Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [144]
It was the economist Amartya Sen who first recognized that poverty is, fundamentally, not the dearth of money or a lack of possessions or a shortage of talent or ambition but the absence of capacities—the lack of tools or opportunities needed to function as a full citizen.18 This concept has become widely used in the field of development, but it finds its most pointed and obvious truth in the arrival city. For it is here, where there is the most will to reach out for betterment, that people are most dangerously deprived of capacities, those knobby handholds in the otherwise smooth vertical face of the economy. As we’ve seen, most needed are the capacity to start a business and the capacity to be educated: When these are provided, a whole new class can develop. Those capacities suddenly materialize, as they did in Jardim Angela, when people have effective self-government, when they have good security and access to credit and urban amenities, when the government takes an active involvement in the neighborhood. And in the eyes of arrival-city residents and many observers, another key to realizing these capacities lies in the full ownership of the land beneath your feet.
A HOUSE FOR MR. AND MRS. PARAB
Mumbai
I met the Parab family on the day they joined the middle class. They had awoken in the soupy lassitude of a late-spring Mumbai morning, the four of them curled together on the floor of the dimly lit, one-room chawl that had been their home for the past six years. It was a concrete-block cube of 200 square feet with a corrugated-metal roof, its neat main floor beneath an elevated cooking platform. They greeted their neighbors in the narrow passageway outside, packed their last possessions into a waiting minivan, and made the bumpy half-hour ride to an adjoining, heavily treed neighbourhood.
As they approached Om Shanti Apartments, a gray and somewhat weather-beaten 22-year-old poured-concrete tower, Subhashini Parab, 36, enthusiastically reassured her children about their new surroundings. “You are only a five-minute walk to the railway station in one direction, and there is a very good temple five minutes the other way,” she told 18-year-old Prateek and 11-year-old Rohan, though there was no need for such reassurances. She had spent the 18 years of her marriage to Manohar, a quiet man 16 years her senior, pushing the family to make it out of the slums and into the genuine middle class. This, long deferred, was their moment of arrival. It had taken far longer than they expected, and it succeeded only by dint of the booming slum property market.
Moments later, they discovered the silent isolation of the middle class. There seemed to be endless expanses of polished-marble floor space, the novel prospect of separate rooms for different functions, of thick walls between families, of having one’s own toilet. In the chawl, water was available for two hours in the morning, a short walk away; here it is available all the time, out of the wall. This apartment is known in the arcane language of Mumbai property listings as a “1bhk,” or one-bedroom-hall-kitchen, a basic 450-square-foot space divided into three rooms, well lit by big windows. To the Parab family, the most astonishing thing about it, and the most deeply unnerving, is its silence. No longer would they hear every word and movement around them; no longer was the air constantly vibrating with the parry and banter of their entire community. When they stopped talking, sound died away. Alarmed, Manohar switched the new 26-inch TV to a Bollywood musical, turned up the volume, and left it on while he talked.
They had bought the place a month before but had decided to stay in the slum an extra four weeks before moving in for a reason that would seem, to almost anyone in the world, characteristically middle class: Subhashini had cashed in her life’s accumulation of gold jewelery, a trove valued at $10,000 and traditionally saved for the marriage