The celebration feast in the village in the sky turns an unfinished Bombay skyscraper into a gathering place for residents of a settlement whose existence the authorities do not officially recognize. The occasion celebrates a hard-won temporary school and the birth of a long-awaited son; its setting, twenty-three floors above the slum, makes community achievement visible beside the uncertain future of the homes below.

The school campaign and the reason to celebrate

The school campaign had answered a pressing need: roughly eight hundred school-age children lived in the settlement, while the schools for miles around were already full. Residents had organized teachers and found a suitable site themselves, but the authorities resisted. As Lin explains to Karla, the objection was bound up with the settlement’s unofficial status: recognizing a school might lend legitimacy to a place that was legally unrecognized. Prabaker makes the erasure concrete through a joke that describes the residents as not-people in not-houses where they are not-living. The humor gives voice to a serious condition: the community lives there, but its presence can be denied in official terms.

The municipality eventually accepted a compromise, allowing a temporary school to operate nearby and promising that another would be organized soon. The concession was not secure permanence. The schools would have to be taken down when construction ended, and the slum itself was expected, at least in theory, to be cleared. Work on the towers had already continued for five years, with perhaps three more years to go, and no one knew what would happen afterward. The feast therefore marks a real victory without disguising its limits. The campaign had sometimes become violent; now the residents could celebrate the school, even as the future of the settlement remained unsettled.

A second reason for the gathering was the birth of a son to a man who had previously had five daughters. He was holding a special lunch before the larger school celebration that evening, and everyone had been invited. The joined occasions make the meal both a public recognition of collective effort and a family celebration. Prabaker calls the destination the village in the sky, and Lin points upward: the name refers to the unfinished towers themselves, not to a separate neighborhood.

A feast inside the unfinished towers

The group travels by elevator rather than climbing to the twenty-third floor, where lunch is laid out on bare concrete. Steel rods and wires rise from the floor; evenly spaced columns divide the enormous space, and cables cross the ceiling. The building has no finished interior fittings. What will eventually be apartments is, for now, an open construction floor temporarily adapted for people, animals, and a communal meal.

The residents have arranged distinct uses around the pillars. A pen made from wicker and bamboo holds goats, chickens, cats, and dogs among bedding and discarded scraps. Blankets and mattresses are gathered by another pillar for people who sleep there; a third area, marked by small mats and toys, is set aside for children to play. These improvised domestic spaces make the floor more than a dramatic viewpoint over the slum: it functions, for the day, as a place where people and animals can gather and where ordinary needs have been accommodated within a structure still being built.

The meal itself is carefully prepared and abundant. Women serve saffron rice, alu palak, kheema, bhajee, and other dishes from kerosene stoves onto large banana leaves used as plates. Guests wash their hands at a drum of water and sit on reed mats. The women have their own banquet area about five metres away; Karla is the only woman among the twenty men in Lin’s group. Johnny Cigar asks how she likes the party, and she praises both the food and the place. The scene presents a shared celebration while also recording the separate arrangement of the women’s meal and Karla’s unusual position within the men’s group.

The hosts and the city around them

The new father, Dilip, is introduced to Karla by Johnny Cigar. He bows with his hands pressed together, then moves away, smiling shyly, to oversee tea being prepared at two large stoves. Dilip works as a rigger on the construction site. The site manager has given him the day off so he can organize the feast for family and friends. His hut stands on the legal side of the slum, close to Lin’s across a wire: a small detail that places the celebration near a boundary separating recognized from unrecognized habitation.

That boundary is overshadowed by the towers. By the time the group arrives, concrete reaches roughly three-quarters of their height, but windows, doors, and fittings have not yet been installed. Their unfinished openings expose the labor taking place on the floors within, while their sheer scale makes them a visible sign of the construction whose completion may mean the slum’s removal. Prabaker, who lives in the illegal settlement and has no connection to the project, boasts about the buildings as though they were his own. Lin corrects him that they are the tallest in Bombay, rather than in all India, and notes that lunch is being served on the twenty-third floor. The exchange folds local pride and playful correction into the scene without resolving the contrast between the residents’ lives and the development rising above them.

Celebration beside an ominous sign

The feast also carries a brief warning. Beside the women’s banquet area, two men scrub at a word painted on the wall, but SAPNA remains legible in large English capitals. Lin says he has seen the name around the city and asks Johnny Cigar about it. Johnny identifies Sapna as a thief and a goonda, and says that he has been breaking into houses, stealing, and killing. The mark interrupts the celebratory setting with evidence that violence is present beyond the school campaign’s earlier struggles. The feast does not become a confrontation, but the name left on the wall gives the scene a second register: communal success and hospitality coexist with anxiety about danger elsewhere in the city.

As an event, the gathering joins a temporary institutional gain to a domestic milestone, then places both within an uncertain urban landscape. The residents can fill an unfinished upper floor with food, animals, children’s play space, and company; they can also only celebrate a school the municipality has allowed them to establish provisionally. The village in the sky is therefore both an imaginative name for the party’s high perch and a reminder of how provisional the community’s foothold remains.