The young film-makers, who had a long night’s work ahead of them, exchanged glances and decided to move on rather than try to explain what they meant because it would take too long. They thanked Anjum and crossed the road to the opposite pavement where several groups had their own separate canopies.
In the first, seven men with shaved heads, dressed in white dhotis, had taken a vow of silence, claiming they would not speak until Hindi was declared India’s national language—its official mother tongue—over the twenty-two other official languages and hundreds of unofficial ones. Three of the bald men were asleep and the other four had slipped down their white hospital masks (their “vow of silence” prop) in order to drink their late-night tea. Since they could not speak, the film-makers gave them a small poster that said Another World Is Possible to hold up. They made sure that the banner with the demand for Hindi to be declared the national language was out of frame, because both film-makers agreed it was a somewhat regressive demand. But they felt that bald men with masks provided good visual texture for their film, and ought not to be passed over.
Occupying a substantial part of the pavement quite close to the bald men were fifty representatives of the thousands of people who had been maimed in the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal. They had been on the pavement for two weeks. Seven of them were on an indefinite hunger strike, their condition deteriorating steadily. They had walked to Delhi all the way from Bhopal, hundreds of kilometers in the searing summer sun, to demand compensation: clean water and medical care for themselves and the generations of deformed babies who were born after the gas leak. The Trapped Rabbit had refused to meet the Bhopalis. The TV crews were not interested in them; their struggle was too old to make the news. Photographs of deformed babies, misshapen aborted fetuses in bottles of formaldehyde and the thousands who had been killed, maimed and blinded in the gas leak were strung up like macabre bunting on the railings. On a small TV monitor (they had managed to get an electricity connection from a nearby church) grainy old footage played on a loop: a jaunty young Warren Anderson, the American CEO of the Union Carbide Corporation, arriving at Delhi airport days after the disaster. “I’ve just arrived,” he tells the jostling journalists. “I don’t know the details yet. So hey! Whaddya want me to say?” Then he looks straight into the TV cameras and waves, “Hi Mom!”
On and on through the night he went: “Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom…”
An old banner, faded from decades of use, said, Warren Anderson is a war criminal. A newer one said, Warren Anderson has killed more people than Osama bin Laden.
Next to the Bhopalis was the Delhi Kabaadi-Wallahs’ (Waste-recyclers’) Association and the Sewage Workers’ Union, protesting against the privatization and corporatization of the city’s garbage and the city’s sewage. The corporation that bid for and won the contract was the same one that had been given farmers’ land for its power plant. It already ran the city’s electricity and water distribution. Now it owned the city’s shit and waste-disposal systems too.
Right next to the waste-recyclers and the sewage workers was the plushest part of the pavement, a glittering public toilet with float glass mirrors and a shiny granite floor. The toilet lights stayed on, night and day. It cost one rupee for a piss, two for a shit and three for a shower. Not many on the pavement could afford these rates. Many pissed outside the toilet, against the wall. So, though the toilet was spotlessly clean inside, from the outside it gave off the sharp smoky smell of stale urine. It didn’t matter very much to the management; the toilet’s revenue came from elsewhere. The exterior wall doubled up as a billboard that advertised something new every week.
This week it was Honda’s newest luxury car. The billboard had its own personal guard. Gulabiya Vechania lived under a small blue plastic sheet right next to the billboard. This accommodation was a step up from where he’d begun. When he first arrived in the city a year ago, out of abject terror as well as necessity, Gulabiya had lived in a tree. Now he had a job, and some semblance of shelter. The name of the security agency he worked for was embroidered on the epaulettes of his stained blue shirt: TSGS Security. (A rival concern to Sangeeta Madam Haramzaadi Bitch’s SSGS.) His job was to prevent vandalism, in particular, to thwart repeated attempts being made by certain miscreants to urinate right on to the billboard. He worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day. That night Gulabiya was drunk and had dropped off to sleep when someone sprayed Inqilab Zindabad! Long Live Revolution! right across the silver Honda City. Below that, someone else scrawled a poem.
Chheen li tumne garib ki rozi roti
Aur laga diye hain fees karne pe tatti
You’ve snatched poor folks’ daily bread
And slapped a fee on their shit instead
Gulabiya would lose his job in the morning. Thousands like him would line up hoping to replace him. (One might even be the street poet himself.) But for now, Gulabiya slept soundly and dreamed deep. In his dream he had enough money to feed himself and send a little home to his family in his village. In his dream his village still existed. It wasn’t at the bottom of a dam reservoir. Fish didn’t swim through his windows. Crocodiles didn’t knife through the high branches of the Silk Cotton trees. Tourists didn’t go boating over his fields, leaving rainbow clouds of diesel in the sky. In his dream his brother Luariya wasn’t a tour-guide at the dam-site whose job was to showcase the miracles the dam had wrought. His mother didn’t work as a sweeper in a dam-engineer’s house that was built on the land that she once owned. She didn’t have to steal mangoes from her own trees. She didn’t live in a resettlement colony in a tin hut with tin walls and a tin roof that was so hot you could fry onions on it. In Gulabiya’s dream his river was still flowing, still alive. Naked children still sat on rocks, playing the flute, diving into the water to swim among the buffaloes when the sun grew too hot. There were leopard and sambar and sloth bear in the Sal forest that clothed the hills above the village, where during festivals his people would gather with their drums to drink and dance for days.