Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Twelve

A young woman is preparing to deliver the opening speech at a film festival when she realises she has left the text at home. She asks her boyfriend to rush home and get it. He speeds off on a bicycle: the house is nearby, and he is able to make it back within ten minutes.

Guards stop him at the entrance to the cultural centre, telling him that bikes are not allowed inside. He protests that he has to deliver something very urgently. When he makes to hurry past them, they set upon him with sticks, beating him around his head and body.

By the time he has recovered himself, he is too late to deliver the piece of paper. He enters the auditorium and sits down next to me as his girlfriend improvises onstage. He is hyperventilating; when I turn to look at him, I realise his head is running with blood. We go outside and make our way to the office of the director of the centre.

“I am sorry about your injuries,” he says, after hearing the story. “But I would say to you that if you had spoken in English none of this would have happened. They saw that you were on a bike and you spoke to them in Hindi. How were they supposed to know you were middle class?”

The mountain of garbage at Bhalswa Colony is awe-inspiring. Only nature, one would imagine, might produce something so vast. It towers over the landscape, a long, gruff cliff along whose flank zigzags a shallow road where overflowing trucks rumble slowly to the summit. From below you can see them driving along the cliff’s flat top, unloading their cargo of trash, feeding the mountain with more. All around them, mere specks from down below, are the people whose work it is to pick out from this megapolis-scale pile of refuse what can still be used.

Around me is an open plain where trash is sorted. The sacks full of plastic bottles are each the size of a car. In one area are piles of cushions, mattresses and sofas which boys are cutting open for the cotton stuffing inside. There is another area where resounding, syncopated hammers flatten out steel dustbins and casings from old air conditioners. There are phenomenal piles of twisted tyres.

It has rained recently and the ground is waterlogged. Pigs and dogs bathe in the water, which stinks of chemicals.

We are in the far north of the city. Walking here is uncanny after the city jam because there is just so much space. The sky is vast above and there is an almost pastoral openness to the landscape. The land slopes down to a reservoir where buffalos soak and storks keep watch on the banks. Buffalo manure has been collected for fuel, village style: here and there are conical piles the size of a large man, which are sheathed in tarpaulin against the rain.

Bhalswa Colony itself is squeezed into a tiny area of this generous tract of ground, a thick mass of brick cubes piled unevenly on top of each other, and reaching out, like saplings in a forest, into any unoccupied patch of air. The houses are flecked with lime green: the bricks have been taken from previous buildings whose painted walls survive here in fragments. From outside, the entire township seems blind: there are no windows in the walls, so the houses cannot see the giant sacks of trash that surround them on every side.

As we walk towards the colony, everyone emerging from it seems to be in uniform. A crowd of laughing school girls in blue dresses, for a start, their hair in wagging bunches tied with ribbon. And a music band, all military hats and epaulettes, departing with trumpets and drums for some distant nuptial.

I am walking with Meenakshi, who is not from this colony, though she is its self-appointed guardian. In her early thirties, she talks hurriedly and with gravity.

“When they had the idea of creating a city, they had to invite people to run it from elsewhere because they had no labourers. You can’t run a city if you live in a mansion. A city is run by people who live in huts and slums. Rickshaw drivers, vegetable vendors, cobblers, construction workers, other working people: these are the people who run any city.

“So people from Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh who didn’t have work moved from their villages to Delhi. In Delhi they found they had work but they did not have anywhere to live. So they began to make little houses for themselves on areas of vacant land on the edges of the city. Since they represented a vote bank for the government, the government decided to register them as voters in Delhi and to provide them with water, electricity and ration cards. Their families began to join them and they lived a normal life for thirty years.

“People kept coming to Delhi. There was lots of work. The Delhi Metro required thousands of workers. They built huts for themselves under the government’s eyes and the government said nothing. But then the government thought: ‘They are dirty people, they don’t look nice in our city.’ The city had grown, the areas where they were living were no longer on the periphery, and the government wanted to profit from that land. So they came to those people and told them they were illegal and they had to go.

“One of these settlements was on the banks of the Yamuna river and it housed some 30,000 families. In the year 2000, they decided to evict them from that place so that they could make the city beautiful. On that site they built the new headquarters for the Delhi government, which is one of the ugliest buildings in the world.

“Of those 30,000 families, 20,000 were declared illegal and were simply kicked out with nowhere to go. No one knows where they went. The others were resettled in various places around the periphery of the city. If they had come to Delhi before 1990 they were given six-by-three metre plots, if between 1990 and 1998 they were given four-by-three metre plots. Families had to pay 7,000 rupees (then $160) for these plots.

“Some of the families that were resettled came here to Bhalswa. But the relocation plan was very cunning. Of the 30,000 families in the Yamuna settlement, only 529 were sent to Bhalswa. The others were sent to other places. They made sure the townships were split up into different places so that they would not be able to unite.

“At the same time, they were destroying other settlements and many of those people came to Bhalswa too. The ones from Nizamuddin were Muslims. The ones from the Yamuna bank were Hindu. There were people from dalit communities. All of them had different cultures and religious practices, and the government knew that if they were all made to live in one place they would definitely fight each other. It was very intelligent.

“What does ‘resettlement’ mean to you? I’ll tell you what it means to me. Resettlement means that people are settled in a complete manner. It means that all the facilities they had in the first place are provided to them in the new place.

“But it was nothing like that. People were evicted from townships they had built over forty years and thrown into places where there were not even the most basic requirements for life. There were no shops. No ration stores. No schools. No buses. Forget about electricity or water. The land was totally bare. There was nothing. The first people to come had to begin from scratch. The government provided nothing.

“Children had to drop out of school, as there were no schools there. Most men lost their jobs. Rickshaw drivers were thrown thirty-five kilometres from their homes into a wilderness where no one ever went. Of course they had no passengers. The same with the shopkeepers. They couldn’t source vegetables anymore, and they had no customers. Everything was finished.

“The women of that slum used to work as housemaids in middle-class houses in south Delhi. They could not let this work go because their husbands had no income. So they used to leave home at 5 a.m. and travel all the way down to their places of work and come back at six in the evening. They could not take care of their children, who were at home since they had no schools to go to.”

We enter the streets of the settlement, which are strikingly well-made compared to the streets of rich south Delhi neighbourhoods. The surface is brick, with a gentle camber. Bright yellow and blue washing is hung across the street; bicycles are parked in front of the houses. Inside, people are making household brooms: in one house they are cutting bristles, in another they are making the handles. There is a smell of frying garlic.

Meenakshi stops at a front door and calls in, “Hello! Have you received your ration card yet?”

“Yes. It came a while ago!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She is quite irritated. “You have to tell me these things!”

The task Meenakshi has set for herself — for no one has invited her to do it — is to be the political representative of this community. She is the one who organises their official documents — many of them cannot read or write — lobbies on their behalf with the city authorities and, when necessary, organises political action. It is a role, I can see, that possesses her utterly.

“As I told you before, all these communities were from different cultures. The government planned to build for them apartment blocks with common spaces in between. We said this layout would create problems because everyone would fight over those common spaces. The Muslims would want to slaughter animals there, which would offend the Brahmins, who would want to use the same space for prayers and devotions. There would definitely be clashes.

“The residents said they wanted individual houses, and refused to accept the government plan. The government said it had been designed by a Scandinavian architect and so it could not be changed. They said, ‘If you don’t accept this plan we will just leave you there in the wilderness.’ So the residents said, ‘We have been living in the wilderness for six months, there is no reason why we cannot continue.’ So for one whole year they lived in small tents under the open sky. They protested. They went to court, to the media, they went on marches. Finally they forced the government to abandon its plan. The government drew up a plan of row houses, allocated plots to individuals and left them on their own.”

We stop at a house, and enter. It belongs to a woman named Jahanara, who is sitting on a mat on the floor with a friend, Saraswati. Both have been closely involved with Meenakshi’s political campaigns on behalf of this settlement.

It is late morning, and the room is bright with the sunshine streaming through the open door. It seems large because there is almost nothing in it beyond a fridge and a stove. The walls are painted cream, and glow with the sunlight reflecting off the floor. At the back, stairs go up to the floor above.

Jahanara offers tea and gets up to make it. Meenakshi continues.

“You can see how terrible this area is. The land is marshy and prone to flooding. The first people to settle here had to dig drainage ditches before they could build anything. And even so this area is always flooded in the rainy season. This year a child died in the flood: the water came up above the houses. And even so there is no water to drink. The water in the reservoir is salty. And the groundwater here tastes of acid because the chemicals from the trash pile seep deep into the ground. It is so toxic that even mosquitoes can’t survive in it. It’s pure acid, and it burns. The kids all have rashes from bathing in it, and the women have terrible vaginal inflammations.

“These people built this town with their own hands. They could not wait years for the government to build streets and sewers so they did it themselves. They had to lobby for every brick and every bag of cement. They had to lobby for electricity. After ten years they are still lobbying. They still do not have a secondary school here. The nearest school will not accept these children because they are ‘slum kids’. So they have to travel far away to a school where there are 100 children in every class and there is nowhere to sit, no water and no toilet. It’s very hard for those children who are trying to go to school. Have you seen the road into this colony? After the rains, it becomes completely impassable.”

“Why did we come to this city?” interjects Jahanara. “First for work, because there was nothing in our villages in Uttar Pradesh. We knew people who were taken by labour contractors to Delhi, and they started getting good money, so eventually many of us followed. And the second reason we came was for schools. We cannot read or write, and we wanted our children to be better educated. In the village, the schools were far away. You couldn’t check that your child was actually going to school. And it was dangerous for girls to travel that far. That’s why we thought it was better to live with our husbands in the city. That’s why we came. To give a better future to our children. Especially our daughters.

“When we arrived we managed to get our two children into a school in Delhi. But it was far away and the teachers didn’t understand their situation. They failed our children because they didn’t want slum children in their school. The children got disheartened and left their studies halfway through. Now they are working as labourers. That is the worst thing about all of this. Our children lost their education.”

In the house opposite, a young woman has just emerged from the bathroom wearing a flaming pink sari. Her hair is wet: she stands in front of a mirror combing it. She puts cream on her face. She takes a long time over these rituals. Then she takes a broom and begins to sweep the floor of her house. With these narrow lanes and these windowless houses lit by open doors, everything is visible.

We drink tea in the room. Saraswati plays meditatively with Jahanara’s toes. Both women are dressed in cotton salwar kameez. Saraswati has a row of metal and plastic bangles up to her elbow. She says,

“My husband’s sister and her husband left our village for Delhi, and we did not hear from them again. My mother-in-law was very worried. She wept every day for her daughter because she didn’t hear from her for two years. She kept asking my husband to go to Delhi to find her. So he went. He looked all over this huge city, asking in every settlement if anyone had heard of his sister and her husband. After many weeks he arrived in a place on the other side of the Yamuna river. He asked if anyone knew them and someone said, ‘They live here.’ They told him to wait by the well. When he got there he saw some women were fetching water. He called out to them and asked, ‘Sisters, does a person by this name live here?’ Now his sister was one of their number, and she heard him say her name. She ran over to him, and when she saw him she began to weep. ‘Brother, what are you doing here?’ she said. My husband said, ‘Why didn’t you make any contact with us for two years? Mother has been so worried that she has become ill.’ And she said, ‘My husband gets no holidays so we cannot come back. But I wrote you so many letters and I never received a response.’ He cried, ‘But we didn’t get any of your letters!’

“After that, my brother-in-law helped him get a job in Delhi. My husband began to work on the construction of the new bridge across the Yamuna. But after five months he lost that job and he had nothing to do. One day, he found a chair. He decided he would set up as a barber on the riverbank. There was no township at that time. There was nothing except a huge pit of trash. My husband was a barber in a place where there were no people. He waited all day with his chair in the middle of a huge wasteland. The area was completely desolate and at night it was in total darkness.

“He hardly earned any money during the day, so he had to work all night as well. He was given a night job removing the trash that built up every day around the Yamuna bridge construction site. In that darkness he had to get into the river and swim to the site. He could not see anything, he just had to swim in the endless black. He worked through the night pulling corpses out of the river from where they had got stuck, and carrying away every kind of garbage. They paid him 500 rupees [$10] a month for that.

“Eventually, the government filled in the trash pit on the Yamuna bank with soil and flattened the area, and my husband and his brother-in-law built a hut on the site. More people came to live there. But my husband was feeling lonely, and he could no longer eat. He could not stop thinking about his children. He had lost his mother when he was three and his father when he was twelve, and he had no siblings. Only his children made him feel that he was not totally alone in the world. So he asked me to come to Delhi to join him.

“We lived there for almost twenty-five years. Little by little we made that place worth living in. We built everything, brick by brick. We made a two-storey home there. Eventually, the place had everything — electricity, piped water, a government school and, right nearby, a government hospital. And then they knocked down everything we had built so they could make an office for the chief minister.

“They promised us that we would own a real house with toilets and bathrooms, and we would no longer be slum people. Everyone hates slum people and we were happy: they said the word ‘slum’ will be erased from your lives. They said they would take us to a new place which would have good schools, parks, water and electricity. Our children were very happy too. None of us knew at that time that this was all fake.

“They charged us 7,000 rupees [$140] for our new house: many of us had to borrow that money or sell jewellery. But they refused to show us the place beforehand. They loaded us all into a truck; on the way, we asked the truck driver, ‘Where are we going, is the place good? Are people nice there?’ He said nothing to us. How could he? He was just doing his duty after all. And when we arrived here, it was just empty marshland. The house they had promised us did not exist. The truck driver himself said, ‘This place is not good for you. How can you live here?’ Some of us had arrived with bricks from our previous houses, but most of us didn’t have even that. The whole place was flooded and there were snakes and rats everywhere. It took six trucks of mud and more than five thousand bricks to bring the land out of the water.”

There is a great precision of detail in their stories of construction. They know how to make a sewer or a doorway, and they know how much cement and how many bricks such things take. If these women are so imposing, in fact, it has something to do with the fact that no part of their lives is delegated. They are not specialised. They are their own builders, town planners and politicians. They have an intimate and comprehensive understanding of all those aspects of life that remain vague and remote to other people. They seem to own themselves in a way that most people I know do not.

Jahanara tells a similar story. When she came to Delhi, she settled in the Muslim slum around Nizamuddin.

“There is a big well there and we lived near it. There was a vacant area at that time and the local boss built a slum with the help of the local police. First we had a tea stall. Soon the place became lively and we made a makeshift hotel there. We had water and electricity, and because Nizamuddin railway station was very near, a lot of people came to eat in our hotel.

“Then they came to us to say that whatever good you do and whatever money you make here, you will always be called slum people. They told us they were going to take us to a new place which would have good schools, parks, water and electricity. We were told that we would have our own house in this place with toilets and bathrooms. Our children were very happy. We didn’t know at that time that it was all a lie.

“They asked to break down the houses we had built with our own hands. There were some among us who said they didn’t trust the promises this boss was making. But one night around 3 a.m. he broke down his own three-storey house with his own hands. People started to panic. They said, ‘If the government officials come to demolish our houses we will lose all our belongings in the mess. It’s better if we demolish them ourselves.’ So we did. Then they loaded our belongings into a truck and threw us here.”

The pitch of our conversation is curiously tranquil. It is a beautiful morning and the women speak calmly, affirming each other’s accounts here and there as if each one spoke for the other. One senses that they are together in a way that few middle-class people are. Precariousness is so much the defining quality of their lives that mutuality is the only form of survival, and even in their grammar the ‘I’ rarely breaks ranks with the ‘we’.

Meenakshi shows me files full of the letters and photographs they have sent off to various government departments in their attempt to make Bhalswa liveable.

“It’s still going on after ten years. We still do not have some of the most basic things. We are still lobbying for ration cards. These are the most important thing in anybody’s life. If they have rations, they can at least eat bread, even if it is just with salt. Without this they cannot survive. You know what the inflation rate is at present? They cannot afford to buy anything from the open market.

“These things actually irritate you. Each time we walk into the office of the Municipal Corporation, the bureaucrat there wrinkles his face in disgust and says, ‘Why does this garbage keep coming back to me?’ How long can you go on fighting with that? The people here can either spend their days fighting for water or they can do their daily work and earn some money for their families.

“I have found out that the government spends 56,000 rupees [$1,200] per month providing water tankers to us. That’s nearly 7 lakhs [$14,000] a year. It would take just half of that amount to make a proper pipeline into this settlement. But they don’t want to do that. They know that without water this will never be a proper settlement, and they will be able to move everyone out again.”

For most middle-class families, government has retreated drastically from social and economic life over the last two decades, to the point that they hardly see it anymore. They like it like this: they idealise government withdrawal and ‘deregulation’. Many of them do not realise how much work the city government does to protect their class from the enormous mass of poverty that surrounds them, which is firmly prevented from having any claim on city space or resources. It is the poor who understand how the city is truly managed. They have a far greater intimacy with government and, indeed, a far greater bureaucratic burden. As I understand, looking through these files: the work Meenakshi has taken on is monumental.

In the house opposite, a man emerges into the room, the husband of the woman in the pink sari. He is wrapped in a towel, his chest bare. He is muscular, with thick, wild hair and a silver necklace shining against his dark skin. He is heavy with sleep and moves slowly. He comes to sit on the steps outside. The rings on his fingers glint in the sun.

“It has been difficult for the men,” says Meenakshi. “They all lost their jobs when they came here. No one wants to employ men for domestic work. Nowadays there is some daily work that the men can do. They shell peas, for instance. That gives them 30 rupees [$0.60] for a day’s work, and that is usually with the help of the whole family. Some men make brooms and sell them the residential areas nearby. Some have started working on construction sites. But that’s not the majority.

“So most of them sit at home, and they get depressed. Their minds get completely blocked. They resent their wives who are always away working. They beat them. They don’t like them getting involved in political work: they turn up at our meetings drunk and abusive. They shout at us: ‘You women can’t do anything. You can’t change a thing.’

“And this community is badly affected by drugs. I am not talking about one or two families, I am talking about the whole community. Even children are affected. They don’t have school so they don’t have anything to do and slowly they get affected. They sniff the glue which is used to make shoes. There is a tablet that costs one rupee and it makes children forget everything that is happening. The cheapest drugs give them the utmost happiness.

“The men drink and they smoke brown sugar. As soon as they see their wives with any money, they take it to buy drink. They come home with their bottles hidden in their clothes. I ask them, ‘Do you really want to buy that bottle when you don’t have any food to eat in your home?’”

Saraswati says sarcastically, “The government is doing a wonderful job here. They haven’t started any hospitals or schools but they instantly opened a liquor store. They even posted a policeman to guard it. Schools cost the government money but liquor stores give them revenues.

“People say we are always blaming the government. Why would we not blame them? The things on which our life depends, the government is taking away from us. And the things that can kill us, the things which make our homes bankrupt, the government is opening new shops to provide those things. It is providing those things very generously.”

In the house opposite, the girl in the pink sari has taken delivery of many hundred newly made plastic brooms, which she is now wrapping individually in plastic sleeves. Her husband is sitting on the steps outside smoking.

Meenakshi says, “So here is the thing. You can see the streets and houses that people have made here. After ten years they now have something of value. But now the government has declared this place illegal and says they have to leave. The land which was provided by the government is now illegal. Because they only gave them permission for ten years. They will not give poor people a permanent place in the city.”

“When you came here, you must have walked across the empty land,” says Saraswati. “Now the government wants to build flats on that land, and they want to get us out. Why do they want to build flats there? Because we have spent ten years making this place habitable. We are the ones who drained the land, who built the streets, who organised the electricity supply, who got the buses to run here. It is we who have made this land valuable enough for the government to sell. We will not leave it. We have built two cities already in our lives and we will not build another.”

“We will not go,” echoes Jahanara. “They tricked us once. They will not do so again.”

Meenakshi says, “When they told us they wanted everyone to leave, people from Bhalswa knew if they didn’t fight they would be left with nothing. For this they were prepared to be beaten by the police. So we decided to hold a protest during the Commonwealth Games to try and embarrass the government into finding another solution. While millions of rupees were being spent on a huge sports event that benefitted no one, the people who needed money were not getting it; in fact the government was taking money away from them and knocking down their houses. So we decided to go out, the whole community, and block the main highway that runs near here. Students and teachers from Delhi University organised the protest with us: many of them are interested in our situation, which no one else is.

“Bhalswa was badly affected by the flood at that time but everyone decided it was essential to participate in the protest. Around 5,000 women came out of their houses and blocked the road. For forty minutes, the traffic was jammed on the highway. First the police came from one station and then they called up other stations. The assistant commissioner ordered the police to attack us with batons. Women were badly beaten up and one had to go to hospital with broken bones. We called an ambulance but they refused to help us. Students from Delhi University were arrested.

“I should say that our women also fought the police. They snatched police batons and hit back. To our great shock, the police identified one of these women and began to intimidate her. They got hold of her son and found out where she worked. Later, the police went to the place where she worked and told her never to do anything like that again. They like to target individuals, because individuals are not strong on their own. But we are never going to give up.”

“When they come to ask us for our vote, they don’t come in cars,” says Jahanara. “They come on foot and they say to us, ‘Sister, please take care of us.’ It is we who win them elections and make emperors of them. The money they grab is our money. So it is our right to fight the government. We are also citizens of this country.

“We have all had many threats. Men came to our house with big sticks and threatened my husband. They said, ‘Control your wife or you will face serious consequences.’ After that my husband started fighting with me. I told him not to get involved in all this: I was the one who was taking care of the family.

“They are the government. They can lodge false cases against us and send us to jail any day. They control everything. If they sanction 10 crore rupees for us, only 2 crores will reach us. The only thing I am afraid of is the government. They will try to seize everything we have.”

Saraswati is enraged.

“If I ever meet the chief minister of Delhi, I will hit her so hard she can’t even imagine! They brought us here on the basis of lies. If they had shown us this land before, we would never have come here. This is the place where all of Delhi’s trash is dumped and she thinks we can be dumped here too. Someone make her live here, then she will realise what it is. And now they want us to leave again! If they try to force us to leave this place, we will break their heads. We had to sell our house in the village to get this plot. Many of us are still paying back loans to moneylenders ten years later for those 7,000 rupees that bought us nothing. We are not leaving.”

The postman comes to drop a letter. His arm has been severed at the elbow.

Meenakshi says, “The majority of the people, the people who actually run this city, are being eliminated from it. They are not welcome here anymore. The city is being remade for rich people. Only people who have cars can live here. Look at the structure: the flyovers, malls, hotels, and other luxuries. It is all meant for people with money. Look how much money is spent on flyovers, and who is using them? Only those with money. What use are they to people who walk? You cannot walk on them. People who walk cannot move in this city: there is no place for them.

“The Metro only links those places where there are offices or posh neighbourhoods. It doesn’t link any places where working-class or poor people live. So the Metro just supports people who have money. A poor man can’t afford a Metro ticket. And poor people travel with a lot of stuff: they cannot take it on the Metro. They have to travel by bus.

“But now they have introduced new buses which cannot serve the poor. They are pretty green buses and they brought them in to make the city look good for the Commonwealth Games. They have special low floors to make it easy for people to get on — even people in a wheelchair can get on. But these buses can only travel on flat roads. So they have cancelled all the buses that used to come to this colony. The transport people simply say that there is no road and we can’t come there.

“Everything is getting worse. Everything. Ultimately it is not only the poor who will suffer. I come from a middle-class family and I can tell you from my personal experience that in the near future even a middle-class family won’t be able to raise their children in Delhi. The people of Bhalswa are afraid for their future, but I too have a deep fear inside me. Because I don’t know what will happen to any of us in the future. It’s not only the poor.”

Saraswati says, “Sometimes we wonder if we should ever have left the village. Many of those who stayed behind have ended up better off. Many of the men went to do construction work in Saudi Arabia or Dubai where they make more money. We don’t have anything. Whatever we had earlier we sold for a better place in Delhi. We thought one day we would have our own flat in Delhi.”

Jahanara says, “The villages have also changed since we left. The schools have become better. Our relatives who stayed behind raised their children better than we did. The villages have seen a big change in the last few years.

“But we can never go back. We sold our property in the village, and whatever we still have has been taken by our relatives. It’s better to fight with the government than with your family. In a fight with your family, you will die. So we will stay here. No matter what they do.”

• • •

Meenakshi walks with me as I depart.

“How did you get here?” she asks.

“I took an auto-rickshaw from the Metro station.”

“You’re lucky,” she says. “Most of them won’t come here.”

As we walk through the township I realise that the streets we entered by were the very best. Others are in far worse condition. Some of the road surfaces have been washed away in the rains, and residents are laying fresh concrete to mend them. The streets where the ragpickers live are full of piles of trash that is being sorted in homes. At the end of the township is a den where men smoke crack behind a tarpaulin. Their kids sit around outside. One girl makes a pattern out of the pieces of a broken plant pot. Other kids are at work sorting garbage or arranging in boxes the jamun fruit they have picked from trees. Chickens forage. The puddles are covered with strange swarms of tiny flies such as I have never seen before: at the slightest movement the entire swarm takes off, but it stays together, a cloud-organism, and then lands all in one go on the puddle again.

The only way out of this place is a community bus. We get on. The thing travels at a fantastically slow pace around the potholes, stopping every few minutes to let people on or off. It takes us an hour to get out of Bhalswa. This is partly because of a big argument over unpaid fares, which leads the driver to stop the bus in protest until the three men in question either get off or pay. They refuse to do either. It is Meenakshi who intervenes. She offers to pay their fares for them. But they prefer to get off the bus than pay, and do so.

It is impossible to communicate how remote and inaccessible this place is, though it is in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities. It is easy to understand how national borders might separate populations with very different access to the global economy but more difficult to conceive of how such divisions might run through a single city. But in this metropolis where many people are totally restructuring the global economy with their capital, ideas and labour, and where you can sometimes feel, therefore, that you are sitting where all the forces of the globe converge, there are populations that are entirely irrelevant to that system. Bhalswa is not a place of capitalist oppression — in fact, many of its residents would love a bit more of that. It is a place of unwanted lives, of people who can find almost no connection to the economic boom that surrounds them. They are a ‘surplus’ population that has nowhere to go, and all they can do is try to survive the shunting around from one trash pile to the next.

Meenakshi and I take the Metro to Connaught Place and sit in the Indian Coffee House, an institution set up in Nehru’s time and run by a national cooperative of coffee workers, where you can still find a hot drink for 5 rupees.³² Meenakshi will not order anything, however. She carries a flask of water in her backpack.

“My father came from a village in Uttarakhand. Our situation was like the people you met today. Farming was very precarious in our village. It was terrace farming, which doesn’t yield much food. It was very dependent on the rains. My grandfather died when my father was two, so my father and uncles did different kinds of work to earn a living: they grazed other people’s cattle and worked in other people’s fields. It was miserable and they were starving. When my father was seven, he ran away to Delhi with my uncle.

“At that time, people in the city were more genuine. A man who saw the plight of my father and my uncle took them to a Jain ashram, where they lived. They studied there. My father left his studies when he was fifteen and started working as a labourer. He cleared the bushes around the Old Fort and every day his hands bled terribly. Then he went to work in the house of a Muslim family in Aligarh. And then he was selected to work for the Intelligence Bureau.

“He never really told us what kind of work he did for them. He said he started out as a dishwasher. In the village they used to say, ‘He has a lot of attitude for a dishwasher!’ But he managed to get a training while he was doing such menial work, and eventually he was given proper responsibilities. When he retired from the Intelligence Bureau, he was an inspector.

“There were more opportunities in those days. Nowadays people would not get the kind of options my father got.

“While I was growing up, he was sent away from Delhi. He was posted to a village in the border regions, where his job was to arrest illegal immigrants. He pursued them ferociously. He had spies and informants who would give him information about people who had crossed the border illegally.

“I did not feel good in the village. I had to go to a school with a broken building and write on a small board. It was the only school for eight villages and even so there were only forty children in the school. I was the only girl in my class. We were taught under a tree. It was very awkward, the transition from the city school to the village school. I lagged behind and when I came back to Delhi, I failed in English. Even today, I am not confident enough to look into someone’s eyes and speak English.

“After high school, my father said I could not study further so I went to work in a factory. I was sixteen years old. It was a textiles factory and I was involved with some of the designs. I thought I wanted to do fashion design but it didn’t appeal to me at all. All I could think about was the women who worked there, who were in hell. They worked more than twelve hours a day and in return they got nothing. I organised for the workers to be given proper clothing to wear and campaigned for them to receive the minimum wage. For three years I fought with the company owner and finally we won, and the company granted them a fixed salary with a few holidays every year. Of course, they fired me and kept my salary. But it made me more confident and I did a lot of different things after that.

“Later on I went to do a degree at Delhi University and then a Master’s. But when I look back, I don’t find myself at par with the world. I feel far behind it. Had I studied in a good school and not wasted the crucial years of my life, I would have been a better person today. When I visualise myself in the world, I feel I have nowhere to stand.

“There are things we are born with. I have something in me, you have something in you. My thing is that I have always been alone. I have not met other people who think like me. I was always eating alone, sitting alone, thinking alone. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I started writing poems. When you are alone and you think that nobody understands you, you feel heavy. But when you put your thoughts on paper, you feel light.”

Meenakshi takes out a notebook and reads out some poems that she has written. They speak of terrible, destructive forces. A man at the table next to us is listening intently. He is enormously impressed by Meenakshi, whose masculine demeanour cannot conceal the fact that she is beautiful. He gets up to congratulate her and to ask her all about herself. He wants to sit at our table and talk to her. But her silence is formidable, and he retreats to where he came from.

She speaks about her childhood.

“In the village there used to be powerful people who would beat less powerful people. There were also many caste restrictions. I was a Brahmin and there were many things I could not do. If a Brahmin did manual work, another Brahmin could not eat his food. These things used to hurt my mind somehow. I saw the things that happened to girls and never to their brothers. When I came to the city, I was friends with a Muslim girl in my class. I used to eat her lunch and she used to eat mine. When I told my father, he said I had become no one, neither Hindu nor Muslim. Then I decided that I wouldn’t tell them anything. Slowly the thought of revolt sparked in me. I used to think about these things the whole night. I used to ask, ‘Who invented these boundaries? Why do they exist?’ But there was nobody to answer these questions. So this was what gave me new thinking.”

I suspect it would be difficult to get to know Meenakshi well. She is extraordinarily self-contained. Through the furious energy of her labour one can sense an intense but inchoate inner search. It refreshes me to hear her talk. She too is part of this city. She reminds me of what I love in the friends I have here: a fierce intelligence searching for a better arrangement of the world. This too is Delhi culture, but it is what you could call the city’s minor culture. It rarely rises to the surface of things.

“After my Master’s I started working for an NGO which sent me to work in Bhalswa. That changed my life.”

Meenakshi, whose father worked hard to provide for his family a middle-class life, finds her ultimate fulfilment in proximity to the poor. As she talks about the work she does for this community, I wonder in which direction the dependency goes: do they need her or does she need them?

Meenakshi found herself at ideological odds with the NGO she was working for. “They are not actually interested in people,” she says, “only in their own projects. Because it is projects that give them money, not people.” In the end her disagreements grew too much for the NGO, and she was fired. Remarkably, she carried on doing the same work for the Bhalswa community, now without position or salary.

“I have dedicated my life to this work. I am a single person, so I can give everything to what I do. I work eighty-hour weeks and I still bring work home because there is no end. When I have money I give it to this work. I live with my parents and I have no needs. I left my earlier life in a textile export business because I didn’t like it. I don’t want to be in a capitalist world, simply earning money and looking at my life like a bank balance. I love to work for people. I like work that can help someone or actually shape someone’s life.

“If I stood today for the council elections at Bhalswa, I would certainly win. Even my brother says that I should do this so that I can earn a lot of money and change my lifestyle. But I don’t want to do this. My brother says that trying to understand me is like beating your head on a stone.

“I don’t know what will happen to me in the future. But I know that my life will never be ‘normal’. I know it will continue to be as it is now. A prolonged fight. So I try to prepare myself for the future by living without things. Now I have many things because I live with my parents, but I try to live without milk, without fruit, because I know that in the future I may not be able to have those things. I try to see whether I will be able to survive if I have to live alone, or without food.

“My father is very unhappy that I spend all my time in a slum. He is suspicious of migrants and the poor. At the place where he worked, if he saw four people talking, he would start to wonder what they were talking about. Are they talking against the country? He thinks like the intelligence services. If he hears people speaking Bengali, he will assume they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh because he is trained like that.

“His thinking is middle class, so I don’t discuss things with him. There’s no use fighting with him about issues he cannot understand. He says I have turned into a slum girl. I feel bad about this but I can’t help it. I know what I am doing. I know I have no money, but I still feel I am better than that other world.

“When I was a child, my mother used to tell me, ‘When you die, no one will even ask about you.’ I used to reply to her, ‘Mother, when I die there will be a thousand people weeping behind my body.’”