When Mumbai’s ‘spiderman’ looks down, there’s only fear

On Labour Day, ARUNA CHAKRAVORTY profiles Sudhir Salunke, a window cleaner without a safety net

SUDHIR Salunke dreamt of being a hawaldar and policing his village. Those were easy dreams to dream as he rolled a cycle tyre and played kho kho with friends in a Satara village. Now, far removed from his dreams, he hitches a two-litre water bucket onto his hips, winds the rope around his legs, catches the safety clutch and lowers himself onto the magnificent glass facade of a trendy building in Mumbai.

Twenty-year-old Salunke is a window cleaner, a ‘spiderman’ as his tribe is referred to in the construction business. For all his risk-taking, he makes around Rs 2,400 per month. There is no compensation, however, for the vertigo he feels every time he follows a drop of water that slips past him. Or the fear when the rope occasionally refuses to yield and his legs scrape the structure.

Though money is deducted from his wages for medical insurance and Provident Fund, he has not seen the benefit. ‘‘We don’t know our PF accounts even though we have been working for the past two and half years and the money is being deducted,’’ says Salunke. His colleague Ashok Kumar Yadav remarks that the difficulty’s with the language. ‘‘The forms are in English, we don’t even know what we are writing on it. Nobody tries to explain to us. We believe the amounts are deducted, but what is written on the papers where we sign, we do not know.’’

Salunke saw his dreams fading away when his father died when he was in Class IX and when his elder brother married and moved out. For four years, he blew pipes in the furnace of a rubber factory in Andheri. When his lungs started protesting, he quit.

The job of a ‘spiderman’ was recommended by a security guard who knew there was a vacancy. What looked easy from below as he squinted upwards was not so when he actually started doing the job. Salunke worked out a solution—don’t look down, he told himself.

Today, he believes he has the confidence. ‘‘I can clean windows even if I am sleeping,’’ he says. But the confidence does not stop recurring nightmares. ‘‘Everybody in the house, including my mother, tells me to leave, but where are the other jobs? Nobody pays even this much. A job of Rs 1,200 is hardly sufficient these days,’’ he says.

News of accidents bring home the hard truth of his job. Two of his colleagues recently fell while climbing down the rope. They were not fatal accidents but the ‘spidermen’ were scared. Both of them did not hoist themselves ever again. No compensation was given to them; the saabs said it was their mistake.

But Salunkhe wants to give himself another chance. He drives a rickshaw once the eight-hour sprawl on buildings is over. From 6 in the evening to 12 midnight, the man who will be 21 next month hurtles on the roads taking fares. ‘‘I make around Rs 50 if I am lucky,’’ he says. Fifty goes to the owner per day, and another fifty for fuel. ‘‘I might just have to work for a few months more, and then I will have enough to buy a rickshaw myself’’ he dreams.

Employed by companies that do not even mark their presence on musters, Salunke and Yadav realise they are only a tad better than daily-wage earners. ‘‘At first, a trolley would carry two men who worked on the windows. Now they have this rope system, where one person hangs out alone,’’ says Yadav. The second person waits on the first, on the terrace where the rope is tied. ‘‘But even this is going to go. They want the other person also to join the work. What will happen if the rope on the terrace were to suddenly give way?’’