The Honey Gatherers
It seems to me that if you give a writer the choice of living in heaven or hell, he chooses hell… there’s much more literary material there. Gabriel Garcia Marquez BACK WHEN TERMS SUCH AS ‘Third World’...
View ArticleSharing the Urban
IN 2005, I BEFRIENDED A GROUP OF YOUNG MEN in a resettlement colony on the northwestern edge of Delhi. Over several months, we had a series of conversations, often speaking about their experiences as...
View ArticleAn Invisible Truth
ABOUT THE STORY Probably more than any other Indian fiction writer in English today, Murzban F Shroff markedly prefers the short story to the novel and writes what in another time (when fiction and...
View ArticleBrazil | Other Homes
ONE AFTERNOON IN AUGUST LAST YEAR, Maria Neuma’s neighbours called her at work and warned her not to return home. Since June, 47-year-old Neuma had been a resident of Rio de Janeiro’s Condominium...
View ArticleDown by the Water
AS A CHILD in the early 2000s, Surender Solanki used to travel from his home in a slum in west Delhi to visit his relatives in the city’s east, crossing over the Yamuna River by bus. He remembers...
View ArticleFrance | Here to Stay
AT 10 AM ON A COLD DECEMBER MORNING, at a circus compound in the north-west of Paris, the green door of the Romanès family’s caravan home was tightly shut. Six other caravans were parked nearby, and a...
View ArticleFighting For Peace
IN DECEMBER 2008, Rio de Janeiro inaugurated a “pacification” initiative to purge its favelas, or shanty towns, of violence and narcotics. The city’s roughly one thousand favelas are home to poor and...
View ArticleHow Many Demolitions Does it Take to Break a Basti’s Spirit?
Like most of the people now living in tarpaulin-covered shanties around the Shakur Basti railway station in west Delhi, Tinna Khan came from Bihar. “Around 1990,” he told me on the evening of 18...
View ArticleHow the DDA Demolished a Jhuggi-Jhopri in Delhi’s Amir Khusrau Park Without...
Gulpsa, a woman in her twenties, sat on a boundary wall that separated Amir Khusrao Park—situated near the dargah of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi—and the footpath next to the road that ran...
View ArticleThe Residents of Kathputli Colony are Divided on the Question of the Area’s...
On 30 October, a large force of police officers, members of the paramilitary Rapid Action Force, and Delhi Development Authority officials supervised the demolition of nearly 400 houses in Delhi’s...
View ArticleBrazil | Other Homes
ONE AFTERNOON IN AUGUST LAST YEAR, Maria Neuma’s neighbours called her at work and warned her not to return home. Since June, 47-year-old Neuma had been a resident of Rio de Janeiro’s Condominium...
View Article