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Showing posts from August, 2015

Palaces under slums

It used to rain very heavily in Mumbai during the monsoon. It still does. But this is from the time I was undergoing my grad studies. From my window in the ground floor of the hostel that I lived in, I could see a couple of tents with dish antennas attached to them. There was a saffron flag that flew defiantly atop a mast on the roof of a single story building. I always wondered if the simple houses and the people hid something mysterious. One day, I got my rain boots, torch and decided to look what was in there. The tents were totally deserted, except for a boy in shorts playing with a football. I moved towards the well that I could see from my hostel window. As I approached it, the boy disappeared in the alley before me. The well was strange. It had no water. I flashed my torch and found a flight of stairs going down after about a meter of nothing. I looked around. No one was there. Holding my torch I sat over the well and positioned myself such that I could land on the stairs safel