al compound that today houses a Catholic high school called St. Xavier's. But in those days it was the Cecil Hotel, an elegant colonial waystation. Diplomats, businessmen and foreign correspondents took rooms at the Cecil and stayed for years, drinking gin and tonics brought by barefoot servants and chatting away their evenings beneath gently spinning ceiling fans. Behind the hotel, though, was a different world. There, carefully hidden by high walls, were small brick shacks where the waiters, pantrymen and gardeners lived. They were people from small towns and tiny villages who had arrived early in the 20th century looking for work, as the little city of Delhi became the new Indian capital. At the Cecil they found decent jobs at decent pay. There was enough money for food, for school fees, for the occasional new sari, and new dresses for Easter. In 1947, though, everything changed. First in India, and then at the Cecil. On August 15, Britain gave the colony independence by dividing it into Pakistan and India. The two new countries were convulsed by violence as Muslims fled to Pakistan and Hindus to India. About 1 million people died in the chaos, and millions fled their homes. And new residents — sometimes with permission, sometimes simply as squatters — moved in. So it was on Ludlow Castle Road, where the Muslim owners of a 19th-century mansion, a circular home with deep verandahs, 22-foot ceilings and five acres of gardens, had gone to Pakistan. Two middle-class Hindu families, refugees from Pakistan, moved into the house and divided it down the middle. From the crowded shacks behind the hotel, the now-empty gardens looked like an invitation. "There were trees and grass everywhere," said Devi, now a 77-year-old widow, remembering when she and her husband built their first hut there from mud and cow dung, covering it with a canvas tarp. "It felt like a jungle." First a handful of Cecil workers came, then their friends and relatives. When the Cecil closed in the late 1950s, dozens more came. The two Hindu families acted as de facto landlords, charging rents of a few dollars a month. What they created, the residents say, was a community. They built one-room one-story houses that leaned and curved. They painted them in exuberant colors. Over the years the mud walls were replaced by bricks, and thatch roofs by ceramic tiles. They built sidewalks that ran between the houses, and planted gardens of papayas and mangos. And with each generation the shacks grew bigger and the slum grew more crowded, as grown children built rooms for their own families. While most Indian neighborhoods are divided into enclaves — by ethnicity, religion or caste — things were different in the shantytown. Decades later, they are still proud of how the Hindu holiday of Diwali would fade into Christmas, which would fade into the Muslim festival of Eid. Old lists of the neighborhood residents show Muslim, Sikh, Christian and Hindu families catalogued together into an Indian anomaly. "We used to celebrate all our holidays together," said Renu Parchha, a freelance beautician born in the shantytown, and who has been forced to move repeatedly since it was demolished. "We had been together since childhood, and these differences didn't even touch us." They left their doors unlocked. When there were important decisions to be made — children who needed spouses, jobs to be accepted or declined, hospital bills to pay — they gathered across India's traditional dividing lines to debate possibilities. It's only in whispers that they speak of the problems. They don't like to talk about the miseries of the monsoon, when the mold could stretch down from leaky ceilings in big greasy patches. They don't like to talk about the quick-fisted husbands, or the long stints without work, or the hard-won wages lost to endless 75-cent bottles of whiskey. "When we were there we loved it," said Parchha, fingering yellowed photos of relatives posing in their shacks. "But now that we're gone, it seems even better." But was it legal? Decades later, there's no way to say. The families living in the mansion say they had an oral agreement with the owners. But the documentation is often contradictory, years of arguments and lawsuits that included the slum-dwellers, relatives of the original owners, a string of other claimants and the city government. Officials didn't know how to treat the shantytown — not uncommon in a country where slums are both political embarrassments and vote banks. One year, the government installed electricity lines. A couple years later, it offered a few hundred dollars each for longtime residents to leave. None took it. There are laws and rules and city plans that are supposed to protect slum residents, said Colin Gonsalves, a New Delhi lawyer who has fought hundreds of slum demolition cases. "But it doesn't change anything." ___ By the 1990s, New Delhi was nothing like the city those Cecil workers found in 1947. Property prices had skyrocketed, powered by economic reforms that cast aside decades of socialist-style policies and laid the foundations for an emerging economic behemoth. Boutiques now sold Chanel purses and Louis Vuitton luggage. Mercedes sedans became common sights. Old colonial street names had been cast aside in surges of Indian nationalism, and the road out front was renamed Raj Niwas Marg — "Governor's Residence Road" — after the official home of New Delhi's lieutenant governor. Some in the shantytown found ways to catch slivers of the boom, with pay raises that let them buy scooters or send their children to better schools. The daughters of maids became nurses. Sons became truck drivers. In one way, the shantytown itself changed dramatically. The property, which in the 1940s had been little more than a vacant lot, was now worth at least several million dollars. The neighborhood, with its large houses and yards, was now among the most sought-after in the city, home to some of India's wealthiest merchant families. Developers looked at that five acres of shanties and saw a string of villas, or even an apartment house, and millions in potential profits. Various neighborhood politicians began wrangling over it. Eventually, in early 2000, one politician began building a small Sikh temple on the property, a move his rivals saw as an attempt to gain the support of the city's Sikh community. It was a time when religious violence was surging in India, fed by a rise of religious- and caste-based political parties. In New Delhi, city bureaucrats worried the real estate squabble could escalate into rioting, according to a top official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Their solution: destroy it. The shantytown families knew nothing until the bulldozers arrived. It happened on a Tuesday, when many residents were at work. First the phones went dead. Then authorities set up barri