This is very personal video for my family. My dad and mom lived in this slum in Bombay (Mumbai) when they started their family and had us kids in the 1980s. It was (and still is) called “Abubakar Patra Chawl” (tin tenements) which consisted of 10ftx10ft / 3mx3m homes with walls made of tin roofs laid down vertically. There was no running water or toilets and electricity was often “borrowed” through a mish-mash of wires. The slum was on undesirable land on the banks of a sewer stream.
I vividly recall my very early years here: we used to make paper boats and chase them through the smelly, open waste-water drains, and the “toilet” was outdoor, where you’d go straight into the open sewer. During the monsoons the sewer would swell up, frequently sending all the waste water into all the homes in the slum. You’d hang valuable things off hooks in the roof.
I visited it in 2018 with my mom and dad. I was only able to record this video because the people still living here know my family. I was surprised when one of the old ladies recognized me and my name. I do not remember her.
By 2018 people had “upgraded” the homes by replacing tin with bricks, a second level built above the first, with metal ladders to go upstairs, water tanks with plumbing etc which had made it more livable. But the constant foul air of the sewer and the flooding are things beyond their control.
I made this video as a rough cut back in 2018 itself. I was hoping to go back and get some more footage to document more things. However, due to the 2020s I was unable to go back. Now most of it is re-developed, using a phased approach of building apartments next door, moving some people into it, demolishing their land to build more apartments, until most of the slum is converted into mixed income housing.
I looked up some historical satellite images to see what it probably looked like when we lived there and I found these high resolution images from 1966.
