MUMBAI, India — Sabid Ali Sheikh stands on a prairie of trash — old onions, excrement, animal bones — slowly rotting its way back into an earth riddled with rat burrows. Sometimes the ground gives way under his feet.
It is after midnight, and Sheikh is after the rats. He listens for them. He tries to catch their red eyes in the sweep of his flashlight. Some rat killers say they can smell them in the dark.
Sheikh, 23, is a night rat killer, one of 44 employed by the city of Mumbai to wage its long, losing war against vermin.
Barely taller than the killing stick he uses to ply his trade, Sheikh is a clean man, dressed in elaborately embroidered jeans and a crisp shirt, who thinks himself lucky to have even this dirty work.
Sheikh’s father is also a rat catcher. His brothers sell vegetables from a cart and wish they could be rat catchers too.
If he ever has children, he hopes they sit in an office from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m.
But given what modern India has to offer the Sheikh family, the children may well end up standing precisely where Sheikh stands now: ankle-deep in the soft earth of a stinking dump, wearing old flip-flops.
The dark side of the dream
Even as India’s booming economy overflows with opportunities for the educated and well-connected, minting new millionaires by the dozen, about 800 million people toil on the dark side of the Indian dream. India’s boom has lifted many people out of poverty, but it has also worsened inequality.
Put aside for a moment those stories about a great nation of engineering geniuses, billionaires and youthful promise, whose economy might one day outpace China’s.
The Sheikh family does not live in that India.
Instead, they curl themselves, all 15 of them, into a 140-square-foot space with peeling paint, tattered plastic bags to hold their clothes and a fan that leaves everyone sweating.
In this India, a job with the city, even if it involves killing rats, is a thing to fight for. It means security, more precious than wealth.
The competition for rat-catcher jobs in Mumbai is stiff. Only men ages 18 to 30 need apply. They must be able to lift a 110-pound sack and run a few miles. They must demonstrate their ability to catch and kill a rat in the dark within 10 minutes.
Each rat catcher must kill 30 rats a night, six nights a week. If he doesn’t make the quota, he doesn’t get paid.
A highly coveted job
Arun Bamne of the city’s insecticide department, which oversees the rat-catching, says people badly need jobs. The last time the city recruited, he said, more than 4,000 people — some with university degrees — applied for 33 rat-catcher positions.
Joining the war on rats does not lead, with time and diligence, to a desk job in a fan-cooled administrative office. After half a dozen years, a man might be moved to the day shift, laying traps and setting poison bait. But there is little else to look forward to.
As a daily wage laborer, still hoping for a permanent job with the city, Sheikh says he makes 12,000 rupees ($271) a month, if he makes his quota. That is slightly less than a city bus driver, at 13,000 rupees ($293) a month, or an entry-level call-center worker, 15,000 rupees ($338).
His father, Jahed Gabul Sheikh, 56, has been a rat catcher for 30 years. He makes 17,000 ($383) rupees a month.
“I am trying my best to get the city to hire my other sons,” he said. “All my kids know how to catch rats very well. But the city doesn’t employ them.”
Sabid, his son, said his friends envy him his steady paycheck.
“A government job is a very secure job,” he said. “Everyone wants to be famous and known. But this is my destiny. Everything you wish will not come true.”
Numbers
44 Rat catchers employed by city of Mumbai
30 Rats that each catcher must kill per night, six nights a week. If he doesn’t make the quota, he doesn’t get paid.
$271 A rat catcher’s monthly pay, if he makes quota
