We are the not-people

“We are the not-people” is Prabaker’s wry description of life in the Cuffe Parade Slum, where thousands of residents live in a place that authorities regard as illegal and unrecognized. The phrase turns administrative exclusion into an identity spoken aloud: the people are present, numerous, and organized, yet official reality treats them as if they do not exist.

The phrase and its setting

The words arise in a conversation about the long campaign for a primary school. The slum has about eight hundred school-age children, while nearby schools are full. Residents have organized their own teachers and found a site, but the authorities resist the project because a school could give the settlement a measure of legitimacy. As the narrator explains, the slum is, in theory, neither legal nor recognized. Prabaker answers with the phrase’s bitter logic: if the settlement does not officially exist, its residents become “not-people.”

His formulation extends from people to place. He calls their dwellings “the not-houses, where we are not-living,” carrying the denial from legal status into the ordinary facts of shelter and residence. The repeated negation is comic in its construction but severe in its implication: what residents know through daily life is disavowed by the terms through which authorities recognize land, homes, and people.

Material life beside official denial

The contradiction is visible in the settlement’s physical surroundings. The Cuffe Parade Slum occupies ten acres and contains seven thousand small huts housing twenty-five thousand of the city’s poorest residents. Nearby, the World Trade Centre is a modern, air-conditioned complex with shops displaying jewels, silks, carpets, and craftwork. The contrast is not simply between wealth and poverty: the slum has no electricity, running water, or toilets, and residents cannot be sure that authorities will not clear it from one day to the next.

Against those concrete conditions, “not-people” names a political vulnerability. The community is not absent from the city; it is exposed to the city’s unequal arrangements while denied secure recognition within them. Prabaker’s phrase makes that gap legible without pretending that the words themselves can resolve it.

The “not-school” and a provisional foothold

The school campaign produces a partial, precarious answer. The municipality agrees to a compromise: a temporary school may be established nearby, with another to be organized soon. The narrator calls it a “not-school,” extending Prabaker’s pattern of naming institutions that exist in practice but lack the full assurance of official standing. Its classrooms are a real achievement for children who otherwise have no place in already-full local schools, yet the permission comes with a condition: the schools must be torn down when construction is finished.

That deadline remains uncertain. Towers have already been under construction for five years, and the narrator estimates that work may continue for about three more, perhaps longer. No one knows what will happen when it ends; in theory, the slum will be cleared. The temporary school therefore embodies both community action and its limit: residents secure an opening for education, but not a guarantee that their homes or institutions will endure.

A language of presence

The phrase’s force comes from the difference between official nonrecognition and lived presence. Residents have teachers, children, homes, and collective purposes; their campaign demonstrates that they act together even when the state’s categories withhold legitimacy. Elsewhere, the narrative shows the community forming its own systems of judgment and forgiveness. The language of being “not-people” therefore sits alongside evidence of social life and responsibility that the official label cannot contain.

Prabaker’s playful, inverted wording does not soften the insecurity it describes. It makes the denial audible, then reveals its absurdity: people who are plainly living in the city are described as not living there. The expression condenses the slum’s central predicament into a phrase that is at once a joke, a protest, and a record of how precarious recognition can be.