Six Sites in Two Years

Yenappa, you want to know my address, I'll give you six addresses, pick one, they're all the same address really, all of them behind some half-built tower with a name like Cauvery Heights or Renuka Residency or something with "Enclave" stapled onto the end because Enclave sounds classy even when what it means is thirty tin sheets and a tarp and a queue for the one tap that works on alternate mornings.

I've been in this city two years. Six sites. I count them like other people count relationships, because in a way that's what they are, a series of short intense things that end without warning when the concrete's poured and the contractor moves the crew forty kilometers to the next plot and you either go with him or you don't eat that week. Nagawara, then Sarjapur, then a stretch out past Whitefield that took forty minutes each way just to get water, then back closer in near Yeshwantpur, then a gap of nineteen days with no work at all that I don't like talking about, then here, wherever here is this month, I genuinely have to think about it sometimes, which tells you something.

My village is four hours from here by bus, out past Kolar, and I want to be clear, I didn't come to Bangalore for adventure, whatever adventure means to a person who's never had to leave anywhere. I came because there was no work left in the fields that wasn't someone else's fields, my family's never owned land, we worked other people's land for generations, and at some point my father looked at me and said, thumba jana hogtaddare, meaning everyone's going, meaning the city's where the money moved to, so I went too.

Here's what nobody tells you before you go. In the village, everybody already knows what you are. Bad in one way, because they never let you forget it, boycotts and separate cups and all of that old machinery still grinding along even now. But there's a strange freedom in it too, illa, hear me out, because at least the rules are stated. Everyone knows the rules, even the ones enforcing them, and you can navigate around a known rule. In the city, nobody says the rules out loud anymore. They just build a system where the rule enforces itself, quietly, through paperwork, through addresses, through who gets asked what, and you find out you've been excluded from something only after you've already been excluded from it, sari sari, too late, next.

I'll tell you exactly how this works, because it happened to me in March, and I'm still thumba angry about it in a way that hasn't cooled off even now, months later, if anything it's gotten more organized in my head, sharper.

I cut my hand on site. Rebar edge, not deep, but not shallow either, needed stitches, real stitches, not the kind you handle yourself with a strip of cloth and hoping. The contractor, and I want you to know his name but I'm not going to give it to you because that's not the point, the contractor said go to the government hospital, it's free, why are you asking me for money. Fine. I go. I take a bus and then another bus because the camp's not near anything, that's the whole design of these camps, they're never near anything, and I get to the government hospital and the intake clerk asks for my address for the registration form.

I give him the camp address. Behind Renuka Residency, near the water tank, off the service road, no number because there is no number, there was never a number, the camp doesn't have numbers because the camp officially doesn't exist, it's not on any map the corporation uses, it's unauthorized land that a few hundred of us are living on because the contractor needed us close to the site and didn't want to pay for anything better.

The clerk looks at the address like I've handed him a joke. Not cruel, exactly, I want to be fair, he wasn't cruel about it, he was just tired, the way government clerks get tired, the way anyone gets tired doing the same denial forty times before lunch. He says this address doesn't fall under this hospital's catchment. He says I need to go to a different facility, closer to my "registered" address. I say this is my address, I sleep there every night, what do you mean registered. He says, without looking up, not really at me at this point, he's already moving to the next person in line, he says, that's not how the system works, beku documentation, proof of residence, ration card, something with your name and a real address on it.

I don't have a ration card here. My ration card is four hours away in a village I visit twice a year, tied to a house that isn't mine either, technically, it's my father's, everything in my family is technically someone else's, that's the theme if you're looking for one. So I stand there with my hand wrapped in a dirty cloth, bleeding slightly through it by this point, and I understand, aagide, it's happened, I have been sorted into a category that this hospital's paperwork doesn't have a box for, and the box that's missing isn't about caste, not directly, nobody's asked my caste today, but it doesn't need to ask, because the address already told it everything the caste question used to ask more bluntly. Behind Renuka Residency, near the water tank, no number. That address is doing the same work the old questions used to do. It's just wearing a form now instead of a face.

I ended up at a chemist's shop. A guy there, not even a doctor, cleaned it and put in three stitches with a local anesthetic he wasn't strictly licensed to give me, I found out later, and charged me four hundred rupees, which is a full day's wage, gone, for a wound that happened doing the job that was supposed to pay me that wage. My hand healed fine, more or less, there's a stiffness in the third finger now when it's cold, small thing, I don't even think about it most days.

What I think about is the form. The little box on the form. I've thought about that box more than I've thought about the actual cut, which tells you which wound is the one that's still open.

My son thinks I should be angrier about this than I let on, ayyo, wait, I don't have a son, I'm twenty-six, no wife yet, that's not where I am in my life, I said that wrong, force of habit, everyone in these stories ends up talking to a kid they're worried about, but I don't have one, I have a girl back in the village I write to sometimes and a mother who asks every phone call if I've found something "steady" yet, steady, as if steady is a thing available to someone with my address, or lack of one.

Here's the part that I actually wanted to tell you, if you've stuck with me this far. Last week the contractor came around and said the site's closing in nine days, structure's up, next phase is someone else's crew, interior work, different skill set, we're not needed. Nine days. I've had less warning before, so nine days feels almost generous, ondu vidha generous, a kind of generous. There's a job maybe in Mysore, someone said, a cousin of someone on this crew heard about it, bigger site, better pay, maybe. Maybe is the only tense I've operated in for two years. Maybe there's water. Maybe the contractor pays on time this cycle. Maybe the next camp has a working tap more than every other day.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you a story with an ending, because I don't have one, that's not dishonesty, that's just accurately describing what this life is, it doesn't have endings, it has next sites. Nine days from now I'll be on a bus, probably at night because the day buses cost more and the night ones let you sleep sitting up if you're tired enough, and I'll have a bag with everything I own in it, which fits in one bag, which either sounds like poverty or freedom depending entirely on your mood that day, and I'll go to Mysore or wherever the maybe turns into an actual address, no number, behind something, near a water tank, and I'll register with a hospital there too, someday, if I'm unlucky enough to need to, and I already know what's going to happen with that form.

I'm not owning any of it. Not the land back home, not the room I'm sleeping in tonight, not even really the two years, in the sense that none of it accumulates into anything, no seniority, no pension, no address history that adds up to a life anyone official can trace. What I own is the six months of calluses on my hands and whatever's in the one bag and this specific, precise, thumba sharp anger about a form that had a box for everything except where I actually live.

Sari. That's it. That's the whole thing. I've got a bus to catch in nine days and I haven't even started packing, not that packing takes long when everything you own agrees to fit in one bag whether you ask it nicely or not.