Although the Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the illegal slum, and construction company officers discouraged contact between workers and squatters, the people thought of themselves as one group; their days and dreams and drives were entangled in the ravel of ghetto life. To workers and squatters alike, the company fence was like all fences: arbitrary and irrelevant. Some of the workers who weren’t permitted to bring more than immediate family into the legal slum invited their relatives to squat near them, beyond the wire. Friendships flourished among the children of both sides, and marriages of love or arrangement were common. Celebrations on one side of the wire were well attended by residents from both sides. And because fires, floods, and epidemics didn’t recognise barbed-wire boundaries, emergencies in one part of the slum required the close co-operation of all.
Karla, Prabaker, and I bent low to step through an opening in a section of fence, and we passed into the legal slum. A covey of children trooped along beside us, dressed in freshly washed T-shirts and dresses. They all knew Prabaker and me well. I’d treated many of the young children, cleaning and bandaging cuts, abrasions, and rat bites. And more than a few of the workers, afraid that they might be stood down from work when they received minor injuries on the construction site, had visited my free clinic rather than the company’s first-aid officer.
‘You know everybody here,’ Karla remarked as we were stopped for the fifth time by a group of neighbours. Are you running for mayor of this place, or what?’
‘Hell, no. I can’t stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.’
‘That’s not bad,’ she murmured. Her eyes were laughing.
‘I wish I could say it was mine,’ I grinned. An actor named Amitabh said it.’
‘Amitabh Bachchan?’ she asked. ‘The Big B himself?’
‘Yeah-do you like Bollywood movies?’
‘Sure, why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered, shaking my head. ‘I just didn’t… think you would.’
There was a pause, then, that became an awkward silence. She was first to speak.
‘But you
I frowned, genuinely surprised by the suggestion. It never occurred to me that the people in the slum might
‘This is a special day,’ I said, smiling and trying to shift ground. ‘The people have been trying for years to get their own primary school. They’ve got about eight hundred school-age kids, but the schools for miles around are full, and can’t take them. The people got their own teachers organised, and found a good spot for a school, but the authorities still put up a hell of a fight.’
‘Because it’s a slum…’
‘Yeah. They’re afraid that a school would give the place a kind of legitimacy. In theory, the slum doesn’t exist, because it’s not legal and not recognised.’
‘We are the not-people,’ Prabaker said happily, ‘And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living.’
‘And now we have a not-school to go with it,’ I concluded for him. ‘The municipality finally agreed to a kind of compromise. They allowed them to set up a temporary school near here, and there’ll be another one organised soon. But they’ll have to tear them down when the construction is finished.’
‘When will that be?’
‘Well, they’ve been building these towers for five years already, and there’s probably about three more years’ work in it, maybe more. No-one’s really sure what’ll happen when the buildings are finished. In theory, at least, the slum will be cleared.’
‘Then all this will be gone?’ Karla asked, turning to sweep the hutment city with her gaze.
‘All will be gone,’ Prabaker sighed.
‘But today’s a big day. The campaign for the school was a long one, and it got pretty violent sometimes. Now the people have won, and they’ll have their school,
‘The Village in the Sky!’ Prabaker laughed.
‘Just where is this place? Where are you taking me?’
‘Right here,’ I replied, pointing upwards. ‘Right up there.’
