Geetanjali Krishna: Wet, wet, wet -- and hating it!

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

When I woke up to find the sun shining on my face yet again, I mumbled sleepily, "I wish it had been cloudy and raining today morning, the humidity levels just go through the sky when the sun is out!"

Asha, the lady who sweeps my house, looked at me like I was from another world, "you should see the kinds of problems that slum dwellers like me had last week when it rained every day," said she, "we're happy to swelter in the heat and humidity this week, thank you very much!"

So I decided to go with her and see for myself, what the conditions in her locality were.

She lived in a small village behind Safdarjung Enclave. Perched over the big drain that the colony's sewer lines opened into, it comprised of tiny hutments and larger pucca houses.

We picked our way through puddles. "It hasn't rained for three days," said I, "then why these puddles?" She pointed wordlessly to the roadside drain, blocked with stinky filth and overflowing.

Two little children were playing in the dirty water, sailing paper boats in it. "Get away from that water," she shouted from behind me. I jumped, then realised she was talking to one of the children. "He's my youngest son," she said, gesturing towards his retreating back.

"It is so difficult to keep them even reasonably clean here. For kids will be kids, and play wherever they get a chance to!" Cases of diarrhoea and dysentery were on the rise, usual for this time of the year, she said. Her three children had all been taking turns falling sick, she said. The slum is largely unauthorised, and the drain there hasn't been cleaned for years.

"If people here were educated or well off, they would have forced the MCD to maintain it," she said indignantly.

Fat flies buzzed irritatingly around me as we made our way to her home, one of the pucca houses near the drain. I asked her to tell me about herself. "I've studied up to class eight in Delhi," she said, "but then left school as my parents thought that I was too old for it."

Her husband, an auto driver, had completed his schooling. "We're relatively educated and well off, compared with our neighbours," she said, "and we understand the value of hygiene and education."

But even though their combined household income was over Rs 4,000, this place, she said, was the best they could afford. "It's walking distance from the homes where I work," she said, "and my children can walk to their school. So we choose to endure all this dirt and filth to stay here!"

Her house, when we reached it, was cleaner than others around it, but mounds of dung festered around it. "Someone in the area has begun to keep cows," she said bitterly, "he makes lots of money selling milk, but it's a nuisance for our neighbourhood!"

Her husband emerged from the house, and invited me in. "Now I'll show you the biggest problem we're facing these days," she said, pointing not to damp patches on her walls, but the noticeably few dry ones. Her husband Krishan added, "the construction quality is so poor, when it rains, we need umbrellas even inside the house! I'm sure it will collapse on our heads one of these days."

When I eventually got up to leave, Asha said ruefully, "in my UP village, we children would dance in the fields when it rained. But I hope you now understand why, living in a Delhi slum, I'd very selfishly settle for drought instead!"