The story goes thus. Rich New Yorkers on vacation in Florida bring back alligators as pets. The pets grow from being cute to frightening in a very short while. They are flushed down the toilet. Some survive in the vast fetid darkness of New York's sewer system. They grow, and they spawn. And now there is a breed of blind albino alligators, strangers to light and sun, occupying their own niche in the intestinal ecosystem of New York's sewers.

All kinds of immigrants flourish in New York.

In the 14 Street and 8 Avenue subway station, an alligator in a suit and tie reaches out from under a manhole cover and grabs a passerby. The passerby's head is a smooth, full sack of gold.

New York revels in its own legend.

If there were no albino alligators in the sewers, they would have to be invented.

On rainy nights in New York, the tops of the skyscrapers go blurry in the mist. The celebrated skyline becomes ghostly, unreal. Light bending through water. It is underground that the city feels real, vital. Busker music echoing in the long corridor, keeping time with the tramp of commuter footsteps, bouncing off the grimy walls, off the paint flaking from the roof. The fragrance of clean laundry lingers in the steam rising from the grates. The trains rumble underneath during the tense silences in the movie theatre.

So much of this city is subterranean. The black steel doors clang open. The meat and vegetable stocks, the mineral water bottles of the city's restaurants appear, hauled out into the new day. On the subway, seen through glass darkly, the lines diverge - twist and tunnel away to depths unguessed but graffiti sprayed. Trains pass in the always night, you see a fluorescent stranger in the car across for the few instants that your lives run parallel, she plunges away into the darkness, unconcernedly reading a book. In tunnels under the University, sealed since the end of the Manhattan Project, uranium decays.

Leatherhead, the humanoid crocodile, meets the teenage mutant ninja turtles in an abandoned subway station. A fifty kilo manhole grates back into place on my street. It is round and ridged and heavy and iron. In small neat letters near the rim it says MADE IN INDIA.

mmm

About forty odd years ago, New York City started ordering its manhole cover inventories from foundries in India and China, rather than from companies within the United States.

Outsourcing, especially 'business process outsourcing' can seem like surreal science fiction. Time shifts. Night becomes day, cars carrying workers speed through the deserted cities chased by dogs, voices bounce off satellites and span half the world in the blink of an eye. You enter a glass tower and are instantly transformed into someone else. A different accent, a different greeting; a different name. When you return, it is morning again, a city returns to its rhythms. But you are out of tune. You will sleep the day away, to awake again at the witching hour, to be possessed by another identity, become someone else. A shaman at the other end of a toll free phone.

There's nothing of this dizzying, dazzling ephemeral synchronicity in the humble manhole cover. It is a thing of (considerable) substance. Over fifty kilos of iron. Iron which had to be mined as ore, refined, melted, moulded. cooled, carried. Iron, which in every manhole cover, carries along with the visible impress of INDIA, the invisible impress of all the workers whose toil is embodied in it. A manhole cover is a heavy thing to move, it is human in its weight, so perfect is it a metaphor for congealed labour time.

And like that weighty thing, the pound coin, it is both flat and round. Like the world is not. The world is flat, say some, for the age of the fibre optic cable has obliterated the difference between night and day. The world is flat, for all its distances have shrunk, it no longer needs to be a sphere spinning on its axis, in and out of sun and shadow. The world is flat for it is equal now, there are no restrictions on the free competition of the open market. But no, the world is still round and it is still unequal, it still spins in and out of night and day. Ships still cross the oceans of this turning world, some of them carrying manhole covers. Take the amount of work that goes into making a manhole cover, its worth. Add to it the cost, the ludicrousness, of shipping tons of heavy steel discs piled in the hold of a slow moving boat across the oceans of half the world, at an order of magnitude not much faster than when Columbus sailed to the New World. Or when the first slaves did. (And this in a time when human voices and faces travel almost at the speed of light, and humans bodies almost at the speed of sound.)

Add all those costs. It is still cheaper, still worth less, to get manhole covers made in India than in America. The value of one human being's labour is less than another human being's labour for doing exactly the same work. The mysteries of economics are as real as the turning of the round world. And as taken for granted. The world turns, and money flows downwards. (Clockwise or anti-clockwise, trickling down to the sewers,depending on which side of the Equator you are - North or South.) A foundry closes in New Jersey. Manhole covers Made in India are unloaded in Brooklyn. The workers in India - the cost at which they sell their labor and estimate their worth, the price that is set on their life and skill - approximately twenty times cheaper.

The world is round, but it was once flat. People were afraid of falling off its edges. On the maps of the flat world, there were many gray areas near those edges, places of perpetual fog, where the ships did not go - for Here there be dragons.

But the world is now round, there are no edges and no fog. The dragons have moved off the maps of the flat world. They are now to be found in the sewers of the round world, masquerading as blind albino alligators.

Manhole. Such a strange word. Almost as if it was an opening inviting men to fall into the netherworld. Like the urban legend of Calcutta streets in the monsoon, knee deep in water, where unsuspecting waders are said to  suddenly vanish in a trail of bubbles because of careless workers forgetting to replace the covers.

But who are them men who use these holes? How many people have you met recently who have climbed down one into the land of shit  and alligators? Except perhaps by accident, like Alice down the rabbit hole, like the hapless waders of Calcutta? Manholes are round and could seem inviting, like the doors of hobbit dwellings, but they are entrances to a forbidden world, a world driven deep underground, a world of shit and miasma.

"Paris has another Paris under herself," Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, 182, "a Paris of sewers, which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its traffic, which is slime." Sewers, he added, were "the conscience of the city" - they tell all: "no more false appearances, no plastering over ... filth removes its shirt ... there is nothing more except what really exists."  The modern metropolis, like Jean Valjean's Paris, is based on the separation of the world of shit and the world of men. This was not always the case.

London, 1858. The Houses of Parliament had to be closed because the stench from the river, receiving all the waste of the city from all the cesspits and open drains flowing into it. This was the London stalked by miasma, the foul reek and bad vapours present pretty much everywhere that were supposed to cause cholera, and a death rate unheard of since the Black Death.

The foul, killing reek of miasma was countered by Joseph Balzagette's building London's  modern sewer system by laying 83 miles of brick lined tunnels.  This was system of tunnels which enclosed the the ordure of the city, and flushed it far below the city and away downriver. The miasma was banned to the netherworld. One of Joseph Balzagette's main supporters was the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose father built the famous (and still used) tunnel under the Thames. It worked, though for all the  wrong reasons. The brick line tunnels separated the shit from the water supply, and prevented further massive outbreaks of cholera.

Once the cholera bacillus was discovered in 1876 (11 years after the opening of the London sewer systems) cities without sewers, without the separation of shit and men, became unimaginable. In India, in Delhi, a city without a major history of epidemics, which functioned through a system of shallow, covered, sub-surface drains and 'nightsoil' collectors, the first sewer systems built in the late 1890's, proved to be inefficient and prone to clogging. Meanwhile in the Presidency Town of Calcutta, the capital of British India, its populace expanding rapidly as impoverished peasants came to work in the jute mills; a sewer sytem of tunnels with unprecedentedly large diameters, made with a technology for curving bricks which was later used (along with cast iron and concrete) in the digging of the 'deep cover' (as opposed to the cut and cover) lines of the London Underground.

Sewers were modernity. The collection of nightsoil, people carrying shit on their heads, became anathema. Gandhi campaigned against it systematically, considering it violative of human dignity; especially because those who carried the shit were of the lowest castes. But the sewers have not liberated the untouchables from dealing with shit. It's just that now no one else has to. In India, they are the ones whose lot it is, de facto, to go down the manholes and clear the sewers. One of the untold stories of Partition is how the Hindu sweepers of the city were not allowed to leave Karachi – even when the riots started. For who else would clean the sewers, running then with blood and God knows what else?   

One of the most poignant memorials in Delhi is a memorial built by a father for his son. It is incised on a headstone in a small disused corner of a Muslim cemetery reserved for lower caste Hindus, so beyond the  pale they did not even burn their dead. The memorial, from the 1950's remembers the son dying while cleaning a sewer in the Karol Bagh area. He was in his twenties.

The generalized miasma of the nineteenth century city exists in the sewers in concentrated form. Sewer gas is methane and sulphides and other inflammable and noxious gases, under pressure. Only those who  have to enter the manholes now have to deal with the miasma. But sometimes on hot days, strange alchemy brews in those deep tunnels – sewer gas is known to occasionally blow off even the considerable weight of manhole covers. Passing by Lexington and 58th, I have seen liquid nitrogen being pumped into manholes.

Most of the manhole covers in New York now come from Durgapur, two hours to the west of Calcutta.