I’m always telling my little brother how exciting my work is here and he wanted to look around, didn’t you?”
She hastily bundled Ravi into an empty room. “When he gets back from shooting his scene he won’t even remember,” she promised. “I’m Pretty. What’s your name?”
“Ravi,” he mumbled. He was so cowed he daren’t even meet her eyes.
It had taken all Ravi’s courage to walk across this huge, teeming city by himself, not to mention outwitting the studio’s security. But now he was here he looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.
“Ravi, listen, we have this amazing canteen,” Pretty said. “You would not believe how much food they throw away in this place.”
“I didn’t come here for food,” said Ravi sullenly. “I came to get help for people in Deva Katchi.”
She gave him a sideways smile. “You know I grew up in Dharavi?”
Ravi looked surprised. “That’s the oldest slum in Mumbai.”
“I was lucky,” she sighed. “I got an education and got out.”
“If our landlord has his way, the kids of Deva Katchi might not even have a school by next week,” Ravi told her.
