New Delhi, 2004
Five pavement-dwellers lie dead at the side of Delhi’s Inner Ring Road.
It sounds like the start of a sick joke.
If it is, no one told them.
They die where they slept.
Almost.
Their bodies have been dragged ten meters by the speeding Mercedes that jumped the curb and cut them down.
It’s February. Three a.m. Six degrees.
Fifteen million souls curl up in sleep.
A pale fog of sulfur lines the streets.
And one of the dead, Ragini, was eighteen years old. She was five months pregnant at the time. Her husband, Rajesh, twenty-three, was sleeping by her side. Both belly-up, tucked in with heavy shawls at the crown and feet, looking like corpses anyway save the telltale signs, the rucksack beneath the head, the sandals lined up neatly beside the arms.
A cruel twist of fate: this couple arrived in Delhi only yesterday. Taking refuge with Krishna, Iyaad, and Chotu, three migrant laborers from the same district in Uttar Pradesh. Each day these men woke before dawn to trek to the labor mandi at Company Bagh, trying to grab whatever daily wage they could find–dhaba cook, wedding waiter, construction laborer–sending money back to their village, paying for a sister’s shaadi, a brother’s schooling, a father’s nightly medicine. Living day to day, hour to hour, the working poor, struggling to survive.
Returning to sleep in this barren spot after dark, beside the Ring Road, close to Nigambodh Ghat. Close to the demolished slums of the Yamuna Pushta that had been their home.
But the newspapers don’t dwell on these three men. Their names vanish at dawn with the stars.
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