Power, oppression, and human endurance

Power, oppression, and human endurance is a recurring idea in the account of life in the Cuffe Parade Slum: official power can dismantle homes and restrict access to care, while the people exposed to those decisions repeatedly organize to survive. The contrast is not between helplessness and easy triumph. It is between systems that make poor residents vulnerable and the resourcefulness that keeps them alive, even when recovery means rebuilding what has been destroyed rather than escaping the conditions that made destruction possible.

Institutional power and insecure homes

The demolition of huts shows oppression in its most visible form. Lin explains to Karla that officials periodically remove houses to limit the slum’s spread beyond its boundary. A police force arrives in several large trucks, while a separate truck brings council workers and equipment. The police form up in two rows as the workers begin pulling down huts with ropes and grappling hooks. Residents have time to save only basic necessities such as babies, money, and papers; cooking equipment, bedding, clothes, and children’s toys are caught up in the wreckage. Some residents are stopped by police, and several young men are taken away.

From a high-rise window, Lin, Karla, and other observers can see the operation but cannot hear it. That distance sharpens rather than softens the scene: the destruction is systematic, visible, and nearly silent to those watching from above. The contrast between the building’s thirty-five floors and the homes below turns the act of witnessing into part of the episode’s moral pressure. People who watch feel compassion and dread, but also shame at their own relief that their homes are not among those being demolished.

The operation clears a strip about one hundred metres long and ten metres wide, destroying roughly sixty houses and displacing at least two hundred people in less than twenty minutes. The homes of construction workers in the legal part of the slum remain safe, yet work at the building site stops in sympathy. Those workers recognize that the eventual plan would also destroy their homes: the settlement is expected to be cleared and replaced by a car park for limousines. The immediate demolition is therefore both a particular loss and a rehearsal of a larger displacement.

Endurance without security

The demolished houses are likely to return, but that capacity to rebuild does not cancel the damage. Lin explains that residents may put the settlement back together by the next day, only to face another demolition the following month, in the same or a different part of the slum. Rebuilding requires buying bamboo and mats again; some residents who are arrested may remain absent for months. Repetition becomes a mechanism of control: the community’s persistence restores shelter, but also allows authorities to repeat the dispossession without resolving its causes.

Karla’s reflection on the contrast between the force that crushes people and their ability to endure it becomes a key formulation of the concept. Lin later finds that she recorded the thought in her journal, linking it to the demolition he had witnessed with her. The movement from a remark made in the moment to a line preserved in private writing gives endurance a second meaning: it is not only the act of rebuilding, but also the effort to remember and name what the community is being made to bear. The journal confirms that the scene remains significant to Karla as well as to Lin.

Unequal access to medical care

The same power imbalance appears less spectacularly in the clinic’s daily work. Lin says he is not trained as a doctor and that he cannot identify or treat every illness brought to him. When he cannot help, he sends patients to the diagnostic clinic at St. George Hospital, but many return without having been seen. He has visited the hospital twice and understands that it is overwhelmed, understaffed, and overcrowded rather than simply indifferent: his clinic sees about fifty patients a day, while the hospital sees six hundred and sometimes as many as a thousand.

The obstacle is also economic. Hospital staff have suggested that referrals from licensed practitioners might help patients move ahead in the queue, but residents cannot afford the doctor’s visit needed to obtain those referrals. They turn to Lin because they are poor, while his own limited training means that he cannot reliably replace the care they need. His account makes the problem structural: the people with the greatest need face a sequence of barriers to professional treatment, and a small community clinic cannot compensate for a shortage of accessible medical services. When Lin calls the residents his people, Doctor Hamid notices how far his sense of belonging has shifted, making the language of responsibility part of this unequal medical reality.

Cholera and collective response

The cholera outbreak exposes how quickly hardship can become a crisis when care and infrastructure are strained. A health official, Sandeep Jyoti, reports several other outbreaks between the slum and Kandivli, including a severe outbreak in Thane, while local hospitals are already overcrowded. He describes the Cuffe Parade outbreak as one of many sites the city hopes to contain during the monsoon. His assessment places the slum’s emergency within a wider public-health problem, but it does not remove the immediate need to treat its residents.

Qasim Ali Hussein turns his home into a command centre and convenes about twenty residents to plan a response. Their measures address contaminated water and the everyday routes by which infection may spread: they plan to purify holding tanks and water containers across the settlement’s seven thousand huts, establish shallow disinfectant-filled trenches in the lanes, distribute antiseptic soap, and set up safe disposal points. Chai shops and restaurants are to provide boiled food with sterilised cups and bowls. Residents also organize the removal of the dead, while Lin takes responsibility for oral rehydration solution and preparing a homemade mixture. Qasim Ali supplies Johnny Cigar with a thick bundle of rupee notes to purchase purification tablets and other medicines.

The response is demanding, but the residents accept their tasks without hesitation. Their cooperation is not presented as proof that the deprivation around them is acceptable; it is a practical answer to danger when official help is limited and time matters. Lin’s willingness to take on the work is complicated by shame. His neighbour Radha had been ill for two days before dying, and he had not known. A week earlier, after his clinic’s patient queue finally disappeared, he had celebrated with Prabaker as if the settlement’s illnesses had been conquered. During Radha’s final illness, Lin had instead been attending to tourists at a five-star hotel. He knows his actions did not cause the epidemic, but cannot dismiss the feeling that his earlier pride and inattention made him complicit. Endurance here includes responsibility: survival depends on collective labor, and that labor forces Lin to confront the limits of his earlier confidence.

Narrative significance

Across demolition, medical exclusion, and epidemic response, the idea holds together distinct kinds of harm. Police-backed destruction is immediate and visible; the barriers to hospital care and the risks of an outbreak accumulate through poverty, overcrowding, and limited resources. Against both, residents build temporary shelter, organize sanitation, and care for the sick and dead. Their endurance has force and dignity, but it is not a substitute for security or accessible institutions. By pairing the image of homes repeatedly rebuilt with the work of preventing disease, the narrative presents persistence as both a communal strength and evidence of the burdens imposed on the people who must persist.