A city has many spaces that are most of the time unknown to us (the citizens of the city). We generally inhabit the spaces in which we feel comfortable and at ease. The different spaces of the city came to my mind recently when I visited East Hastings. Actually I had planned to go some other place but I took a wrong bus and landed up in East Hastings, Vancouver. The moment I got down from the bus I felt uncomfortable and uneasy of the place. I was scared and I became conscious of myself, my position in the city (though I am just a student arrived here few months before from a third world country), the places that belongs to me or I belong to them and indeed, this isn’t the place I belong to. I was accompanied by my husband; we both were looking around trying to locate ourselves and find the place where we have to go, when we realized that we are at a wrong place and probably we took a wrong bus. Since I was a little scared, I wanted to find the bus stop to return back while my husband was busy seeing the locality with which he is not familiar with. He tells me “which strange place is this”? I just told him lets go. We left the place with the next bus but I wondered why ‘strange’. Is it not Vancouver, British Columbia? When we visit other parts of the city we never say each other ‘strange’ place. We walk down the street, buy vegetables from a shop, eat in a restaurant or drink coffee in any coffee shop but we never use the word ‘strange’. We do compare between different places but I do not remember if ever since we came to Vancouver we used the strange for any part of the city apart from this place.

I started thinking about India and I realized that I do not know where the “Red Light area” exists for example in Delhi. I have lived in the city for 10 years and I was never aware of the ‘strange’ places or spaces that the city owns, only recently when I was sharing this experience with one of my friends in India I got to know the location of the ‘strange’ place.  It is interesting to find these places in every city (it has to be a part of most of the cities) but so little talked about them in our daily conversation. We at times do talk about the slums, the problems that slum dwellers face even in class discussions and their poverty but I do not remember of discussing the life or the problems faced by the inhabitants of places like East Hastings which does not only comprise of poverty but also drug trafficking and  prostitution. It is probably easy to talk about poverty but not about drugs and prostitution, I believe!! I do not know whether these places are unknown to us (as in my case not knowing exactly which part of the city is called Red Light area in Delhi), unfamiliar or silenced places but they have a strong existence in the city. Why then these places exist when they are unknown, unfamiliar or strange to us? Does the city need them, if so, then why strange or unknown? Why do not we talk about these places in our daily conversation? Why people say that they hesitate to go to these places when they are also parts of the same city?