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If you are privileged enough in Delhi, then chances are the name Saidulajab means the Garden of Five Senses to you. Delhi government tourism department’s website describes it as a place where “majestic rocks stand silhouetted against the sky, others lie strewn upon the ground in a casual yet alluring display of nature’s sculptural genius. It was the ideal ground on which to realise the concept of a public leisure space that would awaken a sensory response and thereby a sensitivity to the environment”.
On Sunday, six people were crushed to death in a “building” collapse in Saidulajab. There was nothing wrong with the so-called “five senses” of the deceased. Among the dead are one doctor, four engineers and a woman who ran a canteen. They happened to be eating outside a coaching centre for post-graduate admissions when death came crushing down.
What the unfortunate souls lacked was perhaps a sixth sense, which could have helped them avoid a place where death would come without notice. Perhaps it is too much to ask the government to curate a garden which caters to and cultivates the sixth sense to avoid death.
Sunday’s is neither the first nor the last instance in the national capital when the distance between life and death boils down to the proverbial sixth sense. The sky is cloudy; do not go to a “library” in a basement, lest you die in a flood of sewage. There is a storm coming, do not drive in your car lest a signboard comes down and kills you. Do not ride a motorcycle at night, lest you land in a hole which the contractor did not bother to barricade properly, and die after hours of hopeless struggle.
But what do you do when sixth sense runs against survival, aspirations and the path to upward mobility? There are tens, perhaps hundreds, of unplanned urban villages in Delhi that offer a place to stay, study, and work at rates that people who cannot afford to pay more can afford. There are students who do not have the luxury of hostels and are not enrolled anywhere except the coaching industrial complex of the city. Working class and early career families, like the woman who perished in the debris on Sunday, who make a living, sometimes even a relative fortune, selling to the people who live in these places.
I have lived in these places as a student before I was lucky enough to get into Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and find hostel accommodation. For years, as students from Bihar, these urban villages were part of our extended social circle; all our friends from back home lived here. In a way, it was poetic justice. Students running from a decadent and dying feudal order in places like Bihar landed up in a setting which was feudal in the narrow by-lanes of these localities and properly metropolitan once you stepped out of the place. It was surreal to live in a city where construction material was carried on donkey-backs – the lanes are not wide enough to even allow a small tractor – next to your house and find fancy and gigantic cranes digging foundations just a few hundred metres away.
The buildings, if one can call them that, are matchboxes built of a single lining of bricks masquerading as walls. Light does not come in if you close the door. For the lazy student, it was perfect! You could sleep as long as you wanted, without even investing in curtains. Sound, however, could never be prevented from seeping through the narrow walls. More rooms and floors were added as and when the landlord deemed fit.
In some cases, such as two urban villages bordering IIT Delhi, promise was literally next door. If you did well in the ghetto, you landed on the right side of the wall, which IIT has built to demarcate and separate its premises.
The road to realising the human resource of India’s demographic dividend has to go through a dehumanising ghetto that these places are. None of what has happened on Sunday is going to stop people from slugging it out in these ghettos. Anything else is simply not affordable, and the alternative is not an option.
Why can’t these places be better regulated? Why do buildings keep coming crashing down? Is it delusional to ask for the architect, engineer, MCD officer, and Delhi police personnel who allowed such buildings to be constructed to be punished? The privileged elite would like to pretend that it is not. They offer false assurances that this time it will be different. Those who inhabit these places know better.
Life here is best described by paraphrasing what a learned constitutional authority recently said: it’s a fight, where cockroaches are against zombies. The latter have different weapons: a live power line in a puddle, a drinking water line mixed with sewage feeding a mess you eat regularly, an occasional building coming down on you while you are eating Maggi with some extra butter thrown in as a treat.
Some cockroaches die, but many more, thanks to their sheer numbers, do not perish. Some of them even manage to get into the privileged corridors from where they pontificate about cockroaches on odd days and zombies on even days. Some others who are successful just bail out. One of the most common jokes in JNU was that, after university, you either go to America or Munirka, the urban village on the other side of the road.
Munirka, too, saw an entire building collapse onto the road facing JNU a few years ago. Thankfully, that one gave some warning before coming down, perhaps a result of it being located in a place which people called Buddha Vihar. Maybe the system should look into occult practices which make more about-to-fall buildings go non-violent: please warn before you fall. That is more likely to succeed than dissuading cockroaches and disciplining zombies.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. His weekly column for HT Premium Terms of Trade appears every Friday.
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