Perched on a peeling brown bench at the corner of a puddle-lined street in Dharavi, surrounded by stray cats and children, sits Joseph Koli. He is a man with 68 years behind him and innumerable kilometres of roads beneath his name.

He has been here since 1957. Not in some distant ancestral village, but right here in Dharavi. “We are the indigenous people of Mumbai,” he says, not with pride or entitlement, but as a simple statement of fact. There’s no migration story, no fading farmland. They have been the children of Koliwada long before Mumbai got its present name.

Joseph spent 40 years with the Public Works Department. He started in 1983 and worked across the sprawl of Mumbai – Law College, Chunabhatti, Chembur, Phoenix Mills in 2012 — the list is long, but his presence was steady. While the PWD’s main office stood near the Mantralaya, he rarely saw it. Instead, he worked in what he calls cabins. Temporary little rooms were built wherever the work was being done. Cabins would appear and disappear as their work progressed and was completed, which was primarily repair work. They never had a fixed office, but they always had a job. The impermanence kept them moving, exploring areas to be mended, where somehow this area never ended up being Dharavi.

His work revolved around mending broken roads and the endless damage of living infrastructure. He remembered a pothole on the Sion-Panvel Link Road so large it had become part of local memory. Their endless toil repaired it all, while the city forgets the disturbance and goes about its day.

Today he is retired. He lives in a home just minutes from the bench where we met him. His son now works in Bhandup, working as a technician at a cable office, and his daughter lives in Nahur. He has three grandchildren - two boys in the eleventh and tenth grade, and one baby girl, just nine months old, often found wriggling on his lap. Most mornings, Joseph walks her around, nodding at neighbours and exchanging updates about the neighbourhood. Everyone goes about their day with these issues at the back of their mind, but silently hoping that one day their motherland would get higher regard than a few other roads.

He still helps around. His brother used to work for the telephone companies before they shut down. Joseph now helps maintain the Koli Jamat Hall just down the street. It is quiet work, like everything else he has done - it adds up over time.

When asked about Dharavi’s redevelopment, Joseph doesn’t begin with buildings, he starts with small-scale interventions to improve the neighbourhood. “Now each street has bulbs,” he says. “You can see who’s sitting where. It feels safer.” He tells us about the street lights that have lit up the dark alleys of Koliwada, making them safer. This was a part of Koli Jamat’s initiative in collaboration with urbz. 

However, sanitation remains an issue, caused by builders who leave their materials in open spaces. This causes more chaos and contamination, due to which mosquitoes have multiplied. The local municipality begins work, but rarely finishes. He points to clogged roads and forgotten drains. He has tried giving leads to reporters and activists, who lend an ear but rarely a hand.

He has lived long enough to watch parts of Dharavi flourish through sheer will. Not by grand plans, but through people. He remembers when the Rajiv Gandhi government allotted a hundred crore rupees for Dharavi’s redevelopment. A building was erected, then left unfinished. Today, it is barely noticed. “People here developed this place,” he says. “Not because they were told to, but because they had to.” The municipality never interrupted or helped. 

And yet he is not bitter. He speaks with calm observation, not outrage. He has friends outside Dharavi. He moves between worlds. There is wisdom in the way he remembers and resilience in how he continues. It is ironic how he spent 4 decades repairing roads for everyone else but his village. Koliwada’s veins run with stone steps ridden with puddles of monsoon, waiting to be fixed by someone like Joseph.

To many, Dharavi is a cluster of problems. But to Joseph, it is a carefully knit system. Messy, yes, but full of people who know how to get things done. People like him. And in the quiet hours between morning light and lunchtime traffic, people who contributed to this neighbourhood.