[Reader-list] Call this a home.

[Aniruddha Shankar]

Today Nangla continued to break, not with a whimper, nor a bang, but 
with something I can only call an eerie, almost quixotic calm.

I've memorized the way I used to get to the Nangla Machi lab - winding 
my way through narrow lanes, always watching where I step. My landmarks 
   - the particularly broad drain, the perennial card game on the big 
charpoy and the gaggle of women combing each others' hair under the 
peepul tree

Today I couldn't get to the lab because rubble from broken houses was 
blocking my path. I waited under the fizzing high tension wire until 
Rakesh and Lakhmi from our Dakshinpuri lab came out of a lane I had 
never gone into. Like all lanes in Nangla, the road we set off on 
together is paved with bricks. Most people were sitting listlessly in 
whatever shade they could squeeze out of the sun, but some were lading 
handcarts with belongings, tying them with wire and twine. Cops strolled 
about, unbothered, their guns and batons lolling.

People break a house with pointed iron bars and sledgehammers with 
bamboo handles. They bash and bash and bash and bash and bash and bash 
until graffiti, plaster, mortar and brick part ways and shatter.

You don't really have to be a grown up to break a house or help break 
one. I saw one girl, not more than 7, help her younger brother carry 
bricks away from the rubble that had been their house. She would take 
two steps with a big red brick in each hand, hand them to her brother, 
turn around and slap her tiny hands together fussily to get rid of the 
brickdust before picking up another two bricks.

A little way down the road, I saw an older boy. He had an iron bar in 
his hands and was slamming the pointed end into one of the bricks that 
made up the road. The brick had been here longer than the boy had, it 
was stubborn, well entrenched amongst its comrades, but the boy was 
quietly determined, he would bash away at it from one angle, then chip 
at it from another, then scuff at it with his rubber slippers.

Before your locality is demolished, people who are just doing their duty 
will come and paint some acronyms on your front walls - NDS, P98. 
Depending on the exact acronym slapped on your wall, your house might be 
spared till some tomorrow. If you protest along with everyone else - 
violently or nonviolently, the 4 sleeping bulldozers will join the 3 
working ones, the guns and batons will be readied, and the entire 
locality will break, in one day.

Your house will be broken if it is locked, even if you put the big 
Aligarh wala godown lock on it.

You can't salvage the mortar that held your house together but if you're 
really determined, you can salvage the bricks, doors, bolts, doorframes, 
rolling shutters, windowframes, posters, idols, curtains, mousetraps, 
old jeans, underwear, pictures of Durga, shoes, sweatpants, television 
antennas, tarpaulins and the reeds woven together for roofing. Or you 
can leave them behind, as some did.

Jaanu, like so many of my friends from Nanglamachi, is magnetic, 
mercurial. He was laughing for most of the time today, as we walked 
through Nangla, stopping here and there to take pictures with our 
digicams. Were we from the media, people wanted to know. We told them 
no, our lab too was going to break. We told them that were going to 
publish something on Nangla, that would bear witness to what was 
happening, to the place it had been and the people it had borne.

A house lies empty, old clothes and unwanted material lying on the 
floor. Jaanu knows the people who used to live there. I enter, feeling 
like an intruder. A shelf with an odd shoe. A picture of a goddess on a 
board, once fair and lovely, now dark with age. An Indian Navy Sea 
Harrier is taking off from an aircraft carrier on a once-glossy picture 
calendar dated August 2004. The calender can't be thrown away or turned 
to a newer month, obviously, because it has Sanju's mobile phone number 
on it. Sanju's number has been joined by almost 20 others over time, Ram 
Lal's, Kishens, Sheela's, and by numbers with no name next to them, 
somehow skirting the fighter plane and the aircraft carrier.

We continue walking.

Another pile of rubble, tarpaulin and woven reeds. Jaanu turns and grins 
hugely at me, and says "This was my shelter". Like an idiot, I ask him 
if *this* was his house. He grins again, yes. I take photographs, 
engrossing myself in framing, light, battery levels.

We meet up with one of Jaanu's friends - he used to run a tea shop. We 
sit in the shade - Jaanu's friend has managed to "buy" a small plot in 
another basti, where he will continue to work. We asked him about his 
shop - and he says it's broken - he broke it himself. Bahut mazaa aaya 
todney mein - It was great fun. Jaanu didn't want to break his house - 
he let the municipal workers break it. Jaanu's friend gives me the 
impression that after having maintained the shop for so long, if anyone 
was to break the shop, he'd be damned if it was anyone other than him.

Posters of lush meadows completely cover what's left of one wall, once 
on the inside of someone's home. Rakesh steps near it to take a 
photograph. Where once people ate, cooked, laughed, dreamt, coughed, 
fought and fucked, Rakesh stands, photographing a private poster of some 
impossible meadow.

One woman comes and joins us; we chat. She does not know what the young 
people - those whose life has not yet started - will do. Her life, she 
says, is over - but what will the young do?

We circle back towards the lab. A carefully tended mehendi bush stands 
next to some rubble. Some women tell us that a beggar with only one hand 
and one leg used to live in the house that was broken - that he was 
assured, by people doing their duty, that being an invalid, his house 
would not be be one of the first to be broken. It was broken, no doubt 
by people doing their duty.

Are you from the media? Will you print this? Wait a second, I'll call 
the person who lived here, the invalid, and you can take a photograph of 
his one-armed, one-legged body, sitting on the rubble that was his house.

He comes. We take the photograph. No, we're not from the media, but we 
will print something about Nangla. The words are beginning to sound 
hollow to me.

One woman speaks out, her voice not shouting, yet filled with fury. Her 
eyes seek mine out, stabbing. We built this place, she says, with our 
own hands, on a swamp. We never had any government job, we worked hard, 
did business. When the policemen came, we could have broken their heads, 
but we didn't. We don't want riots. But what do we tell the boys who 
want to be violent? We protested peacefully but what effect did that 
have ? Sarkar gareebon ke pet pe laath maarta hai - the state kicks the 
stomach of the poor. India azaad hai par hum azaad nahin - India is 
free, but we are not. I can't meet her eyes anymore.

The night before, I had spoken to a friend who is a committed leftist. A 
member of a radical students union, she believes that armed struggle 
against the state is appropriate and effective in some circumstances. I 
disagreed with her the night before. I still do but my thoughts on what 
can and should be done are more confused.

The thump and crash of hammers and rods on brick and asbestos roofing 
can be heard throughout the basti. Tempos and minitrucks rev their 
engines as the back up, ready to carry Nangla away.

More winding alleys. A house is being broken. One man is squatting on a 
wall, bashing at the bricks above the metal doorframe with another 
brick. As his brick crumbles, someone hands him another one. He 
continues beating. The woman who owns the house is complaining - she had 
it refurbished just a few months ago. Indeed, it's well-made, freshly 
painted, larger than most, with neat rooms, iron doorframes. Look what a 
nice jhuggi I built, she laments. Jaanu is dead serious as he turns, his 
clear brown eyes catching the sun.

"Don't call this a jhuggi. Call this a home."


Aniruddha Shankar

Cybermohalla practitioners have set up a Hindi blog to document what's 
happening with Nangla, at http://nangla-maachi.freeflux.net/ with 
English at http://nangla.freeflux.net/

Nanglamachi is being demolished to make way for a flyover/overpass for 
the Commonwealth Games 2010.