When Sunny concluded his spiel, an awkward silence descended, the meaning of which as a travel professional I instantly grasped. I seized the initiative, opened my purse and handed a nice pile of rupees to our host, which he accepted with a practiced gesture, placing the cash over his heart with both hands flat on top of it and bowing his head in gratitude. All the backpackers followed my lead and did the same, except for the kid outfitted head to toe in top-of-the-line travel wear, who inquired if they took credit cards. The master of the house reached up to one of the shelves and pulled down a plastic bag containing a portable credit card gizmo, and the transaction was completed.

The gratuity for the owner of the monsoon showhouse was on top of the price we had paid for the tour itself, amounting at the very least to what an upwardly mobile slum dweller might earn in a month. Now Sunny was warming us up for the biggest payout of all—I recognized this as a tourism insider—the contribution we would be asked to make at the end of our tour to his worthy nonprofit with an additional tip to him for his superior services. In anticipation, for the grand finale, he announced that we would now be taken around to view just a small sampling of some of Slum Power’s cutting-edge, life-altering projects. All of it was contained in a very small space, he reassured us, so there would not be that much more walking on water to do; in any case, the basti itself with its one million inhabitants right in the heart of the frenetic metropolis of Mumbai hardly took up more than a square mile of land, he reminded us.

He failed to mention the climbing, however, up narrow, steep staircases, sometimes even ladders in near darkness to the factories where men and boys sat shoulder to shoulder, melting recycled plastic water bottles, firing clay pots, stitching garments, a rapturous smile lighting up every face, they looked as if any minute they might all burst out in song as in a socialist realism propaganda film. Most heartwarming of all was the happy leather workshop reeking of animal carcasses employing Dalit untouchables and Muslim outcasts. “Equal opportunity employment, nondiscrimination, that’s our motto, the rejects of Indian society empowered by Slum Power,” Sunny intoned. The previous week alone this factory had shipped out five thousand designer belts, he proudly announced, special order from a very famous chain of stores that we may have heard of, Sex Filth Avenue in the United States of America.