They are tailors, small roadside shopkeepers, vendors, house-helps, construction workers, factory workers and day labourers, the people of this community at Govindpuri, they’ve come, people of many linguistic communities and many religious faiths, from many different cities of India as well as neighbouring areas to settle here in Navjivan and Bhumiheen and Jawahar camps, in Govindpuri – their low incomes not affording them any place else in Delhi.

“These were all hills once and I tore them and built my house,” says Mehr Jahan, standing at the doorstep of her windowless one-room that also houses a stationary store. She, like many of those who have been here for the last 22 years, remembers the days when they tore down forests and broke rocks to build the roads and houses on which they walk and live in today. Her daughter is married and has moved away to the DDA flats, and “my shy and beautiful grandchildren come to visit me here where I live,” she says, smiling.

Mehr Jahan lives alone after her husband’s death. Monsoon rains splatter down through leaking roof and mess her dark, but neatly arranged room, yet Mehr continues to live here, for memories there are many, like Mehr Jahan, also own stores.

Duija, living right across the street from Katha Khazana, has also lived here for 22 long years, her family of children and grandchildren growing over the years, spreading into rooms near and around the store.

Duija speaks proudly of her large family, the responsibilities she has as an Elder, and of her long standing relations with her neighbours. She too speaks of the open drains, the small sunless rooms, bad water, unhygienic living conditions, the meagre opportunities for income generation. Like Mehr, Duija knows that it is not enough to have a store or a tea stall selling bread, biscuits and toffee to support a family, or even oneself. She speaks of the work done by Katha with respect, of the vocational training skills women have gained, the raised income levels of families.

She points to her daughter who she seeks to enrol at the Katha school. There is a gleam in her eyes, and a curious look in her daughter’s as Duija speaks. Duija is one of the many who don’t work at Katha, but attend the Ma Mandal meetings, treating the Katha school and its activities as a wind for change in the communityj, the Pradhan of 200 homes, and who the women look up to with respect, sits in her blue room with jars of pickles on the shelves and wooden birds on the walls that bespeak the effort she puts to keep her small room clean and beautiful, despite the daily fights, the anger and despondence of living in a place that promises so little. It is perhaps in the same spirit for order and the hope and longing for a better life that she speaks warmly of Katha and its initiatives, even though ill health does not permit her to work there.

Amongst independent women entrepreneurs like who generates a sizeable income from her efficiently run tailoring shop, there is desire for a better life. She sends her children to Katha to acquire training in computers. Her daughter wants to become a doctor, she proudly says. , who began running his mother’s tailoring shop after her death, and made it into one of the most successful tailoring shops in the neighbourhood, speaks of his student days at Katha. Katha’s role was that of parents, he says. He continues to stay in touch with the teachers who gave him guidance with his life, education, and career. Katha continues to be an important determinant for him in deciding whether he will stay in Bhumiheen. His two sisters are still studying, one of them is in her final B.A. Political Science honours, desiring to be an advocate.

Murshida Begum’s daughter and Harun Ansari’s sister are not the only ones who reach out to lives that their parents could not aspire to. Phirdaus too, twelve years old, a Kathayan now, a dreamer-doer like other Kathayans, with that inner imperative to excel, to take life into one’s own hands!