It’s morning, 10.30 am in the MHADA colony. The rush of the people leaving for their daily jobs is subsiding and vendors are beginning to set up their shops at the edges of the street. Mumtazji is also busy setting up her little makeshift fish shop, along the boundary wall of the colony. She arranges her best fish for sale on two large white laminated ply boards that are propped up by small tubs where the next batch of fishes are stored. A lot of cats and kittens were playing around and some were waiting for her to give them fish to eat. She spots us looking at her. We take that as a cue and to ask her if we can photograph her and her shop. Excited, she quickly brushes her hair and neatens her black kurta and white headscarf. What followed was a conversation about her life in this “MHADA colony”.
“I have been living in this colony for more than 14 years now. Before this, my family lived in the Mankhurd slums. In 2007, a bunch of us were allotted flats here by MHADA in this Natwar Parekh Compound.” Mumtazji tells us. Moving here was moving to a whole different world, “Aisa laga kaha aake rhene lag gaye humlog.” Living in a “society” setup was a novelty. Each slum household got a single flat that had the capacity of three or four people, where she now lives with her daughter, son, daughter-in-law and their three children. “My son passed away due to cancer. Our situation was too difficult. Now my daughter-in-law works to provide for the family. I sell fish to support her,” Mumtazji says. Every day early morning, at 6 am, she walks to Mankhurd fish market to buy fish to sell and walks back carrying the load all the way to MHADA colony. “Har sube jate hai machi lene aur yaha aake bechte hai”. Her goal is to sell all the fish that she has bought.
There were a lot of people coming to buy fish from her. While cleaning up the fish she chats with her customers and she gets to know what is going on in other parts of the colony through them. One such customer tells her about the issue of water tankers not being able to come inside the colony and they begin discussing a solution to bring it in.
However, Mumtazji laments how she misses her neighbours from Mankhurd. “When we got relocated here, our neighbours got relocated to different floors and different buildings.” These people were her community, part of her everyday life. After moving here she found it difficult to form attachments as it has been very difficult for her to open up to people from different religions or different slum communities. During her work hours, her earlier neighbours come to visit often and have a chat. The number of people in the colony continues to overwhelm her. “Sab alag log dikhte hai idhar, pehle ek hi shakal dikhne milti thi”.
Mumtazji simultaneously keeps feeding the fish waste to the cat family around her, to whom she is quite attached. She shares how once a kitten from this litter was lost in the colony and the mother cat wouldn’t eat food. Mumtazji had to go find the lost kitten and bring it back to her. She relates this story to her own – of how she feels about her own family and wants to take care of them until they are completely stable financially, mentally and physically.
Excerpted with permission from Awaaz: Voices of Govandi, Nisha Nair-Gupta, Yoda Press.
