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A Dozen New Families And Construction Noise
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After a few weeks, I became curious about the workers next door. I wondered what a typical day was like for them.
One afternoon, I met a 34-year-old woman who seemed always to be carrying a basket of dirt on her head. She said she moved here from Bihar, one of India's poorest states. She was from a low-caste family.
After she moved to New Delhi, she renamed herself Lakshmi, after the Hindu goddess of wealth.
She smiled widely, her mouth full of rotting teeth, and covered her face with her scarf, her plastic bangles jangling as she giggled.
"I'm a poor woman, not rich," she said as she shooed her toddler away from a pile of rubble. "But my name can be anything. So I picked wealth."
As her neighbor, I notice a rhythm to her days. She is up before dawn and puts in a morning shift hauling dirt before the sun gets too hot. She bathes in her sari. She uses water from a blue plastic barrel at the corner of the site. She dips her tin pitcher and douses herself to rinse off the soap.
She takes a long break in the afternoon to breast-feed her 9-month-old son. Along with everyone else at the site, she works past sundown and often well into the night.
Sometimes when I'm up late writing, I hear the workers loading the day's rubble onto a dump truck, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. While others sleep, they are building the new India.
