Six weeks ago, the Parab family stepped into a world many of us will recognize. After waking one last time to the murk of a hot morning in the dense slums of northern Mumbai, the four of them picked themselves off the floor of their poorly lit one-room dwelling, loaded their beddings into a van and made the long, bumpy ride into the middle class.
They walked nervously up the stairs of the Om Shanti apartment building, a greying 22-year-old concrete structure in the city's well-treed northeast. For most of their 18-year marriage, Manohar and Shubhashi had been saving to reach this most important plateau – the ownership of a full-sized, respectable home.
Three years ago, they finally attained a sufficient household income – about $7,500 a year – and the down-payment savings that could put an Indian family into the tangible ranks of the middle class. Even then, as hundreds of millions of people are discovering, it was a long struggle.
Ever since quiet, cheerful Manohar, 52, got his job as a driver of executive cars for a major electronics company, earning him a decent $550 a month, Shubhashi, a gregarious, energetic woman of 36 – the master strategist behind the family's upward mobility – had been doing the math, visiting the banks, trying to find a way to join the slowly growing ranks of families around the world whose lives are not governed by mere survival.
She was discovering what economists are just beginning to notice about the new middle class: It is extremely difficult to enter, even for those who seem to have enough money. And, she was well aware, it is all too easy to fall back into poverty.
A mortgage was impossible, given her husband's lack of job security (even well-paid jobs in poor countries now tend to be casual, short-term or temporary), so she had arranged a consumer loan to buy the $42,500 flat in June. His salary of $6,600 a year wasn't providing enough savings, so she found small sources of income – renting out their previous slum dwellings – that raised their household income to a healthy $7,950. This was enough to buy what was listed in the language of Indian real-estate listings as a “1bhk” – “one-bedroom-hall-kitchen,” a three-room flat, or what we would call a starter home.
There were still hurdles: Besides the loan, she had to pay several thousand in “black money” – an off-the-books cash payment, almost mandatory in India – to the seller.
The two boys, aged 18 and 11, were the first to walk through the front door of the cheery apartment. Their mother had made them wait a full month before moving in, because she had decided to do something that Canadians will recognize as a classic middle-class rite of passage: She cashed in the small pieces of gold she had been saving for years, valued at almost $10,000, and used the money to pay for furniture and renovations: new kitchen counters, marble floors, ceiling mouldings and lights installed by her workman cousin, and a bigger bathroom.
“As soon as we got this house, it was clear to both of us that we had now entered the middle class,” she says as her family stretches out in front of the TV, still marvelling at the expanses of unpopulated floor space. After the intimate confines of Asian poverty, however, the middle class can seem to families such as the Parabs like a comparatively lonely place.
“Atmosphere-wise, I liked the old place better,” Mrs. Parab says of their former slum dwelling, a rudimentary cinder-block structure known as a chawl. “People were coming in and out all the time, there were always two or three neighbours inside, you could here everything going on around you. Now, it's just too quiet.”
The middle class may be a lonely and disconcerting place to its millions of new entrants, but the Parab family are clinging tightly to their perch. They recently paid their first visit to a shopping mall, one of India's latest innovations, and found themselves stumbling over a previously unknown device known as an escalator. But they didn't buy anything – their savings are precious.
The family, like almost every new middle-class family here, is betting everything on the next generation. Prateek, their patient, quiet 18-year-old son, is their main weapon, and they are spending a formidable $90 a month to put him through a computer-science program at the Northern India Institute of Technology.
