Rats

Rats are a persistent presence in Bombay, where they move through streets, passageways, and the lanes of the Cuffe Parade slum. They are scavengers, a cause of injuries that Lin treats, and, in one striking night scene, a vast migrating population that residents have learned to live around. Their role is more complex than a simple sign of disorder: they are at once part of the city’s waste system and a reminder of the conditions in which its poorest residents survive.

Rats in Bombay’s urban landscape

In Lin’s first impression of Bombay, the city’s scale is registered through the many forms of life and activity crowded into it. His description includes humans and rats among the creatures whose presence, movement, and waste help define the island city. This places rats within the fabric of urban life from the outset, rather than treating them as an exceptional intrusion. They belong to the city’s crowded, interdependent environment, alongside its commerce, places of worship, traffic, and human struggle.

On a busy street, rats feed on refuse piled along pavements and roadways. Trash can be thrown from the windows above, while garbage accumulates among the movement of carts, vehicles, traders, and pedestrians. The rats’ presence is thus connected to a visible system of discarded material and dense public life. They are not described apart from the city’s human arrangements: their feeding follows the waste those arrangements leave behind.

The contrast is especially sharp in Cuffe Parade. The slum sits beside the modern World Trade Centre, but its residents live without electricity, running water, or toilets, and without assurance that their homes will remain. Rats in this setting are part of an environment shaped by deprivation and insecure housing. The narrative does not reduce the slum’s conditions to the animals; instead, their recurring presence makes the material surroundings of daily life difficult to ignore.

Encounters in the lanes and clinic

Lin first encounters the rats at close quarters when Prabaker leads him through a narrow, dark passage. Moving by keeping their feet against the walls, they cross a muddy, contaminated route. Lin cannot see what is moving near his boots and calls out in alarm. Prabaker identifies the creatures as rats and reassures him that they do not usually trouble people unless attacked. He also tells Lin that shouting is what makes them bite or scratch. The encounter establishes a local knowledge that Lin lacks: a frightening passage has its own practical rules, and the residents’ familiarity with the rats changes how they navigate it.

The rats also appear in the work of Lin’s makeshift clinic. Qasim Ali brings people to him, including a child who has been bitten by rats, because some patients are reluctant to seek treatment alone or to trust a foreign doctor. Later, among the patients Lin sees in the slum, rat bites appear alongside fever, infected rashes, and ringworm. These brief clinical references show that contact with rats can become an ordinary medical problem, handled within the neighborhood’s informal network of care. They do not make every encounter an emergency, but they place the animals among the recurring hazards Lin is expected to address.

That care takes place in surroundings with limited infrastructure. The Cuffe Parade settlement has no running water or toilets, and Lin’s work depends on the willingness of residents to approach his hut and on the trust built through local relationships. The text does not claim that rats cause the wider range of illnesses he treats. Rather, the rat bites sit within a broader picture of people seeking help for injuries and sickness amid difficult living conditions.

The nightly movement through the slum

During the cholera epidemic, Lin and Karla spend long hours caring for sick residents. After more than forty hours without sleep, Lin insists that they return to rest. As they walk through the dark lanes, he hears a sound nearby, stops, and holds Karla behind him. He tells her to remain still, believing that movement might draw the animals’ attention. The scene briefly turns the routine route home into a moment of danger, but the danger is governed by knowledge rather than mystery: Lin recognizes what is coming and attempts to keep them out of its path.

Hundreds and then thousands of rats stream through the lanes, moving over and past the pair before continuing toward sewer pipes by the wealthy apartment towers. Their nightly route runs from nearby markets, through the slum, and onward to the sewers. The account stresses the sheer scale and duration of the movement while making clear that it follows a familiar pattern. Residents do not generally worry about the rats when they are inside their huts or asleep outside; the risk arises when someone obstructs the animals or panics in their path.

Once the migration has passed, the lanes are left cleared of rubbish and scraps. Lin explains that this is why residents tolerate the rats: their nightly movement helps keep the place clean, so long as people avoid interfering with it. The benefit does not erase the threat of bites, and the scene does not present the rats as harmless. Instead, it shows an uneasy accommodation in which an animal population that can overwhelm the lanes also performs a function residents value.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, the rats connect the visible waste of Bombay’s streets to the practical knowledge and mutual care of its poorer neighborhoods. The person unfamiliar with the passage sees darkness and an unknown threat; Prabaker understands how to cross it, while Lin later knows how to respond when the rats pass through the lanes. The contrast is not between danger and safety so much as between unfamiliarity and learned adaptation.

The rats’ movement also makes the city’s inequalities legible without turning them into a simple allegory. Their route passes through the slum and continues toward the sewers beside wealthy apartment towers, while the people in Cuffe Parade lack basic services and face uncertain housing. The animals belong to an urban environment shared across those boundaries, but the novel’s scenes remain attentive to how differently residents experience that environment. Rats may clear discarded scraps, yet their presence in the clinic records and the narrow lanes also marks the daily costs of living close to the city’s waste.

Their recurring appearances therefore resist a single meaning. They can provoke fear, leave people in need of treatment, and help remove rubbish; residents respond not by imagining that the risk has disappeared, but by developing rules for living alongside it. In Lin’s account, that adjustment is part of a larger pattern of learning the city through its inhabitants: the place that first seems threatening becomes more intelligible through the knowledge people share and the care they organize.