Nangla's Delhi

Chiselling ones writing through ones own experience, memories and perspectives, we encountered questions. To move ahead without thinking these questions through was impossible. And so we asked ourselves:
Can every day be accounted for?
Can every moment be recalled and narrated?
Does every passing moment get absorbed in our past?

Every space is somewhat like a story. A story told over many pages. And there are those pages too, which get folded at the edges, and so, when they are turned, they either wrap and silence many pages, or open out several new pages. Time is revealed, or gets concealed in this way. And along with it, many people too.

This is the threshold at which we realised that – to write is to keep active a sense of the force of life. This sense is for the writer, for the one who is being written about, and also for the thoughts and visions that unfold when one writes.

Trickster City is an important book as it documents, in some detail, the death of a certain kind of activism and resistance – a politics of public demonstrations, mass rallies and legal notices. Disputes over land, housing and private ownership have a rich legal history in post-Independence India, where the state has wide powers to appropriate private land and resources for what it deems as the greater public good...

Trickster City’s greatest strength is its refusal to adopt the question-answer, problem-solution format beloved to activists and development workers. The writers engage with the state and its institutions as one would a wealthy, yet cantankerous, old aunt: someone who could conceivably be a source of support and assistance, and occasionally is. But most of the time, she frustrates one’s endeavours, disrupts the best laid plans and will, in all likelihood, outlive us all.

A page from an old diary feels like "a wet currency note that has been dried on a hot surface," a mini-story all by itself. A list of the dishes at a fancy wedding reception ends with: "An entire table just for glasses of water." Some of us might have picked a glass up from just such a table, but never thought of it as an entire table.

The following piece of virtuoso writing does not say a word about policemen, but ends up saying reams by describing the effect of a few policemen walking down a lane: "Young men retreated into their houses. Men covered their card games with bedsheets. Autorickshaw drivers moved their three-wheelers to the side. Everything abated." All this is not to imply that the book works only at the level of detail. There are stories here that Chekov would have been happy to write. Some of the book’s most powerful and revelatory writing is in the sections describing a colony’s eviction and resettlement: the air of dread in the days leading up to the eviction; the almost surreal experience of demolition; the all-important need to prove one’s existence through documents; the starting afresh on a desolate tract of land. These are narrated with humour, anger, irony, and empathy but never self-pity.

When one dwells in a place, one also abides by the ideas that are accepted in that place as being ideal for living. We even think of our future from within the mesh of these ideas. What seems to be at stake here is a consensus, arrived at over a long duration, about what should be sustained as the basis according to which life ought to be led. When a dwelling that has existed for a long time is broken, it is not only their homes that people are evicted out of. Demolition threatens people by scraping at the very foundations they have built their entire lives on.

It was after the demolition of many homes that some people found a place to live in, in Ghevra. The demolition of ones house leaves one steeped in many difficulties. In some ways, the energy mustered by different people to take care of their daily needs after a demolition, becomes a new basis on which to start constructing life afresh in a new place.

These needs include food, water, electricity, roads, means of transport, ways of earning a living, a house, a toilet. But there are some things which have more to do with ones heart and with a search for inner peace and self confidence, which also need an externalisation and a form. Such as: a mosque to offer namaz, a gurudwara to listen to guruwani, a church to find some peace of mind, a temple to pray in. These find their own place amidst the jostle of the everyday.

And they have in Ghevra too.