It's a very nice city," I overheard Raju say on the phone as he was precariously balanced on the roof of my verandah. "Yes, yes, the roads are very broad and it's very advanced...." Finally when he hung up, his supervisor told him to step up his pace. "We must finish this waterproofing before it starts raining again," he said. Raju smiled ruefully, "I'd not realised how the rains wreak havoc in Delhi... and my folks back home think my brother and I are swanning it here." The story he told me while laying out sheets of tar felt on my roof, left me both amused and thoughtful.
Raju had only recently migrated to Delhi with his brother from their village in Bihar. "There were no work opportunities in the village of course, neither were there good schools," he said. But what made living in his village, and especially the area his home was in, very tough was that it was low-lying and close to the Ganges. "Every monsoon, when the Ganges swelled up with rain water, our area was flooded, under hip, and sometimes, neck-deep water," he said. It was so routine, he said, that they had devised several strategies to deal with rising waters. "All our lives, we have hung all valuables from the rafters of our house. When we finally got a television set a few years ago, we had to keep it so high that all of us strained our necks watching it," he narrated. A couple of years ago, they had raised the plinth of their home. "My mother would sit there and watch the waters rise," he said. "And when it was time, she'd call us to move to higher ground to a relative's house."
Eventually, 20-year-old Raju and his elder brother decided to come to Delhi in search of better opportunities. "We arrived a month ago, and rented a room in Delhi's Sangam Vihar. At the beginning, we were awestruck by the city. It was so clean and modern." But this was before the rains arrived. "It was raining when we left for work, and pouring when we returned. Sangam Vihar was flooded with knee-deep water everywhere. It was such a familiar sight," he said. Raju's neighbours returned that evening to find many of their household things floating in their room. "But we had, out of force of habits drilled in us in the village, hung our clothes on nails, and had kept our stove on the window ledge when we left," he said. Over the next few days, he said that as it rained incessantly, the water hardly had a chance to recede. "Unlike the village, where when it rained like this, we could just sit at home and enjoy the weather - here we had to wade through all the muck to get to work else the contractor would fire us," Raju said. Amidst stories of houses collapsing in the flood, the recent migrants learnt that just like in their village, floods were a routine phenomenon here too.
"So today, I've waded through hip-deep water, carrying my trousers on my head to keep them dry, to come here to waterproof your roof," he said glumly. "And my star-struck sister keeps calling me to ask how much fun we are having here in the big city... I hate to shatter her illusions and tell her it is no different from home," As I tried to unsuccessfully mask my amusement, I realised that thanks to Delhi's shoddy infrastructure, the two migrants in search of better opportunities had ended up trading the swollen Ganga in their village for cesspools in the big city.
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