THE HARIJAN STRUGGLE

Before dawn in Mironjilla Colony, in the old Bangshal quarter of Dhaka, the sweepers are already out with their brooms and hooked bamboo poles. For four hundred years their families have cleared the drains of a city that has never once called them its own. Then a white car stops at the mouth of the lane, a notice goes up on a wall, and the colony is given forty-eight hours to leave.

Mangal Basfor, a sixty-year-old drain cleaner who has lived his whole life on what others throw away, must find a way to stand his ground. Beside him are his wife Kamolini, who holds the household together with a gold ring and a stubborn calm; Shammi Hela, a young man who decides to study law; Meena, a small girl whose drawings may become the colony's most precious proof; and Chinothi Rani Devi, the ancient keeper of memory who carries a Goddess and a language across the generations.

When a young sweeper dies in a drain, grief hardens into resolve. A lawyer takes the case without a fee, a reporter turns her camera on the people no one looks at, and the colony begins to gather its scraps of paper, its stories and its courage. Violence, delay and heartbreak follow, but so does something the colony has never had before: a chance to be seen.

"The Harijan Struggle" is a quiet, powerful novel about dignity, belonging and the right to a home. It asks who holds a city up, and what a city owes the people who clean