THE DANCE of the WATER SPIRITS

There's something deeply satisfying about eavesdropping on the sleeping habits of the residents of Apna Jhopadpatti in Mumbai (the new name for Bombay)'s Byculla district, even at the unlikely hour of 3.30 AM.

The rise and fall of five hundred pairs of lungs. People you know by name, some of them well, asleep on backs, sides, tummies; children curled up and intertwined with one another and their parents; older bodies ramrod stiff like sentries at attention. Some on charpoys, others on hard wooden boards, others bundled up in the shrouds of blankets on the unyielding pavement.

Inside Khatau Mills, the first shift's getting the machines ready. Hissing of steam, clanking of metal on metal as the bobbins, feeders and all the other hundred and one deafening machines that go to make up a modern cotton mill gird up for action and Monday morning.

A cotton mill like Khatau may be losing money, but I still love going inside to watch the power and intricate coordination of all those well-oiled pistons and gears and levers that turn out saris and much more. I shall be sorry to see it leave, if and when the government finally approves a financial restructuring.

Khatau Mills was built in the 1870s. Today, of course, it's in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thirteen and a half acres of well-oiled steel and blackened brickwork, a giant industrial whale beached in the heart of Byculla.

But it's the thousands huddled round its walls who've always interested me. The pavement dwellers of Tank Pakadi, Water Street and Apna Jhopadpatti in their bamboo and PVC homes, trying to make an honest (for the most part) living in the myriad small businesses, repair shops and apartment blocks on Byculla and beyond.

Three-thirty in the morning must be the only time the street really and truly can be said to be asleep. Doesn't matter what the bright young things elsewhere in Bombay may be up to. The pavement dwellers huddled round Khatau Mills have earned their sleep the old-fashioned way, by hard physical labor the day before.

You'll hear the odd dog fight, and the milk station at the corner of Maulana Azad Road and Souter Street (the old British name for Apna) is very much up and about, filling huge steel canisters with milk still kept cool with giant blocs of ice, something no Westerner has probably ever seen till he or she first comes to India and peers beyond the constrictive confines of Five Star Culture.

At the Sai Baba temple on Tank Pakadi even the Jawans are asleep on duty. I once dared my friend Shekhar to go up and ring the bell. Shekhar scurried up furtively, rang it just twice, scurried back even more furtively, all the while looking over his metaphorical shoulder for someone to seize him by the scruff of his collar and take him down to the E Ward Police station for questioning. But he got away with it, as he should, because what can be insulting or disturbing the peace to say good-morning to a god?

I don't know how everybody puts up with the deafening noise from the mill's exhaust fans. I know it drives me nuts. But I suppose when you have no choice you get used to it. It's like living under Muhammed Ali Road round about JJ Hospital! Just one constant rumble at 90 decibels.

At four AM precisely, day in, day out, Rehmat Shaikh is woken by her internal alarm clock. She groans off her charpoy, shakes her neighbor Luisa de Souza and any other able-bodied man, woman and adolescent child. (Her husband Hamar's away for another year in the Gulf) Like night commandos they head for their stations, each one a metal or plastic bucket in hand.

Then, in convoy they pad up the road to the place. Others steel out of shadows, off charpoys, (Indian rope beds) peel away the PVC sheeting they hang from their roofs and under the legs of their charpoys in the streets to keep out unwanted night visitors such as monsoon showers. Like some silent flotilla they head up, everyone carrying some form of vessel that can carry the precious liquid. These are stacked in prearranged order, like motor racing cars on a grid waiting for the starter to flash the starting flag to signal the "OFF."

Someone, somewhere inside the place is pocketing several hundred Rupees a month to turn on a standpipe or a tap or a hydrant for just thirty minutes. When that first bore of water roars down the pipes, the street is literally galvanized into activity. For thirty minutes, and not a spare second more, the pavement dwellers of Apna Jhopadpatti will fill every bucket, man, woman and child. Like a chain of firefighters fighting some imaginary fire, they perform as a team, in relays, ferrying the precious liquid, from its sudden fount to their huts. Water will be poured from smaller to larger containers until each household has its allotted ten gallons, enough to see it through the day.

Pavement dwellers have to be pretty ingenious to get the water they need for bathing and cooking each day. Many have to cover far larger distances. Often a couple of miles each way.

Neighborhoods of pavement dwellers develop relationships to their sources of water. They're that important. Little invisible territories come up. It's normal. There's only so much water in any one tap in any given period of time. So when you settle on a particular pavement you're presumably buying into certain water rights. I don't know that for sure, but it seems logical.

And I'm not about to give away any state secrets where these particular pavement dwellers get their water from. Beyond stating the obvious: that India has a thriving private sector economy bubbling and bursting with ingenuity, and that a bit of honest backsheesh goes a long way.

They don't use this water for drinking. (They tell me they don't) Pavement dwellers aren't stupid. They know where most diseases come from. For drinking water they'll go to someone's house (with permission) or the tap inside JJ Hospital compound and store it in large earthenware pitchers covered with a thali to keep it fresh and cool.

Fights get started over water. Someone tries to steal their turn, to jump the queue. Or take more than their share. I remember, a few years ago, when Rehmat had her hair pulled in the middle of the street in broad daylight by Kamranissa. Kamranissa didn't like Rehmat much anyway. I think she thought her too big for her boots. Maybe, she resented being bossed by a woman young enough to be her daughter. Maybe Rehmat didn't show her the deference Kamranissa possibly thought she deserved.

Rehmat's "crime" was to have allowed one family to collect twice its daily allowance. Rehmat says they were having a wedding. So, naturally, they'd need the extra water.

Kamranissa said it wasn't fair. She smelled political horse-trading. Rehmat had been invited to the wedding. Rehmat was a rising star in the local Mahila Milan organisation. Rehmat must therefore be guilty by implication of buying future political favors with an extra ten gallons of water.

At least, that's the way Kamranissa reckoned things. I doubt there was any truth to any of it. I'd have probably have done the same if I'd been in Rehmat's chappals.

But they had a real donnybrook in the street. Kamaranissa seized hold of Rehmat's hair and swung her round. They scratched and clawed and pulled at each other. It sounded like a cat-fight and that's pretty much what it was. At the end of three rounds both of them were covered in dust and exhausted. Each limped back to their respective huts, only thirty yards apart.

No lasting damage was done. But I for one wasn't surprised to hear that Kamranissa and her husband had gone to another pavement, another street.

Right on cue, at 4.40 AM precisely, while good, upright middle class Mumbai is fast asleep, the flow of water dies abruptly. And as if on cue, the monsoon shower starts. But by then, everyone's safely back inside the PVC sheeting. Most go straight back to sleep as if they'd sleepwalked the last thirty minutes. A few sip a cup of chai (or Indian milk tea) and then turn in again. The odd early bird sets off on bicycle or car, headed for who knows where? Crawford Market to pick up the day's consignment of fresh vegetables for a Byculla restaurant, or maybe one in the fancier parts of town?

And maybe the first and most enterprising ragpickers, the unsung heroes of the city's environmental movement, will yawn and set out, jute sack on back, to start their work cleaning up the waste and extravagance of the gilded youth, who are only just themselves returning home to bed.