Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 and mud. These
katcha,
or “crude earth,” houses were decorated with geometric designs drawn in rice paste to attract prosperity, just as they were
     in the villages of Orissa. These houses gave this area of concentration-camplike congestion an unexpected rural charm. The
     former peasants who had taken refuge there were not marginalized people. In their exile they had managed to reconstruct their
     village life. They had built a small temple out of bamboo and baked mud to house an image of the god Jagannath. Next to it,
     they had planted a sacred
tulsi
, a variety of arborescent basil with the power to repel reptiles, especially cobras with their deadly