Co-Existing

I had my first day of work at Swadhaar on Thursday (more on that soon). The head office, in the neighborhood of Santacruz, is about 20 minutes by rickshaw from Mike Delf’s apartment in Bandra. I’m starting to get used to the amazingly cheap prices for rickshaws and I’ve been carrying small bills – Rs 10, 20, 50 – in my pocket for rickshaw rides. When I arrived in front of my building in Bandra yesterday evening, the rickshaw meter read Rs 33. I reached into my pocket and found one Rs 10 bill and a couple nearly worthless coins. Uhoh. I opened my wallet to find some bigger bills. I pulled out a Rs 500 and showed it to the auto-wallah. He shook his head. Uhoh x 2.
Now I’m at something of a moral crossroads. Do I give the auto-wallah the Rs. 13 in my pocket, or the Rs 500 in my wallet? (For those of you following along at home without your T.I. 89s, Rs 500 is about $10. Rs 30 is about 60 cents). Actually, this was the easiest moral crossroads in the history of moral crossroads. I spent $15 on a hung-over cab ride from NYU to the Upper East Side the day I flew to India (thanks for the credit card, pops); in the grand scheme of things, $10 could not have meant less to me. The Rs 20 difference between the fare on the meter and what my front pocket had to offer, however, would make a noticeable difference in the life of the rickshaw driver that day. When I gave him the Rs 500 bill, he almost fell off of his perch in the front of the car. “Thank you, thank you,” I think he said. He reached out and shook my hand with both of his and nodded his head frantically.
His white eyes looking up at me from the rickshaw stayed in my mind as I went up to my apartment, showered, and then called Nadir Padamsee. Nadir is a friend of Ed, who recently married my fake-cousin Charlotte. Nadir invited me over to his place, which happened to be a block away from Mike Delfs’. No Rs 500 rickshaw ride necessary.
The elevator opened onto a 1970s-Bond-villain-esque, teal-silver-and-glass-themed apartment with views of the sun setting over the Arabian Sea. Woah. We went up the stairs and out onto a grassy roof-deck. Then, up another flight of stairs, past a sauna (“Come over and use it anytime you like,” Nadir said, not realizing that the very last thing a visitor to the hottest, most humid place on earth would want is a sauna. A nice offer, nonetheless), to an indoor pool with views of the sea. I told Nadir, “I would have asked to interview you for my research on the middle class, but I think your pool is too nice.” He loved my joke, so you don’t have to.
If you ever get a chance to visit Nadir’s place (and you really should), look a few hundred feet below the sun, setting into the sea, and you’ll see the slums of the fishermen’s families of Khar. One- and two-story homes surround a football-field-sized dirt-patch, which, during the summer months (April-June in Mumbai (I don’t really get it, either)) the fisherman use to dry thousands and thousands of fish. The smell, I’m told, is painful, even 100 feet above. If you have the option, don’t visit Nadir’s place in the summer.
“The amazing thing about Mumbai,” Nadir said, as we stood there, “Is that everyone, all different kinds of people, can co-exist.”
Co-exist sounded like a bullshit euphemism to me, but he was providing the Cokes and the view, so I didn’t say anything.


The next morning, I traveled to one of Swadhaar’s field offices – in the Chembur area of Mumbai. I had planned to take a rickshaw, but Nadir insisted (he didn’t have to insist too hard) that his driver take me. After about 45 minutes of Mumbai traffic and 20 minutes of searching, we found the office. While I was slightly embarrassed to show up to a microfinance office in a chauffeured car, I would have been completely lost without the help.
My job with Swadhaar is to assess the implementation and efficacy of the “2-step evaluation model.” Under this new system, one person – the Loan Officer – is charged with evaluating the potential-clients’ willingness to pay (WTP), while another person – the Loan Analyst – evaluates the potential-clients’ capacity to pay (CTP) and oversees the Loan Officers. I had traveled to the Chembur field office to interview the Loan Analyst and his four Loan Officers. I had been told that the Loan Analyst would speak English and that, while the Loan Officers might not, the Loan Analyst could certainly translate. This, of course, was not the case. The Loan Officers spoke 0 English and the Loan Analyst spoke only a tiny bit; he seemed to understand much more than he could speak. Fortunately, there were two people there – training to become Area Managers, the next level in the hierarchy – who spoke perfectly competent English and offered to translate.
I sat down with the Loan Analyst (Satish), his four henchmen, two Loan Officer trainees, and my trusty translators. I had hoped I might get to speak to Satish separately and in private, but when I asked, he just motioned for me to speak, so I did. I asked them about their experiences and how the 2-step model made their jobs easier or harder. I’ll present my complete findings to you and the good people at Swadhaar at the end of the summer. You can back up from the edge of your seat now.
After the interviews, I went out into the field with Satish, the two Area Manager trainees, and the current Area Manager, Himanshu. Himanshu was a balding 30-year old man with a MBA from a university in the near-by city of Pune. He and I got to know each other pretty well over the next three hours (His father is a doctor in Bihar, one of the poorest areas in India. He’s lived in Delhi, Pune, and Mumbai and would like to leave Mumbai soon. He has uncles in New York, but he’s never been to the U.S. He travels to work by train and he has one of the sickest Nokias I’ve ever seen).
We visited three of Satish’s clients. The first was a newly married 50-year old man with a handicap that forces him to use a hand-powered cart to get around. He runs a very small snack and drink store that also offers short- and long-distance phone service. He was applying for his third round of funding to finance purchases of inventory for his store. I couldn’t understand a word he said, but he had a sheepish grin and a silly look in his face the entire time he was speaking to Satish. Once, everyone was laughing hard at something he said. I asked what it was and I didn’t understand it at all; but he seemed like the kind of guy who could tell excellent jokes. I bought a bottle of water and some massala-flavored potato chips from him.
The second client was also handicapped and also provided short- and long-distance phone service from a small storefront, where he sold sandals. He, too, was applying for his third round of funding. But it was unclear what he had spent his early funding on and why he needed more funding. There were no sandals to be seen in his store and he seemed to have all the phones he needed. He and I didn’t really hit it off. Himanshu explained that many clients use some or all of the money Swadhaar lends them for household consumption, which is against the terms of the loan. They were trying to determine whether that was the case with this client.
We then walked down a small alley into one of the many slums that together house 10 million Mumbaikers. I tried to avoid stepping into the open sewer that widened and filled with grayish-blue water as we walked further in. We visited a client who, with the help of his family, makes the sandals that are sold throughout Chembur and other parts of Mumbai. On the ground floor, two kids – about 16 years old – sat on either side of a small gas-powered stove (you might want to take your laptop into the nearest sauna right about now to approximate this. Put a dirty rubber shoe and some nasty heating oil into the cedar-enclosed radiator while you’re at it). One kid was melting the soles of the shoes so that they would stick to the uppers. This involved repeatedly reaching under, over and around the hot stove with his bare hands. The second kid then pounded the soles and the uppers together with a small mallet. Once, while I was watching, the two kids achieved some sort of victory – my Hindi is not nearly good enough (read: namaste and walla are my only two words) to tell you what they had accomplished. They both shouted and then slapped each other five over the open flame of the gas stove. For that moment, the two boys – smiling and slapping-five – seemed like kids.
I got a footlong and a strawberry-kiwi Snapple from Subway when I got back from the slum. It was incredible.