On 26 July 2026 we went back to Sisaiya, but not to the temple this time. Sisaiya Chowk is the junction the village actually passes through every day: shops on both sides, autorickshaws waiting, people stopping for tea. It is also where waste collects fastest, pressed into the roadside until it stops looking like waste and starts looking like the ground.
The team started at half past eight and worked through the morning. Brooms first, along the roadside and around the shopfronts. Then the harder part: waste that had settled into the soil and had to be dug out, broken concrete lifted away by hand, sacks filled and dragged to the roadside. A few neighbours picked up brooms and joined in, and one elderly man in an orange kurta swept beside the volunteers for much of the morning. The municipality sent a loader and a tractor trailer, so the waste we collected left the chowk instead of sitting at the edge of it.
Sweeping a place clean is the easy half. The chowk will fill up again unless the people who use it every day change how they throw things away. So between the work, volunteers sat with local shopkeepers and talked it through: where waste actually goes, what a shop can do differently, what it would take to keep the junction looking like this. Those conversations matter more than the sacks we filled. Thank you to everyone at Sisaiya Chowk who stopped, joined in, or simply made room for us to work.