The village across the street

When I first moved onto this lane there were two holes. One across the street, and one at the corner. The one at the corner first became a forest, as bamboo poles sprouted thicker and thicker. One night floodlights appeared, and thirty men worked pouring concrete floors. Now it’s back to a few skinny men, carrying loads of bricks, working in clean sweaters and flip flops.

The house on the other side of the road will have much more stories to tell. At first it was an undifferentiated hole in the ground. Then the walls of became straight, the hole wide and deep. Dirt piled up in the day, carried out by men gliding up a steep path in the far side. One morning, they started mixing concrete out front. They make a pile, dig a depression, and pour water into the middle, mixing more material in from the sides with a shovel until it’s the right consistency. Soon after, metal lengths sprouted from the basement floor at irregular heights into the sky, looking like frayed electrical cords. A first floor skeleton appeared on top of another forest of bamboo, none of which were straight, but nonetheless seemed to add up to horizontalness.

In the beginning, the men had slept by the road on metal blanks or boards. Once it was finally cool enough to sleep with sheets, I would come home silently past the sleeping row, willing them to stay in their cocoons. The scary nights were when they were sitting up, men laughing from behind the tarp that blocked the site from the road. By November, three women and a chai-walla had joined the men. The women wore saris, a circle of cloth on top their heads, and bricks on top of this. They looked at me and chatted, as they piled bricks six, eight, ten high and set off down the path.

The women brought some civilization to the growing village. The neighbourhood security guards set up their fires beside the bamboo forest, and didn’t seem to mind the noxious fumes coming off the paint chips and debris. Now they were up playing cards at night, not so interested when I passed; most comforting, they’d taken down the tarp. The first floor had joined with the concrete pillars, hiding the steel spindles, making the inside dark and casting an appropriate house-like shadow onto the street.

This week, walking out to catch an auto rickshaw to work, I noticed the children. The piles of bricks had turned into proper shacks, with poured concrete floors, even and solid, and electricity, and plastic bags of worldly possessions. The kids sat around a fire set up between three sides of stone and a pot. They pointed at each other and yelled, generally amusing themselves. I wondered where they pee, how the families knew to come at this time, how many babies and stories it took for my house to be built. As I walked to dinner last night, one solemn little one, wearing no pants, sat cross-legged on top of a pile of wooden crates. In the taxonomy of VS Naipaul, he was a country child, as country children cover their tops and expose their bottoms, while poor city kids do the reverse. I turned around every few steps to make sure he was still there. I thought of baby gates, and lawsuits, and outrage over lead in paint in children’s toys. Three feet off the ground, watching dinner cook, and I wondered what we are really entitled to.