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Constructing the Future

I am assaulted by the noise of a huge truck-based drill as I write this. It has been going for the last two weeks. Every day, all day. On the now wet and muddy empty plot behind my home, a piece of land that till some months ago had an old Mumbai bungalow on it, this truck-drill has been hard at work. It's trying to sink a borewell for water, I was told by a visiting farmer I know who should know borewells. The people who plan to put up a building here will need the water for the construction. Since they haven't struck the stuff yet, they are trying over and over all around the plot. Thus the continuous assault on my ears.

Well, fine. Except that I am now neighbour to two construction sites, and can look forward to months of noise and dust. That apart, the first time the noise on this site got to me it had nothing to do with drilling. It was when the bungalow was still being broken down. A team of workers were doing it, bashing down the walls and floors over a period of a few weeks. Migrant labourers from Bengal, they had been hired for this job. When done tearing the bungalow down, they would move on to the next such job. And while this one lasted, they were living on the plot, in a small tin shed at the back.

But this was the height of pre-monsoon heat in Mumbai, a time of still nights, cloudless heat, dank sweat and swarms of annoying mosquitoes. That tin shed must have been unbearable. These young men certainly thought so. They were sleeping out in the open every night. From my window overlooking the plot, past the ever-lower ruins of the bungalow, I would see them as twilight descended, cooking themselves some food, shoving aside the rubble, laying out their mats to sleep on.

I didn't think much about it till very early one morning, when we awoke to a sudden eruption of noise from next door. Screams, shouts, a running motor. My first bleary-eyed thought was: Not again! We had been pleading with these guys not to begin their rubble-removal activities -- involving throwing bricks and stones into a truck with much attendant noise -- at 5 in the morning as they had been doing. For a few days they complied and we slept in peace.

Now here was this disturbance again. 5 in the morning again. There was a truck again, come to pick up the rubble. But my annoyance at seeing the truck there evaporated quickly, as I comprehended what had happened below. The driver had reversed the truck into the plot, trying to position it where it could be filled easily with its load. His helper had got off and was guiding him as he reversed.

Just a routine job: Except that neither driver nor helper had noticed the line of sleeping Bengali workers. The truck had driven right onto them. When I first looked out, there was this surreal tableau in front of me: truck with its headlights on, rumbling backwards, shouting from somewhere underneath it, one or two men emerging shakily from there. And two figures racing away through the gate as fast as they could. For as soon as they realised what was happening, and fully aware of what the workers would do to them, the driver and his helper had abandoned the truck and fled. The driver had not even paused to switch off the engine.

I'm not sure how, but the driverless truck was still moving backwards. It stopped only when it bumped into the remnants of the bungalow wall. By that time, the workers had all emerged, shaken and enraged. Luckily none had been killed, though one man's leg was broken and another had the flesh on his thigh lacerated.

Much shouting and many phone calls later, a man in shirtsleeves drove up in an auto-rickshaw and sauntered into the plot. He must have been the owner of the truck and must have had simply no idea of the magnitude of what had happened. The irate workers gathered quickly and began thrashing the man Eventually, they sat him down in a corner of the plot and threatened more beating every time he so much as moved. At which point a new target emerged: Skinny fellow in the back of the truck. It was now about an hour since the incident. Clearly this young man had seen what had happened and could only cower in fright in the back, waiting for a chance to make an escape as his driver had. For even if he had had nothing to do with the whole thing, he wasn't about to try explaining as much to these angry labourers.

From my window, I saw him when he stood quietly, perhaps thinking their attention was elsewhere and he could sneak out of the plot. No luck. One labourer saw him as soon as he stood, and the truck was quickly surrounded by faces twisted in anger, shouting and gesticulating for him to come down. He pleaded and perhaps was able to convey some reason to them, because when he finally descended from the truck, he suffered only three heavy blows to his face before they sat him down next to his boss.

One last blow to a face remained to be delivered. Some time later, two cops arrived on the scene. One sat taking notes while the other began talking to everyone: workers, security guard, the pair who had been thrashed. Without warning, he drew back his arm and punched the guard so hard that the man, no 90 pound weakling himself, staggered backwards and nearly fell over. Then the cops went over, picked up the truck boss and the skinny dude by their collars and frog-marched them off the plot.

Went down there later in the day. Met the guy whose leg was broken. Back from the hospital where it had been put in plaster, he sat in a chair with an oddly philosophical air about him. "The way our work is, these things will happen," he said to me. "At least none of us died today." Asked him about the guard. "Ah, the guard. He was asleep when the truck came, so he did not tell the driver we were sleeping there." And that's why the cop hit him.

That was that. The next day, the men were back at work. The same truck returned several times for loads of rubble, though I don't know if it was driven by the same team. When the bungalow was completely gone, the labourers vanished to who knows where. Not long after, this infernal drilling device showed up. Before long there will be a foundation and the block of flats will rise, floor by noisy inexorable floor, from that muddy, messy rectangle. That's how it goes, with construction.

And I doubt even the security guard remembers that early morning when two men raced out the gate, others shouted in terror from under a rolling truck, and he collected a Mike Tyson-worthy slap for sleeping on the job.

Returning from meeting the labourers that evening, I passed the other construction site that neighbours us. Things are much further along here: seven floors and counting. Just outside its gate stood a young woman. Her little daughter squatted nearby, defecating right there on our busy street. Why are you doing this, I asked the woman.

"I work on this site and our huts are in there," she replied, pointing back at the gate. "But they haven't given us any toilets."

Feeling curiously deflated, I walked on. Then it came to me. Why agonise over this stuff? This was undoubtedly how my own building was built, over 20 years ago: On the broken bones and defecating children of bands of migrant Indian labour. Nothing has changed, that's all.

Dilip D'Souza