By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 20, 2009
MUMBAI -- Never again would Azhar Mohammed Ismaill, 11, sleep in the overcrowded warren of shanties and festering lean-tos known as Garib Nagar, literally "city of the poor." Azhar, one of the child stars of the Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire" recently moved with his family to a new home in Mumbai: a modest two-room apartment on the ground floor of a high-rise called Harmony.
The apartment was a gift from "Slumdog" director Danny Boyle, whose film grossed $300 million. On the rooftop of his new building, Azhar, 11, danced as he watched jetliners take off from the airport. He recognized the emotion as similar to what his character, Salim, must have felt as he looked out over the Mumbai skyline and said: "India is the center of the world now, brother. I am at the center of the center."
Azhar's real-life journey -- and those of the other child stars in "Slumdog," including his elfin co-star Rubina Ali, 9 -- has been a roller coaster of personal tragedy and red-carpet glamour. In many ways, they are experiencing at warp speed the masala of euphoria and turmoil that India's vast poor feel as they emerge from the iron bonds of caste and class to an era of genuine social mobility.
Over two decades, India has awakened from a drowsy agricultural nation and into an industrial one that has lifted millions out of poverty. Rapid urbanization and the opening of markets has broken down feudal village roles and inspired young Indians to grab hold of new destinies in cities far from their birthplaces. Mumbai has become a magnet for a new generation of Indians, a New York of India, where professions are no longer inherited, where hundreds sleep on the street for a chance at a better life.
Unlike Azhar, Rubina has not seen her fortunes improve much since the movie in which she plays the young ragpicker Latika. She filmed a soda commercial with Nicole Kidman and collaborated with an Indian journalist to write her autobiography this year.
But her family's shack was demolished by city municipal workers and later rebuilt in the same spot, next to an open sewer and piles of garbage. She remains in the slums because her father, despite Boyle's offers for a new home, isn't sure he wants to leave. He also was caught in an undercover sting by a British newspaper where he allegedly agreed to sell her for adoption to a wealthy Dubai family for the equivalent of $290,000; he denies the allegation.
The way Rubina and Azhar's lives have diverged also tells the story of an India where some are forging ahead while others struggle and worry they will be left behind.
"But to me," said Vikas Swarup, the author of "Q&A," a novel on which the film is based, "the most enduring image was at the Oscars, when Rubina and Azhar shared the stage with Steven Spielberg. That was the central message of the film: Whether you come from a slum or a five-star home, what matters is not where you are from, but where you are going, and that is an enormous change in psychology of Indians.
"Yes, they have gone from zero to hero. Yes, they have been touched by magic. But their journey -- in its spirit -- is not very different from the spirit of Mumbai, the feeling across Indian cities and towns today -- which is full of stories of people who are at ground zero of the great Indian dream."
* * *
Just six months ago, Azhar and Rubina were walking the red carpet at in Los Angeles at the Academy Awards. Azhar wore a bowtie and tuxedo, his hair neatly oiled. He held hands with Rubina, who wore a sea-blue princess dress with matching headband over her pixie hairstyle, her hands festooned with traditional henna.
"Angelina Jolie," cooed Azhar, recently lounging in his new home. "She was so beautiful."
"I was scared to sleep in the hotel room, it was so big," Rubina said.
Azhar and Rubina's triumphant return to Mumbai was a whirlwind of media interviews, fashion shoots and parties with Bollywood celebrities.
But in May, their lives seemed to return to normal. Normal for slumdogs, that is, since the government bulldozed their illegal tin-roofed shanties in a scene that seemed straight out of the gritty film.
"They took all our furniture and broke my cellphone," Rubina recounted on a recent day, inside the rebuilt one-room shelter that her family painted bright pink to cheer her up. "They beat my father. We thought of calling Uncle Danny, but what could he do? He was in America."
Then her father was accused in the sting.
Around the same time, Azhar's father was hospitalized, drunk again and suffering from tuberculosis. Homeless and living under blankets and tarp, Azhar was bitten by rats and had to get medical care.
"We were hit with bamboo sticks by the police," Azhar said. "It was a bad time, when they destroyed all the shelters. I cried. A lot."
At a time when call centers and software outsourcing have become the symbols of a booming India, "Slumdog Millionaire" brought to light an equally true reality: the hardscrabble lives of many slum children of an India brimming with optimism and eagerness to be the world's next superpower.
"Nearly every child from the slums has had their home bulldozed and has a parent who has a drinking or gambling problem or has walked out," said Ziyan Contractor, 28, their teacher at the well-respected Aseema School, chosen by Boyle because it's a public school where slum children attend and receive an excellent education. "Every single scene of that movie was true. The only scene that wasn't true was when they dance on the train platform at the end. There is no space to dance on the platforms of Mumbai: only a crush of people."
* * *
Azhar's old neighborhood sits along the railroad tracks, where bone-thin boys haul sheets of tin on their backs to rebuild shelters, goats and chicken roam, a child without legs skates by on a slab of wood with wheels, and girls in school uniforms race to classes.
His last ramshackle shelter had a dirt floor and corrugated tin for a door on which he etched "A Z H A R" with a pocketknife.
His new neighborhood is on a quiet tree-lined street, down the road from an air-conditioned shopping mall. His new home has one small room, taken up largely by a bed, along with a few plastic chairs and a large cupboard with a mirror, plastic flowers and a television.
There is a kitchen, where Azhar stores his bicycle, a present given to him by a mentor and Bollywood movie star. And there's a small bathroom, a first for Azhar, who is used to the semi-public bathrooms in the slums, or else relieving himself near the train tracks.
"Bollywood-Hollywood, I love them both," cooed Azhar, who has long eyelashes and cracks jokes like: "If you eat chicken biryani, it's so good you would eat your finger." It's a popular Indian dish his family can now afford.
His mother, Shamim, who married at 16 and has only an elementary-school education herself, says Azhar is bright but sometimes doesn't want to go to school. Azhar is having trouble adjusting to his notoriety, which has led to fights with classmates.
Maybe that's because at just 11 Azhar is the most successful person he knows. He has become the family patriarch, putting food on the table and even lifting the extended family out of the slums and into a middle-class neighborhood.
"Why should I go to school," he recently told a teacher. "I'm an actor."
After Danny Boyle gave him a laptop, Azhar got frustrated that no one in his family knew how to get Internet service so he could play video games.
Last week, Azhar's father was admitted to the hospital for tuberculosis again, aggravated by his alcoholism, a common disease in the slums. At the hospital, he often bribes nurses to sneak in whiskey to mix with the hospital's coconut water. It is clear he is a burden on the family, but Azhar misses him.
"Still, life is much easier here," said Azhar's mother, smiling as she watched her son race around the apartment, roaring like a lion atop his bike.
Many of Azhar's friends were extras in the movie. The brush with stardom wasn't enough to get them out of the slums. But they say it has given them more confidence.
"I played a handicapped beggar," beamed Abdul Khan, 11, whose father digs ditches. "We are happy for Azhar. He still comes to play cricket with us on Sundays. We wish we could move, too."
* * *
Rubina's slum neighborhood sits just past barefoot children renting bikes for 20 rupees a half-hour, a few 1980s video gaming stations, tea and butcher shops, where incense burns to keep bugs away and train tracks strewn with piles of garbage have a sign reading, "No dumping trash here."
Friendly and bright with a hoarse voice, Rubina seems like a mini-diva, practiced in the art of what photographers want: her hand on hip, in a sparkly pink dress, always striking a pose over a sewage-filled gutter, her head tilted.
"I think back to what my life was like before the movie," she said, as she thumb-wrestled with visitors. "No one ever asked who I was or what I thought about anything."
Although several apartments were shown to the family, Rubina's father has refused to live anywhere but the Bandra neighborhood. He is a carpenter and says his contacts are in Bandra, only.
But it's not just Rubina's living situation that's a problem. Her teacher worries because she frequently misses school, sometimes to shoot commercials or fashion shows. Her father and stepmother have never responded to the teacher's requests to come by. A social worker whom Boyle hired to help wonders if Rubina misses school because her family earns money from visitors if Rubina is there to greet them.
Still, like Azhar, she has moments of joy and pride. On a recent school day when Rubina stayed home, she sat listlessly in the heat, fanning away flies, until news spread that an interview with Rubina was on television. A cheer went out from friends and family.
Rubina ran to the television, riveted by a larger, dreamier, more self-assured version of herself.
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