In Mumbai, one man's meat is indeed another man's poison By Amelia Gentleman
Friday, September 21, 2007 International Herald Tribune MUMBAI: Cooking chicken has become a high-security, covert operation for Shailaja Hazare, an undercover meat eater who has spent the last decade pretending to be vegetarian so she can keep her apartment in one of Mumbai's strictly vegetarian-only residential complexes. Her preparations are meticulous. She travels to a butcher a few kilometers from her home to avoid running into a neighbor and makes sure her purchases are disguised in layers of plastic bags and paper. She lights sandalwood, rose and jasmine incense on her doorstep to mask the smell of frying meat. If the doorbell rings while she is eating, she clears the surfaces, retreats to her bedroom with her food and lets her vegetarian daughter open the door. While Mumbai is one of India's most cosmopolitan cities, much of its housing is splintered along ethnic and religious lines. There are predominantly Muslim, Roman Catholic and Hindu areas. And then there are extensive vegetarian-only stretches, some of which occupy desirable patches of real estate along the waterfront. Such divisions have long been a feature of life in Mumbai, where around a third of the city is estimated to be vegetarian - because they are Jain by religion, members of the Hindu Marwari business community, or Hindus originally from northern state of Gujurat, all groups that renounce meat, fish and eggs. But recently the tone of Mumbai's vegetarianism has become more militant, and activists have started battling against a tide of Westernization that they fear is seducing a younger generation of vegetarians to start eating meat. This summer campaigners in the city staged protests against plans to open a chain of shopping malls that would sell meat as well as vegetables Vegetarianism in India is far removed from the animal-rights vegetarianism of the West. It is usually a marker of religious identity, handed down over generations, inherited at birth, rather than adopted for reasons of personal health or concern for animal welfare. But aware that lectures on spirituality are not working, activists here have begun adopting shock tactics, like organizing visits to slaughterhouses, to persuade "flesh eaters" to return to the fold. In such a climate, the fear of discovery hangs heavy on Hazare, who requested that her maiden name be used and would be photographed only from behind to obscure her identity. Her husband and mother-in-law, both strict vegetarians themselves, are understanding about her occasional need to eat meat and conspire to make sure that the neighbors remain unaware. "The real estate agent told me 'You don't look vegetarian. You won't be able to live here,' " she said, recalling his discomfort as he studied her face and surname, trying to divine if she was a Jain or a Marwari. In fact, she was brought up in a coastal area near Mumbai as a non-vegetarian Hindu. "That annoyed me a lot," she said of the inspection. The apartment was in a highly sought-after building, a good investment. "I lied and told him I didn't eat meat." It was the start of an existence punctuated with deception. Pieces of eggshell swept out to her landing almost exposed her double life a few months back. "My neighbor, a strict Jain, asked my sweeper who the eggshells belonged to," she said. "The sweeper was loyal to me and said she didn't know. "Another time he came into my flat, opened the fridge and found eggs inside. I had to tell him that the doctor had told me to feed eggs to my daughter." She estimates that 99 percent of the people living in a three-kilometer, or two-mile, radius from her apartment are vegetarian. For most residents of these enclaves, the very idea of being near someone who might cook meat is repulsive. "I'd have issues living next to a non-vegetarian person," said Nirmala Mehta, a Marwari housewife who lives in another apartment block with 200 fellow vegetarians, a few kilometers away in north Mumbai. "The smell would be a problem, but it's more than that," she said. "A non-vegetarian person eats hot blood and it makes him hot blooded; he might not keep control of his emotions." The passionate disgust that the notion of eating meat elicits is summed up by Vinod Gupta, the leader of one of Mumbai's most vocal pro-vegetarian movements, Maharashtra Gopolan Samiti. "Even the sight of someone eating meat is revolting," he said. "It's not just a matter of principle, I have a sense of physical repulsion. I wonder how they can behave that way." Denying someone the right to move into an apartment on the grounds of caste or religious affiliation is illegal in India, but vegetarian-only homes occupy a gray area under the law. Although the government does not record numbers, vegetarian leaders say thousands of such buildings are dotted around the city. No other city in India has such a concentration of vegetarian ghettoes. Their existence is the source of some unease to Mumbai's Muslims, who see this as a cover for creating Hindu-only enclaves. "They should be discouraged," said Majeed Memon, a leading Muslim lawyer in the city. "It's very sad if, under the guise of vegetarianism, residents are excluding people of a particular religion." Although Muslims have routinely been excluded from such housing complexes, he said, he did not know that anyone has filed a discrimination suit. "No one wants to live in an atmosphere of hostility," he said. Lifestyles are shifting fast in Mumbai, and there is a growing unease among older vegetarians that the next generation may not be so fastidious. Nirmala Mehta lists meat eating as the worst misdemeanor her two sons could commit - above smoking and drinking. "It's blood-spilling. It's almost murder," she said, and yet she knows both sons regularly eat meat when they go out. "They are grown now, I can't control it. They don't do it to hurt me, just to fit in with their friends. Society has changed." India's census does not reveal the number of vegetarians, but government research published this year showed that households eating chicken increased threefold in urban areas and two and a half times in rural areas between 1993 and 2005, a trend that may partly be explained by rising incomes. "There is a lot of false publicity coming on television, saying that non-veg food is better than veg," said Mahendra Jain, a lawyer and vegetarian activist. "It's part of the process of Westernization. There are advertisements for McDonalds everywhere. "It's like drug addiction," he continued. "You taste it, once or twice, and then you get an idea that you must have it. "We have to fight this." Jaswant Shah, president of the Vegetarian Society of Asia, based in Mumbai, said no one in his family had eaten meat for at least seven generations, but he was uncertain how long this would last. "We've no way of knowing how quickly younger people are turning to non-veg lifestyles," he said. "But we feel it has been going faster over the past 10 years. The impact of globalization is so great." Shailaja Hazare veers between relishing the subterfuge that underlies much of her life and fearing the consequences of exposure. She thinks that her building's residents' society would probably balk at evicting the family if they discovered that she eats meat, but is quite certain that disclosure would poison her life. "Now it's become funny," she said. "It's like a hide-and-seek game. But if they found out, my neighbors would hate me. They would stop inviting me anywhere. They would never take food from my house again. My life would become very unpleasant."
