The Slum That Stopped the Virus

摘要

Normally, Khwaja Qureshi's recycling facility in Dharavi, Mumbai's largest slum, would be no place for three newborn tabby kittens. Before efforts to contain the novel coronavirus idled much of the Indian econ- omy, the 350-square-foot concrete room was a hive of non-stop industry. Five workers were there 12 hours a day, seven days a week, dumping crushed water bottles, broken television casings, and discarded lunchboxes into a roaring iron shred-der, then loading die resulting mix of plastic into jute sacks for sale to manufacturers. But during a recent visit, the shredder was silent and the workers gone, decamped to their villages in India's north. That left the kittens plenty of space to gam-bol across the bare floor, nap on a comfortable cardboard box, or be amused by the neighborhood kids who came to visit. Qureshi, a stout, thick-fingered man of 43 whose father founded the operation, mostly ignored his feline workplace companions. He'd been spending his days sitting on a plas-tic chair, drinking cup after cup of milk tea and chatting with other Dharavi entrepreneurs, all of them part of Mumbai's fearsomely efficient but completely informal recycling indus-try, who stopped by to talk business. The consensus was pes-simistic. India's economy is in an historic slump, and less economic activity means fewer things being thrown away-and also less demand to make new products from the old. No one had much hope that things would pick up soon.