Tidal Washing: Mumbai

Maybe it partly was the malaria tablets (coupled with a lack of good REM sleep) but I was constantly light-headed during my four days in Mumbai. Coming out of the station, where I'd being trying to take photographs without alerting the attention of the ubiquitous soldiers posted everywhere, I met a white-bearded sixtysomething Sikh taxi driver. He clocked the camera and offered to take me on a guided tour of Mumbai. I hesitated enough for him to ratchet up the sales pitch, promising to bring me to places where tourists generally don't go, unless they are semi-pro photography tourists such as myself. I really didn't have much time, so I haggled him (the first and only time I've done this) down from 5000 to about 500R for a quick ride over the bridge to a place where I could get a panoramic shot of the less salubrious but far more colourful and lively city within a city, the place where 'they wash the clothes.'

I took this from a bridge, while the driver waited patiently in heavy rush hour traffic. I wanted to go down the steps but he warned me that I'd be instantly mobbed by kids looking for money (as of course they have every right to do). So this was all I could frame of the shanty town dimension, what Indians simply call the slum. I had first noticed this kind of conglomeration as our plane descended: a vast a mosaic of brown/grey and ultramarine tarpaulin roofs, improvised huts lapping the airport's perimeter fence like one of those volcanic favelas pouring down a mountainside in Rio. But from this bridge I saw a different, more intimate aspect, a vast outdoor laundry where thousands wash clothes and set them out to dry on lines and roofs. Washing: the great patchwork flag that is both the imprimatur of poverty and what resists poverty, acres of it, the scrubbed linings of lives airing in the hot midday sun. I could almost smell the soap.

PS
If you look very carefully you can see a guy washing himself in the lower right corner.

PPS
Another angle HERE and a closeup HERE.