He smiles as he doles out toffees to a young customer: “I tried at a call centre, and a firm in 2002 and 2003. Then I realized I wasn’t getting a response at all, so I decided on my own little business.”

Mohammed Haroon runs a kirana store very close to him, he has studied only till Class 8, but boasts of a wife educated till Class 12. They spend a lot sending their two girls to a convent in the hope of a better life. He is not forthcoming on why he came here from Sion in 1993. His only explanation: “The mahaul (atmosphere) here is much better than there.”

Obviously, though residents here say there is little government attention, a fact borne out by no government hospital in the area and no government schools for children beyond Class 8, the township’s streets are dotted with boards like Talent Tutorials, Oxford Tutorials and Onyx Coaching Classes suggestive of aspirations higher than otherwise betrayed on the surface.

The chorus here: Yes, we can educate ourselves but now, especially after the train blasts, who will give us jobs with Mumbra in our address column.

Mumbra has no government hospital, and so much garbage strewn around, that you almost believe the locals when they say that all the kachra from nearby Thane, Damboli and Diva gets dumped here. An NGO Khoj, working in education, has presented a detailed memo listing local woes to the state government. But the local corporator, Yasin Qureshi, is ready to rubbish the pessimistic prognosis of Mumbra-ites when he says “Rs 15 crore from the Thane Municipal Corporation has just been okayed for the Mumbra city road and work is to start early next month. The garbage is a problem as one resident has gone and got a stay on the place where the Mumbra garbage is dumped, we are fighting that in the High Court.”

... contd.