From a childhood in Mumbai's slums to working at Microsoft and empowering others: Story of Shaheena Attarwala

This Republic Day, Shaheena Attarwala, Experience Design Manager at Microsoft, posted a series of tweets about her life. The first one spoke about her childhood in the slums of Mumbai.

The second tweet cut to the present and also included two images — one with her nephew in a modern kitchen and the other is a window shot with a parrot perched on a tree branch.

In 2021, Shaheena had long said goodbye to her slum-life, having just moved to her own apartment in the same city, a far cry from the makeshift shanty she grew up in.

Saved by education

Shaheena’s story is not just of surmounting the odds but also of resilience, rebellion, guts, determination, and giving back.

“Watching Bad Boy Billionaires on Netflix, I could see a bird’s eye view of the Dargah Galli slums I had grown up in. It brought back memories, and I thought I should talk about the conditions I had lived in. I also wanted to talk about faith, the conditions in our country, poverty — because there were so many emotions at the same time,” Shaheena tells HerStory.

Though she was born in a village in Uttar Pradesh, Shaheena’s family moved to Mumbai to be with her father who was living in the city.

“My father migrated from UP to the Dharavi slums in Mumbai as a teenager. He had no formal education and started by doing odd jobs, and eventually became a hawker of essential oils (attar). He had no accommodation and would sleep on roads and railway stations, eating just vada pav to sustain himself. Slowly, he moved up a little in life as he focused on selling attar,” she says.

The family lived in the Dargah Galli slums in the 90s in a makeshift shanty and Shaheena remembers some really hard times. The house caught fire taking along with it their belongings and savings. For a year, they lived on the magnanimity of other people, moving from place to place.

“We lived in unhygienic conditions with human faeces all around and shared a toilet with many others. Sometimes, we also had to defecate in the open. For women, it was even worse — with harassment and eve-teasing very common,” she recalls.

However, her father did not scrimp when it came to her education despite his patriarchal mindset. Her enrolled Shaheena in St Joseph’s Convent where she studied until Class 10.

“Thankfully, in those days, schools were not so particular about whether your parents were educated or not or whether you were financially stable to take care of things. They were more open and embracing of people from different backgrounds,” she says.

It took a lot of convincing to be able to continue her education because she was being “groomed since childhood to get married, be a wife and a mother”.

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More than “just existed”

But Shaheena did not want to follow the path that would be chalked out for her. She enjoyed school; the toilets were clean, the people she met there and their ways of living were different, and so at the age of 16, she started sensitising herself towards what she wanted to do in life.

Also, she observed that many women, including her mother, were helpless, abused, and dependent on men – without the freedom to make their own choices or even voice their opinions. She observed that they “just existed”.

“While I could see the parents of students in my school encouraging their children to study further, I had to threaten to leave my house to convince my father that I was firm about studying further. I also told him that if I do get married, and something goes wrong later, the family would be responsible. So, if I was not empowered today to learn and solve my own problems, they will have to solve them for me,” she says.

It took months for her father to agree but eventually, she was enrolled in a local college. She went on to get a bachelor’s degree in commerce and also law.

At St Joseph’s, Shaheena also learnt of computers. The school offered an option between needlework and computers but while she was excited about the latter, her application was rejected as she did not have the requisite grades.

Resolving to learn all about computers, after completing Class 12, she asked her father if she could enrol in a computer course. It was yet another uphill battle filled with heated conversations.

“Finally, my father agreed and my mother later told me that he had borrowed money to pay for the course. I enrolled in a HTML course because I was not sure of what I could do. When I came across design tools, I was immediately drawn towards it. I felt the impossible is possible through design experiences,” Shaheena says.

After completing her course, she taught at the institute for a while and eventually went to work for companies like BookMyShow, Shaadi.com, Wigzo, and Zoomcar.

In early 2020, she joined Microsoft’s design team.

“As a design manager, I lead design and research for the Emerging Markets team. My approach to design is about solving unmet and unarticulated needs of the underserved segments,” she explains.

Impacting other women

Over the years, Shaheena has also been training and mentoring girls and women from underprivileged backgrounds.

She is associated with a few fellowships that focus on girls’ education and mentoring.

She is also connected to girls in her slum and her village, helping them and raising awareness about girls’ education. Shaheena also helped crowdfund studies the education of a girl child in Bengaluru, who is now studying forensic sciences.

For Shaheena, one of her biggest wins is that her parents are today assisting her in empowering other girls.

“My parents have proved that people can overcome cultural biases and shocks, and change their mindsets,” she says.

While Shaheena currently works in Hyderabad, her family lives in the new apartment she bought in Mumbai.

“In the slums, we would often have water flowing through cracks in the roof. There was no sunshine or ventilation – it was filthy. Here, I can see the sunshine and the clouds, sit near the window, watch a tree and the clouds above. It’s so surreal,” she says.

“As for the future, I don’t just want to be the best in the industry. I aspire to leave the planet by impacting a hundred girls in some way or the other through my help and guidance, and in turn, they can take on the task of empowering hundreds of other girls,” signs off Shaheena.