“Anything goes,” he promised. The man was already reading my mind. By “anything,” I guess Sameer meant day-glo walls and a large group of women all wearing their company’s t-shirt. It’s okay, though. I had a beer and smoked two cigarettes, as much as I really wanted from the night.

On the way back to the hotel, we agreed he’d take me to Chor Bazaar, or the Thieves Market as it was once known, a place where you can “get anything,” Sameer said.

Right on time, I found Sameer in the same spot we’d met last night. We drove through choked traffic moving about a half a mile in one hour. Sitting at a stand still in the middle of the Muslim part of the city, I watched a tangle of people shouting, small children banging on our windows, and then I watched a squatting man slide a needle into the vein of his friend, a cigarette dangling from his lips. The man took a long time drawing the blood into the chamber, letting it sit in the crook of the man’s elbow until he pushed the plunger slowly forward. The recipient’s head bowed as his friend slid the needle out.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, right out in the open, and prepped my phone to video it. Sameer told me to stop. “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s dead.” And the children kept banging on our window.

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Electrical wires jumbled along the exteriors and my guide told me they had “twenty four hours of power.” The heat and smell had teeth. The people wore open smiles, kids running beside us, not for money, but to look at a tall white bald dude. Toward the end, a thin man stood beaming and Shailesh introduced me to his father. I shook the man’s hand, telling him his son was very smart, never breaking eye contact.

We went around the corner and my guide showed me where he lived. I peaked past the thin drape that acted as the front door, saw three kids and a smiling woman in a house the size of a Macy’s dressing room. The tour ended when we went to a school room that doubled as the offices of Mystical Mumbai Tours. About ten students sat on the floor doing their lesson in Hindi, while I filled out a survey about the quality of the tour.

Great, I said, and wrote about the indelible insight my guide gave me. Sure, Shailesh’s constant coughing freaked me out, but his open spirit and the love he had for his roots batted away any concerns I had as we walked toward the car to go back to the hotel, a billion miles away from Dharavi.

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