The butcher of New Bombay

Rizwan spent his days on a tatty chair in an unmarked butcher shop, dreaming into the glare of the busy highway outside.

He dreamed, among other things, of not working in the butcher shop, where flies crawled on goat flesh hung on the hooks around him. 

He was fifteen. His job was to slaughter goats, then cut them up and pack them in black plastic bags. For this, he got six thousand a month. He wanted something else in life, although this job was better than the last one, where he learned to bleed chickens. Thirty chickens, every working day for a year.

We had talked for hours when a chicken clucked close by. Rizwan looked at a dark hollow by his feet, leaned forward in his chair, and caught a wing. “You hold one wing,” he said, “then take the other.” 

The panicked bird shrieked in midair while Rizwan held its wings in one hand. He released his thumb to pull the bird’s head back by its wattle, so that all it could see now was the boy. The chicken went silent, and its chest swelled and fell rapidly. A long knife was put to its throat. Rizwan looked at me, and began to move the knife as I said “don’t.” He smiled. “Aise karte hain,” he said, and released the chicken back into the hole. “It isn’t mine. Belongs to the old guy in the next shop. I’m playing a joke on him. He’ll come to his shop and cry ‘kissi ne chori kar li’.” The chicken was alive, for now.

Two customers came in the four hours I was there. One wanted a hundred and fifty grams of meat. The other wanted something Rizwan didn’t have. He sat behind the tree trunk chopping blocks with the pink-white scraps on it and steel cleavers that bit into its scarred surface. He played with a phone, and went back to looking out stonily, almost angrily. I asked him about his studies. Rizwan hadn’t been to school, but thought his brother should get an education. “Padhai uss pe chhod diya.” His brother, it turned out, was four years old. 

Rizwan wanted to return home to work in the fields. “Kaam hai. Aath bigha hai. Geho, makka.” The village was a few kilometres outside Lucknow. He took comfort in the thought that he could leave anytime. “It’s just 24 hours away.”

A friend came by. The boy was thirteen, and he talked about this and that. Rizwan was happy for the company. Then Sahil asked Rizwan what would happen to the shop. 

“It’s going,” Rizwan said, with a little wave that encompassed the clinic with its young doctor, the run-down dispensary, the phone shop next door, and the chicken coop across the road. “Everything’s going.” Even the fixtures, which included the uncles stretched out on chairs next to the highway in the afternoons.

“How big is it?”

“Poora,” Rizwan replied. The whole place. Sahil’s eyes grew wider, and he smiled. A goat’s behind dangled on a hook above him.

The bigness of this airport lends itself beautifully to imagination. On paper, it starts at the island of mangroves near the shimmering buildings in the north, levels quarries in the desolate west, swallows rice fields at the centre. It claims a river, and a hill. All the way to the highway in the east where buffaloes race below a grassy slope that changes shape in the wind.

It takes in roadside stores that sell old doors and colourful houses with red ticks painted on by the surveyors. In the south, finally, it ends at a boundary wall fifteen feet high. The land behind it may have belonged to people who have lived there for over a century, but not much longer. The airport consumes the familiar, breaks rhythms, and throws lives into disarray well before it exists.

This is why it takes hold of imaginations.

The airport’s effects ripple outward. Miles away, in places people considered themselves safe, the illusion slowly dissipates. One day in October, a young couple from a village hear a name for the first time. Naina. Someone in the village, Palaspe, has a net connection, and reads about Naina. The name spreads, and so does the general idea behind it: Naina will change their lives. Three days later, after he has discovered enough to be concerned, Mhatre puts on a dark cap and dark clothes while his wife dresses lightly, and together they leave for the town of Belapur on a blinding day. Hours later they arrive at the local office of the town planner, CIDCO, on the building’s third floor. Planners buzz about in the corridor, massing at the canteen at one end. Inside, behind the reception desk, a row of cabins is reserved for the people in charge of Naina. A young planner recently hired from CEPT university begins to hear a question about Naina, and cuts in immediately, “The deadline for reservations and objections is over.” There have been “thousands of letters” about the project. If my land is affected, he says tells me, I should write a letter to the planner, who may accept it.

The Navi Mumbai Airport Influence Notified Area — NAINA — is a part of CIDCO, and it covers 270 villages over 561 square kilometres. Its surveyors have visited the villages and come away convinced that the area lacks a “well-developed social infrastructure,” that it hasn’t a solid waste management system. There are no super-speciality hospitals or technical colleges. It isn’t equipped for the future the airport will create. But NAINA is there.

Mhatre and his wife stand before the tall printouts on the corridor walls, trying to make sense of the brown blocks, the thick white lines, the difference between the shades of green, the sprinkled red. For half an hour they walk from one section of the urban plan to another, studying them for a familiar landmark. They move on from the one marked ‘Koproli-Nere-Vihighar-Chipale’ to ‘Palidevad-Devad-Vichumbe’, and finally come to the last panel. The words above it say ‘Palaspe-Derawali-Kon’. Mhatre lifts a finger to the sheet, and runs it across lines and numbers. His partner says something to him and touches the paper. He moves his finger beside hers, and they stand in silence. 

On the printout, the thick white stripe of a new metro line swallows their plot. Very little is left. All along the white band, no one with as much land has been as affected. This is a biblical shafting. Finally he breaks the silence.“Let me go in and see what they’re saying,” he says. He walks away, slowly. She stands there, watching him.

There is a visceral unfairness in not knowing. It is not the unfairness of markets, or of sudden illness. This unfairness has been planned. A couple enter an unfamiliar office full of planners who know something they do not.  People learn of their own impending upheaval by chance: on the internet, browsing an unfamiliar newspaper, idly watching television. A lawyer I meet claims that notices relevant to the villages are published in papers such as the Economic Times. “Does anybody here look like they read the Economic Times?” he asked.

Mahendra Patil takes me to the place where the homes touch the fields at Paregaon. Patil is among the leaders of the villages that resisted CIDCO’s entreaties. These villages were guided by lawyers, as well as by Justice P. B.Sawant, the retired Supreme Court judge, and they asked for written explanations of what, exactly, the planning agency would offer the villages in return for their land.

In March, Patil was part of a small group attending a presentation at a CIDCO office in Navi Mumbai. The presentation was a visual demonstration of what their new home, Pushpak Nagar, would look like. It would be a city of the future, a modern city in the way real estate developers envision things before the first shovel is rented. The city would be well-connected, with effective modes of transportation. This was what they were signing up for. The villagers were unmoved. “It’s okay to show us what Pushpak Nagar will look like,” Patil told me. “But it was good as a dream up on screen.” The committee asked for a copy of the minutes from that meeting, “but they didn’t give us anything.”

Patil’s home is near the fields. He smiles at an old man sitting outside his home at the edge of the village, and talks about water. He points to a place beyond the trees and says, “The wall is over there.” Right now there is no wall, but the shifting ground and uncertain time have made the wall real. Given its location at the Arabian Sea, the airport will be elevated above the flood line. If the rain is heavy, and the tide happens to be high, he believes the water will cascade down the nearby hills into the valley created by the airport. Pargaon will be flooded, he says. “This is what I’m afraid of.”