My niece, Anagha, managed to connect with Imtiaz Alam, who makes leather jackets. He stays in Dharavi (Mumbai). I always wanted to meet people in Dharavi, but I had no contact with anyone there.

The area is known to me. On the other side of Dharavi, (Sion as it is called) I studied in DS High School and later in SIES College. You walk a few feet ahead of SIES and there is a bridge over the railway. It lands in Dharavi.

This too was known to me as a student, which is way back in 1966, but I had never crossed the bridge. Literally and figuratively. (We students only remembered that the actor Sadhana used to stay very close to our school, before she became a celebrity!)

As I climbed up the bridge my curiosity about Dharavi grew high and higher. I have passed by Dharavi literally thousands of times but never entered it.

Trousers were washed and hung for drying on one side of the bridge while small rugs and bedsheets were placed for drying on the other side of the bridge.

A bespectacled man in his fifties working for Imtiaz came to the bridge to receive us. He was clad in white and was wearing a knitted white skull cap. ‘I come from the Aurangabad District of Bihar,” he said. They were five brothers and three sisters. They had to find work. He travelled to Mumbai.

Wikipedia tells us that the Indian government named Aurangabad one of the country’s 250 most backward districts (out of a total of 640) in 2006.

“Corruption has destroyed that part of the country” he said. He came to Mumbai in 1999. Although he could speak Bengali fluently, he did preferred Mumbai over Kolkata for finding job opportunities. “I will not be able to speak Bengali fluently now” he said with a nervous smile.

We moved in to small lanes. It is easy to get lost in the labyrinth of those lanes. There are iron ladders everywhere. People stay in a small room on the ground floor. They cook and eat there. I could only steal a glance at the rooms as curtains were placed at the entrance of every room which prevented me from seeing inside. I wondered if there was sufficient ventilation.

One had to climb a step or two to enter the ground floor room. I presume the level was raised to ensure that the rain water did not come inside homes. Water clogging is everywhere in Dharavi during the monsoon.

About two feet above the ground, and next to the steps a ladder is placed to go to the upper floor. It is so steep that one has to climb carefully. A thick nylon rope hangs loosely on the side with knots at every three feet so that one can hold it and climb. Regulars however do not need that support.

We climbed up a floor. The room here was about 12 ft by 10 ft in size. An attic covered about a third of the room which made the room look smaller. On the left side there was a desktop which surprised me.

On the floor there were sheep skins. They make excellent jackets using sheep skins. The skins were dyed black, and also lying on the floor was excellent cloth which was used as the inner lining of the jackets.

Imtiaz arrived. He is a tall and slim man, who sports beard. He was wearing a white cap which was more embroidered than the skull cap of the other man.

“We used to stay at Nagpada (in Mumbai). But moved here after the riots. He was referring to the communal riots in December 1992 when Babri masjid was pulled down.” Nagpada had a large Muslim population.

“The sheep skin comes from Chennai. It is a big center for leather materials and Chennai exports large quantities of leather material,” Imtiaz said.

“Oh, I thought Kanpur has many tanneries so they must be big exporters”

“Kanpur skins buffaloes, we require sheep skins.”

Placed below the table were newspapers neatly wrapped. “Those are formas,” Anagha my niece said.

“We make forma – meaning paper stencil cuts of various parts of a jacket. This is difficult and a highly skilled job. The leather is cut based on the paper cut. So, a mistake can be very costly, because leather once cut cannot be amended again.

“We look for trendy designs, cut the paper and then cut the skin accordingly.”

This undoubtedly is a highly skilled job. “I used to cut the patterns and then stitch them too. Now I cut and they stitch.”

Imtiaz owns a small workshop now. On the second floor. Going there meant climbing the steep ladder, which was not an easy prospect for me. Yet I decided to go there, and I climbed carefully holding the nylon rope occasionally.

Four people who were resting there sat up seeing us. The room was as big as the one on the lower floor but there was a difference. They had made a small toilet block in one corner. That made the room look small. Next to the toilet was a small window, about four feet by two and a half feet in size. And an attic to place all the material.

Three ‘Juki’ sewing machines were placed in one line and one was placed separately. Juki is a Japanese brand of industrial and domestic sewing machines. Special needles are needed for stitching the sheep skin and oil is also used. Imtiaz explained the details.

It was a Sunday and a weekly off for the workers. They stay on the second floor, lie down next to the Juki machines which is their resting place and eat together.

“They start the work at 10 in the morning and work till 10 in the evening” Imtiaz said and added, “with lunch break of an hour.”

“How many pieces do they stitch?” I asked.

“Eight to ten”

Jackets differ in shape, material and design. You have Bikers’ jacket, Bombers, Designer wears, leather pants, shorts, the list can be long. Each piece will be different. It is unlike what we see on a standard packing line in a factory.

“I search good and trendy patterns on Internet, and make and sell my products on Amazon too!”

I did not ask how much he earns, but asked how much his workers earn. “They earn thirty to fifty thousand a month” he said. I did not question him. It did not seem improbable to me, given the high price of leather jackets, and paucity of skilled workers in the market.

Yet I found it difficult to believe. They may be sending money home, I rationalized.

Dharavi must be seen an industrial complex. The Kumbharwada area of Dharavi, for example, is a ‘vibrant hub for traditional earthenware.’ Moving people out of Dharavi has its benefits and it has its demerits too. It is not just about people; it is also about their work and entrepreneurship. Some things get lost to when people are moved. The Governments are blind to it.

Climbing down the stairs, which are extremely steep, was a frightening prospect for me. Hold the nylon rope tightly, take a deep breath and put my foot on the step below on the steep ladder, and do this ten times to reach the first floor and repeat it to reach the ground floor.

“One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen” to (partially) quote Rene Daumal, the French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic and poet.

Oh, how true, especially in Dharavi!

Vivek S Patwardhan

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” All matter copyrighted.