BAREFOOT
Journey to the streets
HARSH MANDER
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Beneath our familiar, privileged cities lie the unsuspected phantom cities of the homeless…
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Homelessness is a stubborn form of denial, and it does not seem easy for people to escape it once they slip into it.
Photo: K. Ananthan
My bedroom: Where the homeless live…
“This is my hall, on that side is my kitchen, across there is my bedroom, and in that corner is my bathroom,” Bhavani said to us. “This is my bungalow.” The hall that she pointed to was a grimy portion of pavement on which we sat together, adjoining a busy highway in Chennai, as the street lights pierced the overhanging smog, and traffic never ceased to ply through the long night. The kitchen that she spoke of was a corner of the same pavement, on which some rice was cooking on a kerosene stove. The bedroom was a parking lot across the busy street, where her children were sleeping on mats in the spaces on the ground vacated by parked vehicles at that late hour. The bathroom was a community pay toilet against the walls of which I rested as I sat on the pavement. “At least we do not have to suffer electric power cuts like all of you do,” she added ironically.
It is as though there is not one but two cities layered one over the other: at night in places where the homeless congregate, you can peal off the familiar city of relative privilege, predictability and mainstream, and a whole new unsuspected phantom city reveals itself, the city of the footloose homeless. Because in the night what serves as their dwellings become with sunrise pavements, streets, road dividers and shopping corridors.
Harsh necessities
It is on the harsh pavements near the Old Delhi Station that Vijay has grown from a runaway teenager to a middle-aged man. Like Vijay, innumerable young men choose the streets of the city so as to save as much money as they can to send to their homes. If he hired a room to live in, he would have to spend money on rent and travel to work. There would be nothing left for him to send to his village.
Occasionally, women come to the streets for the same reason. Sixty-five-year-old Budhan bai spends eight months a year begging and sleeping in the courtyard of Kalkaji Mandir in Delhi, to support her ailing husband in their village in Uttar Pradesh, who is too proud to beg. She does not blame her grown sons for abandoning them, saying they have to take care of their own families. A destitute elderly widow in Madurai, who begs from temple to temple, likewise frees her children of any blame. She tells us unconvincingly that it is she who is restless and likes drifting, and not her sons who refuse to feed her.
Therefore, whereas they may be alone on the streets of cities, they are not homeless in the sense of not having a family, but rather they are “houseless” in the cities, often as a matter of conscious choice, of personal sacrifice and denial, so that their families can feed themselves in their homes.
Sometimes, however, the dreams that drive them to the city sour. Seventeen-year-old Hashim sleeps among the multitudes of homeless in the open grounds near Jama Masjid in the medieval walled city of Delhi. He recalls, “In our village in Uttar Pradesh, my father’s income was not sufficient to make both ends meet. Many times we all had no food for days on end. My mother used to scold my little brothers and sisters who cried only because they were hungry. I could not bear this painful scene played out in our home everyday. I also used to be without food for many days together.” He goes on, “I was very worried. The thought haunted me that in my household, every next meal for the family is a challenge. So one day, I ran away from home. I thought I will make lots of money after reaching a city. First I arrived at Lucknow, but could not find much work; then I reached Delhi which I hoped would give me better prospects. I did not know that life was so difficult here. I worked at rag picking, pulled a rickshaw, went to jail also. Even then I did not attain anything in life. Hunger was still an inseparable part of my existence. At times I even thought of committing suicide. I ran away from home only because I wanted to do something for my family. But I did not know that I was foolish to come here with these dreams. I took this step without thinking, and I repent till this day. I believe that parents who can’t feed their children should not have children at all…”
Abuse often drives boys from their homes, who flee their families to escape intolerable abuse. These are acts of incredible courage for children so young, echoed and repeated in the lives of tens of thousands of street children who decide at very young ages to bravely escape violence and abuse in their homes — alcoholic fathers, physical and sexual violence — by fending for themselves, at whatever cost. But we also have children who were lost or abandoned by their families at such a young age that they do not recall their origins. The streets are the only home that they remember.
Forty-year-old destitute Phelena Devi also lives alone on the streets in Patna, because she was abandoned a decade earlier by her husband, an alcoholic. She belonged to a nomadic family that wandered from village to village, put up their tents, or lived on the bed of drains. Her daughter passed away soon after her father abandoned her mother. Likewise, Shabir made Nizammuddin Railway Station his home for a large part of his life, after his brothers refused to take care of him when he fell from a tree and became paraplegic.
But in more unusual cases, it can be the strength of family ties that can also render one homeless. In Patna, we met Deepak, the 10-year-old son of a rickshaw-puller, who lived with his father on the pavement, studying under a street light. His father wanted him to become a “sahib”, and therefore sent him to a school in the city, instead of leaving him in his village with his mother.
No other home
Some are also simply born to the streets. In Chennai, in particular, we encountered several families which had lived for several generations on the same piece of pavement. Their great grandparents came to the city, sometimes 80 years earlier or longer, and the patriarchs colonised gradually “their” part of the pavement. New generations were born, one following the next, and they all grew up in the same stretch of pavement. This was the only home that the large extended family now knew. Mohan, a street boy in Chennai, said, “Homelessness is not a new thing for me. I was born into streets, and it was here that I was brought up.” He is convinced that they will be forced to return to the streets. Likewise, Mythili is another of “homeless lineage”. When she was a child, her father was irresponsible, “a drunkard, he never cared for us”, she recounts, and her mother fed them by selling food cooked by her on the pavements to other homeless people.
Homelessness is a stubborn form of denial, and it does not seem easy for people to escape it once they slip into it. There seem many roads that lead men and women, boys and girls to make the city streets their home, but few that lead away from the streets to settled homes.
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