Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

BAREFOOT

Love and longing on the streets

Photo: K. Murali Kumar

No fairy-tale ending: Just a long, cold night.

Loneliness and social isolation are dominant motifs of city street life. Around half the homeless men and women, boys and girls whom we spoke to in Patna, Chennai, Madurai and Delhi said they never celebrated festivals, three fourths said they had no friends whom they could trust and more than half felt that they belonged to no community, even of the homeless. Sixty-two out of 85 homeless people we spoke to in Patna sadly felt they had never been helped by anyone — government, neighbours, charity — during their entire lives on the streets.

The majority of homeless people, in all cities, of all ages and gender, find one kind of solace in their loneliness in some kind of drugs or intoxication. Vijay, who has grown from a runaway teenager into a middle-aged, homeless head-loader in the walled city of Delhi, admitted that he was intoxicated with ganja most of his waking hours. “I have smoked ganja for so many years, the time has come when I do not know whether I am sober or high,” he says. “I need the ganja because it alone brings me solace and solitude. There is no place I can go, in order to escape the din, the hordes, where I can be by myself. Where I can think, be at peace, be at rest. Only when I smoke my ganja, I can be alone even in a crowd”. In Hanuman Mandir at night, we found many homeless women who are almost always utterly in a daze, drunk or drugged. Some talk compulsively, but the conversation typically is disjointed and inarticulate.

Most street children are introduced to the easy but deadly escape from pain and loneliness offered by soft drugs early in their days on the streets. Thinners are readily available at any stationery shop for Rs. 25 a bottle. Shopkeepers know that the children who buy these are not using them for painting, but they do not hesitate to sell to the street urchins who flock to their stores. Two bottles are enough for a day for one child. They soak a rag and inhale the fumes of the solution, and it transports them to a world free from hurt and violence. But it also destroys their lungs, rendering them vulnerable to TB, and damages their brains and memory. Many children graduate to hard drugs like smack, but fortunately others are able to steer themselves away, as they know that for those who succumb to smack, it is virtually the end of the road. Qasim also sniffs the intoxicant. He recognises that sniffing is very dangerous and that is why he has a constant pain in his chest. He tries repeatedly to kick the habit, but still he cannot do it. Qasim earns about Rs. 100 to 150 a day, and he spends about Rs. 50 rupees of this on the sniffing fluid, like most other children on the streets.

Many live alone in the city to support their families in their villages. Emotionally, however, they live on in their village homes. Despite her age and the fact that she can barely walk, Budham Bai uncomplainingly begs eight months in a year alone in the city for the sake feeding her incapacitated husband in the village. Vijay has supported his family in Gwalior for years through his work as a night porter and his life on the streets. He brought his younger brother Raju to Delhi and arranged for him to learn work at a garage. Vijay hopes to set up a garage for him. His sister was married a few years ago mainly with the money he sent home over years. They found decent people, who agreed to take no dowry. For his ageing mother, he is still able to send money home regularly. But he is uncompromising that he will never marry nor raise a family. “I cannot let my child have a life like the one that I have led”, he says firmly. “I am content instead to see my brother have a family, and a home. This is enough for me.”

Jai’s mother worked as a vendor of small items in a village in Nepal, carrying these in a huge tokri (basket) on her head, traversing the mountainous path, going home to home to sell her wares. The family fell on hard times, and Jai ran away to Delhi, hoping to send money home. But work was scarce, and he fell into drugs, sleeping on the streets. He still sends money home when he can, but it is never often nor enough. He feels he has failed his family. He came to know that his old mother has again started selling knickknacks in a tokri. Jai worries, “Now she is not young: its brings tears in my eyes to think of her traversing the mountainous path and going from house to house selling …” He has not told his family where he lives or what he does, Jai says, “What do I tell them, that I live on the platforms, so that my parents will be more unhappy?” Instead he lies to them that he is doing fine and working in an electronic repair shop, at least it will bring some moments of peace to his parents that one of the boys is doing well…

For those without a family — either in the village or on the streets — new bonds often grow on the streets between strangers, which may prove closer and more loyal than many ties of blood. As many as a quarter of the homeless people we met said they shared their life on the streets with adopted relatives. A lonely homeless widow, Saroja, met Rampyari, a crabby, eccentric older widow who shared the community spaces of the temple compound. They cannot say who was initially drawn to whom, but Rampyari was kind to her, and Saroja in turn began to take care of the older woman. These two profoundly lonely women, each without family or home, decided to adopt each other as mother and daughter. It is a sturdy, unwavering bond that has survived two decades of the vicissitudes of life on the streets. It is typical of many such alliances that are formed between despised people in the world of the cities’ pavements, sturdier in loyalties, more tolerant of idiosyncrasies, and more tender in giving, than most biological relationships. I recall a street boy who adopted a disabled old man as his grandfather: he would carry him long distance on his back, and for years save from his own earnings in rag-picking for food, medicines and even the old man’s addictions. A mentally ill woman occupied the same space on the pavement outside New Delhi railway station for years, but would eat only if one particular street boy would bring her food, and the boy, himself less than 10 years old, made it a point to share his earnings buying food for her everyday.

Street boys, cut off from their families in their village and alone in the city, tend to live in gangs, sharing everything — food, clothes, intoxicants, sleeping under the same sheet — teaching each other trades like rag-picking and recycling drinking water bottles, protecting each other from street violence and the police, and feeding each other in sickness.

They find other ways of enjoying life as well, some healthy, some less so. Street entrepreneurs have set up makeshift video parlours, especially on lanes where they sell their rags and waste. These are nothing more than a space marked off by faded curtains with a television set. For five rupees, you can watch as many films as you like. The parlours are packed with the rejects of the city, street boys and lonely migrant workers, rickshaw-pullers, head loaders, construction workers, watching raptly Hindi cinema interspersed with pornographic films. But a third of the homeless people we spoke to (and nearly half those in Patna) say they have no source of recreation at all; they could not afford to enjoy for even brief moments to savour the glitter of city lights.

Qasim likes to play cricket, but at the railway station, there is usually neither time nor the space to play. However, they have found a small stretch outside the New Delhi Railway Station, basically a road, there are days when some street children play cricket there. Some employees of Railway Police Station Force, who otherwise thrash them with their batons, also join them in play. And in this way, in the hardest of conditions, they still manage to grasp some of the joys that life offers.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail