It was a mela Parvati never saw. The curtains had come up wherever she looked, even around the strip of land where her cows usually graze. "Bandhook leke seedhe khade hue the," she said about men in uniform clutching guns, who would not let anyone through without a pass. She did see performers in bright costumes walk past her thatched hut, who had deboarded mini-buses coming in from the DND Expressway. Weeks before March 11, 12 and 13 last year, small farmers such as Parvati who cultivate vegetables on the floodplains on the west bank of the Yamuna – without permission – were asked to pack up and leave.
