The Village Inside the City

And yet a neighbourhood can be close to everything and still feel cut off.

Kotla is an old urban village folded into the capital. Its lanes are narrow, its roads broken, its market restless with people hurrying to work. The city has grown around it, but growth does not always mean exchange. A vibrant mosaic of languages, customs, faiths, trades and ways of living is within reach; still, some young people describe a life that can feel enclosed by sameness, old habits and a reluctance to look outward. It is not a verdict on Kotla or its people. It is a question about what a city owes the neighbourhoods it surroundsand what a neighbourhood might discover when it lets the city in.

When I first returned to Delhi from America, a friend heard I was near Kotla and warned me to be careful of the men from there. I remember being startled. In my younger years, Kotla was simply the neighbourhood next door. It did not carry, for me, the reputation people now attach to it. The warning stayed with me, not because I accepted it, but because it revealed how easily a place can be reduced to a rumourand how readily a rumour can become a wall.

On dating apps, I have heard the neighbourhood invoked as shorthand for danger. Young men and women have spoken to me about boys being drawn into groups and factions, about the pull of bad company where the older Indian idea of satsangatithe company that shapes ushas given way to something less sustaining. These are perceptions and experiences, not a sentence on every young man from Kotla. Toshi Siddiqui is one reason we must resist that sentence.

Toshi is 17, a first-year B.Com student at Jamia Hamdard University, and, when we meet, he carries himself with a quiet self-possession. He chose commerce because it felt right for him. His CUET score was 426; he says the competition for a place at SRCC was too steep. A young person can work hard, earn a score that once might have seemed extraordinary, and still find that the doors he hoped to enter are narrowing. Toshi speaks of this without self-pity. He is among the youngest students in his class, and knows he must work to be taken seriously.

He is not trying to escape Kotla by pretending it has nothing to teach him. He sees what needs repair. The lanes are broken, he says, and rubbish is left on the roads. If he could change one thing, he would build better roads. Then he speaks of education and of changing peoples attitudes: where to put rubbish, how to treat women, how to live responsibly among others. These are not grand slogans. They are the things a young man notices when he has grown up there.

His father came to Delhi from Kandla, in Shamli district, when he was 13. The eldest of six children, he worked hard to support his family. Now he runs an aluminium and glass business with workshops of their own. Toshis mother, also hardworking, is the eldest among her siblings and cousinsthe one who cares for everyone, fusses over them, keeps the family together. Their son has grown up watching responsibility as a daily practice.

His parents have not placed him in a race they chose for him. They have not insisted that he become a doctor, engineer or civil servant. They want him to succeed, to stand on his own feet, and to do well at whatever he chooses. That freedom has not made him directionless. It has made him ask what success might be good for.

Toshi wants to become wealthy enough to help people who are poor, ill or without shelter. He has seen families outside AIIMS sleeping on pavements and bus stands while they wait for treatment. He imagines arranging food and a place to stay for them. He wants to be able to give without making someone beg. He also wants to make his parents proud, and one day to build a happy family of his own.

There is tenderness in him, too. His younger brother Safwan is in Class IV, and the age gap is large enough that Toshi sometimes feels like a parent. Still, he does not want to hurry the boy into grown-up responsibility. Let him play, he says. Childhood is for playing. One day, Safwan will have to think about lifes burdens; for now, he should have the freedom to enjoy being a child.

When Toshi talks about sexual violence, that tenderness turns to anger. He is tired of rules being made for girlswhat they wear, where they go, how they behavewhile boys are not taught the most basic boundaries. Mothers and fathers must tell their sons not to leer, harass or force themselves on anyone, he says. We keep warning girls to protect themselves. We should be teaching boys how to respect other people.

He remembers a protest where, in his experience, women seemed able to occupy public space without fear. He thought it mattered that the young people there were looking at one another as fellow citizens, rather than as targets. His observation cannot stand in for every womans experience, or for the safety of every gathering. But it speaks to what he hopes young people can make possible: a public life in which women do not have to measure every glance, touch or passing comment.

At one point, his anger reaches for the harshest punishment for rapists. I hear in that the frustration of a teenager who wants violence against women to stop now. But justice must do more than frighten; it must protect, investigate, convict fairly and prevent the next assault. The more lasting part of Toshis answer is his insistence that boys must be raised to understand consent and responsibility, and that women should not carry the burden of mens behaviour.

Toshi mostly grew up with Hindu friends. He says he did not feel discriminated against. When I ask what he sees in the mirrora Muslim, an Indian, a man, a young personhe says he sees himself. At night, he thinks about what he might do better the next morning: study harder, help someone, do something for his country.

He does not watch cricket, so the question of whom he supports when India plays Pakistan does not interest him. His answer to what country he belongs to is simple: India. It should not have to be tested.

In Toshi, I see a young citizen whose ambition is not to rise above other people, but to become capable of helping them. That possibility belongs to Kotla, too. A neighbourhood so close to the heart of Delhi should not remain stranded at the edge of its promises. The city must make room for its villages; the villages must be able to meet the city without surrendering their memory. The past can be an inheritance, but it cannot be the only future on offer.

Kotlas old tombs and narrow lanes belong to Delhis history. So do its young people: Toshi, drawing anime and portraits, studying business economics, thinking about broken roads, hungry patients, womens safety and the country he calls his own. He is not the whole story of Kotla. No one person could be. But he is proof that a neighbourhoods future cannot be read from its reputation. Sometimes it is already walking to class, taking the long way to the gym, and quietly imagining how to make life kinder for someone else. (ANI/Suvir Saran)

Disclaimer: Suvir Saran is a Masterchef, Author, Hospitality Consultant And Educator. The views expressed in this article are his own.