Ek aur aa gayi aakash naapne.”

One more has arrived to measure the sky.

One more woman has come to measure the immeasurable. When Syeda moved to Karawal Nagar, Roopmati said this about her. A few years later, Syeda repeated this for Seema who then said the same for Khushboo. No one remembers the source of this adage. But it continues to be said for every new migrant woman who joins the workforce in Karawal Nagar.

Astronomers measure the sky in degrees, minutes and seconds to confirm if a star has moved closer to the moon. The women workers of Karawal Nagar count the pieces, the dozens, the kilos, of things they prepare, to measure how close they are to survival.

When Kallu Ram told Syeda he had fixed up a cycle parts job for her, she imagined herself standing in a factory assembly line. The dhak-dhak-dhak of big factory machines. A long, endless hall as in the Dilip Kumar film Mazdoor. With workers standing next to each other who laugh and work together. And sing songs in the break time as they share food from their tiffin carriers.

Instead, she found herself sitting in her mouldy, dark, one-room house doing the cycle parts manufacturing work.

I will hit you so hard, your teeth will fall off!

I will beat you to pulp, your intestines will hang from your body!

Salman and Shazeb brawled all day.

You shut up, mongoose’s offspring!

Seven-year-old Reshma regularly yelled expletives at the tenants.

She had to push buckets full of water as big as her from the shared handpump. She would spill water all throughout the corridor while dragging them to their room every day.

Khichdi simmered on the clay oven the third consecutive day, much to the kids’ disapproval. This was the one thing about which all three were in silent solidarity.

In this domestic commotion, Syeda struggled to make cycle brake wires. Nathu Ram, a thekedar, subcontractor, had provided her the raw material: steel strands and plastic sleeves. The rate for preparing 12 dozen brake wires, 144 pieces, was Rs 80.

In Sabhapur, she had seen women do per-piece work in their free time. But Karawal Nagar offered it as a full-time occupation to all women.

Things that are necessary for a common person’s survival — food, snacks, spices, cosmetics, stationery, garments, automobile parts, books, prints, spare parts, decoration pieces, toys, kitchen appliances, hardware, carpentry tools, plumbing material, building material, devotional items, festival goodies, medical supplies, electric goods, electronic goods — everything is made and packaged here by women on a per-piece basis...

...Home-based workers are those who are directly or indirectly employed by an employer and work at home, or premises other than the workplace of the employer, for remuneration. They are paid piece-based wages, mostly per 12 dozen or 144 pieces, not time-based ones, like those received by workers in a factory who work in shifts. That helps to circumvent the minimum wage set by the government. Syeda was one of them now.

Karawal Nagar is an industrial town and home to several small-scale industries. Like Sabhapur, it was earlier a village, called Dhodhi, on the Delhi-UP border. It had a large Rajput population engaged in farming, a Gujjar population engaged in cattle rearing, and a significant Dalit population. In 1973, a few months after the Delimitation Act of 1972 came into effect which increased the number of Parliament and Assembly constituencies all over India, a big chunk of Dhodhi village land was acquired by the government to carve two new Assembly constituencies out of it: Kara-
wal Nagar and Mustafabad.

Syeda’s first five months in Karawal Nagar, from February to June 2001, were a whirlwind for the family. Unlike the namkeen factory in Sabhapur which also had a living space, this job did not come with accommodation: they now had to rent their own living space.

Akmal had found a place near Kali Ghata Road, in West Karawal Nagar. It took two whole days of going from lane to lane, looking for a vacant place that had doors and, most importantly, a separate toilet. Reshma had flatly refused to poo or pee in the open. She was growing up. Their new dwelling was a ground-floor room, the size of one of the bathrooms in Sukhbir Gujjar’s house. It was all they could afford for Rs 500 per month.

The decade Syeda moved to Karawal Nagar, its population doubled. According to the 2011 census, between 2001 and 2011, the population increased from 1.5 lakh to 2.3 lakh. This was also the decade when the number of internal migrants in India doubled.

There was an influx of people looking for accommodation close to income-earning opportunities here. Karawal Nagar mostly had tiny, one-storey independent houses on small plots...

...Often, many families lived in rooms next to each other along with the house owner. They shared the same toilet, if there was one. In the house in which Syeda’s family was renting a room, there was just one Indian style toilet at the end of the house. A makeshift cloth enclosure had been put up around it by the tenants. The children would count other people’s farts and speculate about who had diarrhoea as they waited in the queue to use the toilet in the mornings.

The house had only one hand pump that everyone had to share since the municipal water supply was minimal or of extremely low pressure.

The room Akmal and Syeda rented was so small that if three of them lay next to each other without any gaps in between, there would be no room for the other two to also lie down. February in Delhi is cold and so sleeping outside the room was out of the question. Inspired by other tenants, Akmal fetched some discarded wooden planks from a local timber shop. He propped them up on one wall to create a bunk bed structure as a sleeping arrangement for the other two people...

...They had a gas stove but no official papers to obtain a gas connection. The gas cylinders available through the black market were unaffordable. So they made a clay oven in the common area, like everyone else. For cooking fuel, it was cheaper to use twigs and dung cakes, which they bought from the dairies in Karawal Nagar...

...Akmal, now thirty-one, had silver sideburns. After a series of setbacks to his self-worth and demotions in the last decade from a super-skilled handloom weaver to a power mill sidekick to a cart puller, he got his first promotion.

He had got the job of a cart rickshaw puller at a monthly salary of Rs 3,000. He had to ferry raw material and finished products from a bag factory. Bags of all kinds: school bags, luggage, office bags and whatnot. And unlike Syeda’s, his was a real factory with ten to twelve workers.

“Arre, all work comes to a halt when Akmal Mian does not turn up,” the thekedar would say. Akmal had not felt so important in a long time.

Perhaps he needed that ego boost. He was now also the primary breadwinner since Syeda was still struggling with per-piece work.

He wanted to be the man he had not been so far since their move to Delhi.

Get me chai!

Massage my feet!

You greet a man looking like a chudail when he comes home after a long day of work!

Chudail. Witch.

It is true that with her dark circles and freckled face she looked like the oldest twenty-eight-year-old ever. Her love for finely cut kurtas and fancy necklines was long lost. She had not trimmed her hair in three years. The split ends in the braid made it look like a broom. Where was the time? To sleep or look in the mirror. And when there was, she didn’t want to.

Excerpted from The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian by Neha Dixit published by Juggernaut Books