Nangla's Delhi

"Sleep has vanished from my nights, agonising over what will happen during our survey. We have lived here so many years, made so many things, but we can be turned homeless overnight..." The word 'homeless' runs through our lives today like a shiver down the spine. He who doesn't have a plot of land to his name doesn't exist. Listening to my father I sensed, our sense of self, our entire existence is connected deeply to this place in which we have lived many years. But only to have lived here is not enough. Today the ground has suddenly hollowed out like a bottomless pit, the walls of the house are shifting away from us. And we are trying hard to keep everything together but, I think, not too successfully.

"When we first came here, we saw it only as a place to shelter ourselves in. We saw possibilities here, which were first and foremost, and perhaps only about earning a living, finding a sustenance to live life. When the VP Singh cards began to be made, we saw our names inside official registers, and thought now we have been included in government ledgers. Slowly, as we continued to live here, we realised it is not enough to just build a house somewhere. When it presented itself as a possibility, we got our ration cards made. The ration card was something through which we could get sarkari benefits, that is rations at lower costs than in the market. That is, it made it possible for us to save some money from that which we were earning while living here. Over twenty five years, through different kinds of counting done by the government, we too began to get different numbers. Every corner of the house we turned into a corner for safe-keeping the various slips of paper we received in the process, so that they remain secure."

How long have we lived in this place? As soon as this question knocked at me, I pulled out all the documents in the house, to look at them closely, again. We have lived here for twenty five years. How are we going to prove this? Here is a small visualisation of what will happen when the surveyors come to our house: They will ask for evidence. They will say to my father, "Babuji, what can we say about mistakes that may have been made in your documents. We are here only to see what there is."

Between 26 February, when it started and 6 March, yesterday, the survey of 220 houses has been completed in LNJP. There are roughly 1000 houses left to be covered. From the groundwork done end of last week by a group young women and men residents of LNJP, documents of many have been put in order, and the encounter with the survey teams this past week was much more confident.

Till date there has been no notice put up in LNJP as to the precise requirement of the documents for the survey. This has produced a spectral power around the survey's intention and surveyors' abilities, cunning and compassion.