New Delhi: Syeda’s life is sandwiched between two riots. She came to Delhi from Varanasi after a Babri Masjid demolition riot, only to have her home burned down when communal clashes erupted again in the city in 2020. A saree weaver, Syeda X found that in the busy lanes of the capital city, life would come a cruel full circle.
Her story is recalled in excruciating detail in journalist and author Neha Dixit’s new book, The Many Lives of Syeda X. For almost a decade out of the 30 years in Delhi Syeda took on more than 50 jobs, she spent time with Dixit.
The publisher, Juggernaut, sought to remind the readers at the launch of the book at the ML Bhartia Auditorium in Delhi that it is not just the story of one woman or one family but millions of workers in India.
“This [book] is about what it means to live in urban India today,” Parth Mehrotra, editor-in-chief of Juggernaut, said at the book launch.
The auditorium in Delhi was packed to the brim with a cheering, whistling and thunderous audience comprising journalists, lawyers, activists, and students applauding Dixit.
“Delhi, the national capital, has forever been explored through the eyes of its rulers – either via the charms of the Mughals or the power corridors of New Delhi – but hardly through the eyes of the roughly 35,000 poor migrants who come to the city every day, never to return,” Dixit said.
It was evident how deeply connected Dixit’s collaborators and readers were. Mehrotra, moderator Nilanjana Roy, and the audience were all emotional as Dixit took the stage to introduce the book.
The many lives of Syeda X
As Roy and Dixit settled into their seats to start a conversation, the former iterated that it wasn’t just a book launch event but “a celebration of Neha, the kind of person she is, what she brings to journalism and writing”.
Dixit revealed she met Syeda in 2009 when unorganised workers of North East Delhi had started a strike. She met a bunch of women and struck up a conversation. This is where she decided to document the life of Syeda.
“In journalistic space, there’s only space to write about what happened around an event, there are a few follow-ups, and that’s about it. In this case, what was important to me was…Delhi has a lot of medium and small manufacturing units, particularly in North East Delhi. So, I started going to a number of working-class areas in Delhi. This is where I met Syeda, who used to clean almonds,” Dixit said.
When Dixit approached Syeda, she says the latter was quite amused about someone wanting to document her life. The journalist delved into her journey of reporting for the book. Karawal Nagar opened up to her with its intimacies, and, in return, Dixit had to open up to them.
“When you ask personal questions, you’ll also have to answer personal questions. One of the questions that everyone in Karawal Nagar has asked me is: Why don’t you have children?” Dixit revealed to an audience, amused to hear about such conversations.
Dixit recalled that over her frequent visits to Karawal Nagar over the years, the women of the community slowly accepted her as a regular traveler to their homes’ by-lanes.
She also read out an excerpt from the book where Syeda recalled the time she had moved to Karawal Nagar. “Ek aur aa gayi aakaash naapne (Another woman is here to measure the limits of the sky),” a woman in the neighbourhood, Roopmati, remarked when she first moved in. Sometime later, Dixit read, Syeda would repeat this for Seema who moved in. And Seema would repeat it for someone else. “Nobody knows the origin of the adage, but it is said for every migrant woman who joins the workforce at Karawal Nagar,” Dixit said.
The journey of the book
At the launch, Dixit recalled how she started freelance journalism after the media house where she was employed at pivoted toward focusing on stories of the urban rich, advising against ‘jholawala bleeding heart’ stories of the urban poor or struggles of workers or women’s rights.
Dixit says the approach of newsrooms toward gender and gender crime reporting completely changed after the anti-rape movement in 2012, following the brutal gang rape in December of that year in Delhi.
In the following years, Dixit would report on sexual violence in rural and urban areas, organised and unorganised sectors and during communal violence. While newsrooms, she says, couldn’t dismiss stories of sexual assault, the debate didn’t transcend a narrow space between policing and laws for the protection of women.
“My book was born out of a lack of an intersectional gender lens in the mainstream media. To put it simply, I wanted to report on women as legitimate and equal citizens of the world, who have the same concerns as any other human being. Sexual violence may be part of their story but it is not the whole story. It is an extra ‘thing’ they have. To handle but it is not the only thing. I wanted to tell the full story,” she writes in her book.
Dixit also spoke of how Delhi’s rising pollution levels, which led to the closing of several industrial units within the city, also caused displacement and loss of jobs to Syeda and her family. They had initially moved to Chandni Chowk in the ’90s but over the years were pushed to the fringes of the city.
At the launch, Dixit gave glimpses of what’s to come in the book. She spoke of Syeda’s husband, an able saree weaver from Varanasi who has been reduced to a cart puller in Delhi, pushing him into an existential abyss and alcoholism. She spoke of Syeda’s daughter, Reshma, who wants to assert her identity as a Dilliwala even as she finds herself working in washrooms of malls of the capital where she’s asked to be invisible. She spoke about her sons, who have had their encounters with Delhi police.
Toward the end of the conversation, Roy remarked that Syeda’s book was “a democratic book. It brings an entire mohalla, a neighbourhood. It is a plural book that moves effortlessly from voice to voice to bring them into the conversation”.
The audience then asked questions. Among the first questions was about Dixit’s choice to keep Syeda anonymous. “Names of most people I met for the book have been changed. My journalistic ethics had to be in play since there are a lot of legal cases against the people I mention in the book. The ‘X’ part denotes that it could be any woman in any part of North India living that life on the edge,” Dixit said.
Responding to a question by ThePrint on how poverty affects interpersonal relationships, Dixit said: “Recently there was a report that 60 per cent of Indians are not eating three meals a day. If this is the priority every single day, what is the scope to think about how the other person in the family is feeling? Like in the book, mother and daughter Syeda and Reshma are extremely heroic in the things that they do, but they’re not in sync.”
During the Q&A session, it also became evident how laborious and lengthy this project was for Dixit, who only collected information in the first 5-6 years before she sat down to start writing.
And it is this hard work and dedication toward the story that has made this project special for Neha, her collaborators and readers.
“Thank you, Neha, for your friendship, and on behalf of Juggernaut, thank you for the privilege for letting us publish your book. What are we doing as publishers if we don’t publish Neha Dixit or the Many Lives of Syeda X… it gives meaning to our lives,” Mehrotra said.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)