Cuffe Parade is a settlement shaped by the construction of the Mumbai World Trade Centre Construction Site and by the people who made a home beside it. In the narrator’s first view, a modern commercial complex and a ten-acre sprawl of huts occupied adjacent plots: one displayed jewels, silks, and bright fountains; the other housed thousands without electricity, running water, or toilets. The contrast is not merely visual. It reveals how a city’s monumental building projects and its precarious living spaces are produced together, while those who inhabit the latter remain exposed to official tolerance that could end at any time.

Setting and First Impressions

The slum stood beside the Mumbai World Trade Centre Construction Site on land along the shore of Mumbai Back Bay. From the road, the World Trade Centre appeared air-conditioned and affluent, with shops arranged across three levels and displays of jewels, silks, carpets, and craftwork. Across the divide, Cuffe Parade held roughly seven thousand small huts and around twenty-five thousand of the city’s poorest residents. Neon lights and floodlit fountains on one side threw the absence of electricity, running water, and toilets on the other into stark relief.

The entrance made that deprivation immediate. An open latrine, partly screened by tall weeds and reed mats, filled the air with an overpowering stench. Once inside the lanes, a sea breeze from the settlement’s seacoast edge dispersed it; the smells of cooking, spices, and incense took its place. The huts were assembled from scraps of plastic and cardboard, bamboo poles, and reed mats over bare earth. In spots, remnants of concrete and stone from earlier buildings showed through the ground, marking the site’s previous use beneath the fragile settlement.

A Settlement Built for Construction

Cuffe Parade began as housing for the tradesmen, artisans, and labourers building the twin thirty-five-storey towers. Under the arrangements then required of companies constructing large buildings, land beside the work site was set aside for hutments. Many workers travelled from other states to follow employment; others, native to Bombay, had no home apart from the shelter their work provided. For some, the chance to secure one of these huts was worth the dangers of construction work.

The arrangement also served the employers. Housing workers near the site removed the journey to work and helped foster kinship, solidarity, and loyalty to the company. Workers’ families and dependants could be recruited for additional labour at short notice, while a large workforce living in one community was easier to influence and, to some extent, control. The settlement’s origins therefore joined practical shelter to the needs of the construction business.

When the towers were planned, more than three hundred hut-sized plots were marked out. Workers received a plot and money to buy bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber, then built their houses with help from family and friends. Underground wells supplied water, rough lanes were levelled, and a tall barbed-wire fence kept squatters out. This planned, provisioned enclosure became the legal workers’ settlement. Its vulnerable huts formed a shallow root system beside the immense towers they helped raise.

The Fence and the Expanding Slum

The fence did not contain the settlement’s growth. Workers’ wages and access to fresh water drew squatters outside the perimeter. Chai stalls and small grocery shops attached themselves to the wire first; vegetable and tailor shops and small restaurants followed, along with gambling and places selling alcohol or charras. As space along the fence filled, the illegal settlement spread into the surrounding open land toward the sea. New arrivals marked out ground for huts, and gaps in the wire allowed squatters to enter for water while workers crossed out to shop or visit friends.

The two parts developed in contrasting patterns. The workers’ compound had more orderly lanes, while the squatters’ settlement grew in a haphazard response to need. Over time, there were eight squatters for every person in the workers’ compound, and the squatters’ population exceeded twenty-five thousand. With crowding, the distinction between legal and illegal areas became difficult to see on the ground, even as the Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the illegal settlement and construction-company officers discouraged contact across the boundary.

For residents, however, the wire did not define two separate communities. Workers and squatters understood themselves as one group, with daily life and aspirations intertwined. Some workers invited relatives who could not join their household inside the compound to settle beyond the fence. Children became friends across it, marriages took place between residents on either side, and celebrations drew neighbours from both areas. Fires, floods, and epidemics also made cooperation necessary: those emergencies could not be confined by a boundary on a map.

Work, Care, and Daily Movement

The towers dominated the edge of Cuffe Parade while still unfinished. Their concrete had reached roughly three-quarters of their height, but they had no windows, doors, or fittings. Openings intended to become windows exposed the work on each floor, where people moved among the tasks. Generators, hammers, drills, and grinders filled the construction site with a continuous industrial din.

Women carrying dishes of gravel on their heads moved through the work areas between piles of stone and cement mixers. They carried much of the stone, steel, and cement, one load at a time, and continued working beside men on the upper floors, as high as thirty-five storeys. The towers were thus not only a looming backdrop to the slum: the labour of its residents and other workers was integral to their construction.

Care and exchange also crossed the settlement’s internal divisions. The narrator had treated children for cuts, abrasions, and rat bites, and some construction workers with minor injuries sought his free clinic rather than report to the company first-aid officer, fearing they might be stood down from work. The clinic answered a practical need created by the conditions of labour and by workers’ insecurity, as well as serving residents beyond the official compound.

At night, the settlement’s lack of sanitation shaped the routes people took. An open area about the size of a soccer field was set aside as a latrine zone for women, young children, and elderly people; after eight months of continuous sunshine it lay dusty and bare. On the track toward the slum, people relieved themselves after dark, wary of rats or snakes in the open field. Yet residents maintained, without an announced rule, a narrow, irregular strip of clean ground along the route so latecomers could enter without stepping in the filth. The track, potholes and all, records a small act of collective accommodation within conditions that official infrastructure had left unmet.

The Settlement’s Significance

Cuffe Parade makes the dependencies hidden by the neighbouring towers visible. Construction companies organized housing to support a mobile workforce and benefit from its labour, but the planned compound attracted commerce, relatives, and people with nowhere else to go. A fence intended to separate workers from squatters became porous in practice, and shared work, kinship, celebration, medical care, and response to emergencies made a common social world across the legal boundary.

The settlement’s precariousness remains part of that story. Its first huts were built for a construction project, its outer growth followed everyday needs, and its residents lived without basic services or assurance that the authorities would continue to tolerate them. Against the glitter of the World Trade Centre, Cuffe Parade shows both the human labour supporting urban ambition and the community practices through which people endured the insecurity that ambition left behind.