Shivaji Nagar in the Deonar suburb of Mumbai is popularly known as “Bombay's Gas Chamber.” Located between one of Asia's largest garbage dumps and Mumbai's largest municipal slaughterhouse, this neighborhood is environmentally vulnerable, situated at the crossroads of clusters of heavy and petrochemical industries, and a network of the city's busiest highways. In popular, official, and scholarly narratives, this neighborhood has been constructed as a place of failure, waste, and death. The residents of Shivaji Nagar, well aware of these narratives, use the demonstration of “failure” to their advantage to stake claims of belonging to the neighborhood, and demand state assistance, albeit often with punitive consequences. They contend that in doing so, “failure” becomes not merely a judgment conferred upon the neighborhood, its residents, and their way of life, but rather a medium of exchange for and a condition of possibility of their futures, and thus elicits an additional amount of labor. The article will focus on these labors performed by the waste workers who live and work in the neighborhood.