Chapter 374 Indian Middle Class
Ashish is actually not very satisfied with the apartment on Mira Road.
But his family loved it, especially his mother.
Years earlier, in the slums of Jogeshwari, Ashish’s mother had seen such a house in a Gujarati magazine, with flowing window screens and bright lamps.
She immediately asked the gods: When can we realize such a dream, when can we enter such a future?
Now Ashish can smile and point out to his mother the window screens and the lamp hanging from the ceiling in the living room of their new home.
When he first moved into his new home, his house was crowded with people every day. The visitors were mainly his old neighbors, aunts and uncles, their colleagues, his sister Laju's first students, Ashish's own friends, etc.
It took them two generations to actually live in a place that could be called a house and take a big step towards becoming middle class.
The story of Ashish's family is the story of Mumbai's transformation, as they first moved from the Fort area to the slums of Jogeshwari and then to a new apartment on Mira Road.
All this was thanks to Ashish finding a good job. He also helped several of his cousins find part-time jobs at Sur Electric.
If one person succeeds, the whole family will benefit. This is an opportunity for the people in the slums to make a big leap forward.
Gradually, after these relatives and friends had money, they also moved into the apartments on Mira Road.
They consciously align themselves with Ashish, rally around him, and follow his lead.
He is the bond of the family, and the success of those around him depends on him, so everyone naturally knows what to do.
Of course, the houses on Mira Road are indeed nice, and they are the middle-class housing that countless slum dwellers dream of.
Take his cousin's family for example. For the first time in their lives, the children have a relatively independent resting space.
The first thing they did after moving in was rearrange the beds. Now, their cousin (the breadwinner and the main contributor to the apartment) and their youngest brother, Parrish, shared the bedroom. Another brother, Sayish, worked as a salesman in the suburbs of Malati and rarely visited home. Their cousin's mother slept on the chaise longue in the living room, their father and fourth son slept on the sofa bed, and their younger sister slept on the floor near the kitchen.
The two-bedroom apartment, which seemed cramped to people in South Mumbai, seemed incredibly large to my cousin's family.
“I even feel overwhelmed,” my cousin and Ashish said. “The room is so big that I can’t sleep.”
So the family huddled together in the living room again and slowly fell asleep to the noise of the TV programs that comforted them.
Oh, by the way, the newly bought Sur TV has a “sleep timer” function, which will automatically turn off after half an hour of being on.
Having grown up in only one room, they long for more and bigger space, but once they get it, they don’t know how to use it.
The living room of Ashish's new home is decorated with hand-painted vases. Although there is plenty of light coming in through the windows surrounded by vines, the number of mosquitoes is also astonishing, but the people in the house seem to be unaware of it.
The glass case displays three of Ashish's leisure time works: one depicting the Eiffel Tower, another the Statue of Liberty, and another depicting a man stripping off his skin along with his clothes.
He graduated from a reputable university, and his knowledge level and hobbies have a bit of a petty bourgeois flavor.
One wall of the living room is covered with dark brown stone tiles. The two spotlights on the ceiling try to add a warm atmosphere to the cold and hard wall, which is quite inconsistent with the other three walls painted white.
People think that stone bricks are only for decoration, but in fact they are because the wall behind them is leaking and they have to cover up the ugliness.
Ashish had a hard time explaining that his newly acquired apartment was already leaking everywhere. However, when guests praised the design of the stone tiles, he never revealed the real reason behind it.
Ashish still remembers the brochure when he bought the apartment, which was what initially attracted him, his family and all the residents of Chandreshchau.
The brochure, with its vibrant red, yellow, and blue background, exudes a tacky air reminiscent of American real estate ads from the 1950s, albeit ones designed to attract buyers to buy homes in sunny California.
The brochure copy, riddled with spelling errors, read in ornate boldface:
In the 1980s, a group of energetic young entrepreneurs had a dream: they longed to create a beautiful and peaceful oasis outside the desolate and monotonous urban buildings.
Led by its founder, the late Sri Chandresh Roha, the Roha Group has brought lush greenery to Mumbai's weary homebuyers. Today, every Roha Group property is a symbol of warmth, comfort, brightness, joy, and prosperity. Choosing Roha means choosing a happy and fulfilling future.
The illustrations in the brochure are silhouettes of Mumbai's skyscrapers, low- and medium-rise buildings surrounded by palm trees, couples strolling leisurely in front of the buildings, luxury cars driving on clean roads, children's playgrounds, and the blue sea with waves in the distance.
The brochure promised to build a bus station, tennis courts, clubhouse and library in the community to solve the "last mile" problem, but none of these promises were fulfilled.
But if you were sitting in a shabby shack in Jogeshwari, with sewage flowing outside, the incoherent shouting of drunks and the provocative cries of thugs, along with the buzzing of mosquitoes and flies, flying in through the only window of your house, and looking at the brightly colored brochures, you would be willing to believe that these promises were true.
Maybe that night when you fall asleep, you will dream of your children playing in a green playground, your wife cooking at the marble counter, and you walking back to your new apartment from the bus stop on a Saturday night. The road under your feet is so wide and the country air is so fresh.
In fact, the operation and maintenance of the community is extremely poor. The walls of the buildings are uneven, and the pipe ducts in the walls where the electrical wires should be laid are empty, dug out and left open.
There's no elevator in the elevator shaft, and even the staircases aren't finished. The developer promised to create a communal garden and install water heaters that meet Indian national standards in every home.
But there was no sign of the garden. Instead, a house was built on the land where the garden was supposed to be built, and there was no follow-up on the installation of the water heater.
Ashish complained, and the device installed was a device so underpowered that it was "not even enough to heat water for a mouse bath."
But as it says in the contract: this also counts as a water heater.
This ridiculous machine is not only small, but also extremely sensitive to the amount of water. It will not work if there is insufficient remaining water.
The bath water in the pipe was only supplied every other day, so the family had no choice but to install a water tank in the attic to store water.
Drinking water is even less available, delivered only once a week, and the drivers won't bring water tankers into the community unless they bribe them with a hundred rupees per truck.
But this amount of water was not enough, so the property management committee asked a private company to transport three trucks of water to Chandreshchau every day, at a cost of 325 rupees per truck.
The heads of these water transport companies are the most powerful people on Mira Road. They monopolize all transportation routes in the area and do not allow the city government to lay any additional water pipelines.
In Chandreshchau, drainage is as difficult as water delivery. The sewers and sewage pipes are almost non-existent, and the property management committee has to pay an additional 400 rupees per month to have the water on the land drained.
If the drainage system is completely paralyzed, housewives and clerks will sit on the railroad tracks in rebellion until the government steps in to temporarily resolve their problem.
In addition, residents have to pay for cleaners out of their own pockets, and they are unable to care where the cleaners will transport their domestic waste.
If we only use the municipal garbage bins that are only emptied every two weeks, the community will inevitably be filled with stench and dirt.
Because Mira Road is located in the suburbs and cannot be reached by bus, the property management committee once spent money to hire an eight-seater van and asked the driver, who was also a resident of the community, to pick up residents and take them to and from the train station, at two rupees per person.
The rickshaw drivers on Mira Road were not happy (they charged 20 rupees per person) and surrounded the van driver, scaring him so much that he no longer dared to take any business.
The residents called the police, but when the police and local councillors arrived, they all sided with the rickshaw driver.
As a result, people on Mira Road spend most of their monthly wages just to get the most basic facilities they should have: water supply, sewage and transportation.
Mira Road lies squarely on the outskirts of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, which is both its allure and its fatal flaw: it is a no-man's land, a so-called urban-rural fringe.
Fortunately, Sur Electric has developed rapidly in the past two years, and Ashish's status has also risen.
He solved the problems of the community's tap water and the police who took sides in the dispute with just one phone call.
The rickshaw drivers outside no longer dared to embarrass the van drivers.
The developer of the community, Chandresh Chau, personally stepped in to solve the water supply problem. He also hinted that if Ashish needed it, he had a more upscale apartment.
Ashish refused, as mentioned before, there were too many relatives and friends here.
He moved to a high-end apartment, but they couldn't follow him.
Only when family members unite together can they take care of each other.
But overall, the Ashish family is much happier than they used to be, when their more prosperous relatives would visit them in Jogeshwari, survey their small shack, and ask why they hadn't moved out.
It was so frustrating that Ashish was thinking to himself, don't they want to move?
My parents’ illness cost a lot of money in the past, but our family had no savings at all.
When he lived in Jogeshwari, he never told his home address to his college friends, nor did he visit their homes to avoid having to return the invitation.
But now he doesn't have to hide anything. Relatives can stay overnight, friends can come to visit, and anyone can come to visit at any time.
Look, this house is full of relatives and friends, who live in the buildings around them.
Ashish waved his hand and called his cousin Dharmendra aside. After all, it was not appropriate to talk about selling the film in public.
"Doesn't your wife's brother have a bookstall in Kimble?"
"Yeah, what's wrong?"
"Don't sell that thing. You won't make much money from it."
“Actually, some magazines sell quite well, the kind that feature people wearing very little clothing.” Dharmendra gave him a look that said, “You know what I mean.”
"It's just a picture that won't quench your thirst. Is there a movie to cheer you up?"
"Movie?"
"Yes, adult movies, all kinds of them."
"You mean selling videotapes? Those are too expensive and not many people buy them."
"No, look at this." Ashish took out a CD.
"Huh?" Dharmendra took it and turned it over and over in curiosity.
"This is called a VCD disc. Just like a videocassette, it can play all kinds of movies. But it's much cheaper, only around a dozen or twenty rupees. And it's not as delicate as a videocassette. You can put it in water, take it out and dry it, and you can still use it."
"Really?" Dharmendra's eyes lit up.
"Of course, you might not imagine that you can make this kind of CD yourself."
Next, Ashish talked about VCDs, focusing on how to burn the discs, how to operate them, and how to promote them.
You know what, my cousin Dharmendra was immediately attracted to her.
This kind of business that can control the supply of goods or even create the supply of goods has great potential.
As an Indian man, he knows all too well what people desire in this regard.
It was completely endless, after all, what's life without that kind of thing?
After discussing it, the two brothers both felt that VCD would be popular and the CD business would be even more popular.
(End of this chapter)
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