• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Ratna Nadar bowed down to the ground in thanks, touching the samosa seller’s sandals with his right hand, which he then placed on his head.

Padmini rushed to the parrot’s cage. “We’re saved!” she cried. The bird responded with a triumphant squawk.

As soon as he saw the little caravan approaching, the man seized his walking stick and went out to meet it. He was a hefty fellow of about fifty with a curly mop of hair and sideburns that joined the drooping ends of his mustache.

“Welcome, friends!” His soft voice belied his imposing appearance. “I guess it’s a roof that you’re after here!”

“A roof would be a lot to hope for,” stammered Ratna Nadar apologetically, “but perhaps just somewhere for me and my family to camp.”

“My name is Belram Mukkadam,” the stranger announced, pressing his hands together in front of his chest to greet the little group. “I run the Committee for Mutual Aid for neighborhoods on the Kali Grounds.” He pointed in the direction of the string of sheds and huts on the edge of a vast empty expanse along the railway line. “I’ll show you where you can settle and build yourself a hut.”

Mukkadam was not an Adivasi, but he spoke the language of the people of Orissa. Thirty years earlier he had been the very first person to settle on the wasteland on the northern side of the city, bordering on what had once been the immense parade ground of the Victoria lancers, the cavalry regiment of the nawabs of Bhopal. The hut he had built with the help of his wife Tulsabai and their son Pratap had been the first of the hundreds that now made up three neighborhoods of improvised homes, in which several thousand immigrants from different Indian regions lived. Apart from the Orya Bustee, there was the Chola Bustee and the Jai Prakash Bustee. Chola means “chickpea.” It was by planting chickpeas that the first occupants of the Chola Bustee had escaped starvation. As for Jai Prakash, it was named after a famous disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who had taken up the cause of the country’s poor.

His position as dean of the three bustees had earned Belram Mukkadam a special prerogative, one never contested by the various godfathers of the local mafia who controlled those poor neighborhoods. And since there was no municipal authority to intervene, Mukkadam was the one who allocated newcomers the plots on which to make their homes.

Leading the Nadar family along a path that ran beside the railway track, he pointed to an empty space at the end of a row of huts.

“There’s your bit of ground,” he said, tracing a square three yards by three yards in the dark earth with his tamarind stick. “The Committee for Mutual Aid will bring you materials, a char-poy and some utensils.”

Once more Ratna Nadar prostrated himself on the ground to thank this new benefactor. Then he turned to his family.

“The great god’s anger is spent,” he declared. “Our chakra* is turning again.”

Orya Bustee, which Padmini and her family would now call home, was the poorest of the three poverty-stricken neighborhoods that had grown up along the parade ground. In the labyrinth of its alleyways, one sound singled itself out from all the others: that of coughing. Here, tuberculosis was endemic.

There was no electricity. There was no drinking water, no drainage and not even the most rudimentary hospital or clinic. There were scarcely even any vendors, except for a traveling vegetable salesman and two small tea stalls. The sweet milky tea sold in clay beakers was an important source of energy for many of the local residents. Apart from four skeletal cows and several mangy dogs, the only other animals were goats. Their milk provided precious protein for their owners, who, in winter, had no reservations about swaddling their animals in old rags to prevent them from catching cold.

Yet for all its poverty, Orya Bustee was unlike any of the other slums. Firstly, it had managed to maintain a rural feel, which contrasted with the jumble of huts made out of planks and sheet metal in the other neighborhoods. Here all the dwellings were made out of bamboo