The guys at our hotel woke us up at 9 am with egg filled bread and chai tea. We sipped the tea slowly as we got our bearings… it was a night of deep sleep.
Eventually the wheels started turning and we left the hotel to catch a cab to Dharavi slum, allegedly the largest in Asia. The cabs here are cheap and make up around half of the cars on the road. The forty minute ride cost us 250 rupees ($4).
Soon after exiting the cab we entered a tent with Ganesh. A man in the tent quickly smudged our foreheads with the dye at the gods feet and we gratefully accepted apples from the fruit scattered around the alter (is it an altar?). A teenage boy approached us as we left the tent, remarking about the beauty of the diamond work on this particular Ganesh and introducing himself at Ahmed.
Ahmed proudly took us around the corner to another Ganesh shrine before inviting us into his building nearby. In the building one of the rooms was dedicated to Ganesh and I committed the faux pas of leaving my sandals on the doorstep as opposed to entirely outside the room. Whoops. Next, we walked barefoot up two flights of stairs to Ahmed’s home.
The home was one room and had a small upper deck where I assumed some of the family slept. We greeted Ahmed’s brother, mother, aunt, and grandmother with Namaste’s before taking our places on the floor alongside them. I’d guess the entire apartment was around 15 square meters.
We were quickly offered piping hot chai tea amidst smiles and quick translations from Ahmed.
The tea was served in small tea cups on tea plates. I sipped the tea directly from the cup and scalded my mouth. Ahmed’s grandmother and mother mimed to pour the tea onto the tea plate and slurp the tea off the side. We did as we were told, and the extra surface area of the plate cooled each sip to a drinkable temperature.
Word spread quickly through the tenement that foreigners were in Ahmed’s house, and soon we had a crowd of girls between 2 and 14 years old sitting on the floor around us. At first, the girls lined the perimeter of the room, but as they gained confidence they scooted closer and closer to Louise.
Louise told the grandmother that the marks on her hands were beautiful, and the word “mandi” flew around the room. In a moment of linguistic confusion everyone was laughing without really understanding what was going on. Ahmed’s mother handed him 20 rupees to buy the mandi and I quickly stood up to follow him out of the room.
We walked (again barefoot) along a dirt road to a corner store nearby. There, Ahmed instructed me to buy the Mandi from the seller…. it cost ten rupees and came in a cone similar to a cake frosting cone. The device was tipped with a replaceable pin. Only then did I understand that the Mandi was the dye used to create the Henna-like designs Louise saw on the grandmothers hands.
Unbeknownst to me, while I was gone with Ahmed the women of the family were having Louise try on one of their traditional dresses. They insisted on giving the dress to Louise as a gift but luckily it was slightly too small.
Back at the home we sat on the floor and Ahmed’s mom and neighbor took turns decorating Louise’s hands with the Mandi. The dye took around thirty minutes to dry, and while it hardened the girls slowly opened up to ask Louise questions. We played word games together and learned each others favorite colors, flowers, and animals.
Ahmed explained that ten people live in the apartment and all share a small toilet next to the kitchen. I can’t imagine how the logistics of the sleeping would look. In broken English Ahmed’s mother asked us to join them for dinner at 8 o’clock. As much as I would have loved to dine with the family in their home, I felt we had already more than exceeded our tourist-generosity quota for the day.
In Paris, we purchased small Eiffel tours to give to people we stayed with through homestays. I’m embarrassed to say we didn’t bring them to the slum. For the second day in a row I’ve underestimated the generosity of the Indian people. Those little towers will be a permanent fixture in my day pack from now on.
For the next hour we wandered through the slum and, like yesterday, we created quite a spectacle. We did not see another traveler or foreigner in the entirety of 
our time there. By chance, we walked into a game of cricket being played in an alley and we stopped to watch for a while before snaking our way back towards the main road. We stopped for lunch and I ate two spicy red sausage like patties while Louise chowed down on spicy rice with her hands. Louise didn’t finish the rice plate and you could feel we violated the social etiquette as we left the restaurant.
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