‘Sometimes I find a Rupee in the garbage’

“Why do you do this?” I ask Saheb whom I encounter every morning

scrounging for gold in the garbage dumps of my neighbourhood.
Saheb left his home long ago. Set amidst the green fields of Dhaka,
his home is not even a distant memory. There were many storms
that swept away their fields and homes, his mother tells him. That’s
why they left, looking for gold in the big city where he now lives.
“I have nothing else to do,” he mutters, looking away.
“Go to school,” I say glibly, realising immediately how hollow
the advice must sound.
“There is no school in my neighbourhood. When they build
one, I will go.”
“If I start a school, will you come?” I ask, half-joking.
“Yes,” he says, smiling broadly.
A few days later I see him running up to me. “Is your school
ready?”
“It takes longer to build a school,” I say, embarrassed at having
made a promise that was not meant. But promises like mine abound
in every corner of his bleak world.
After months of knowing him, I ask him his name. “Saheb-e-
Alam,” he announces. He does not know what it means. If he knew
its meaning — lord of the universe — he would have a hard time
believing it. Unaware of what his name represents, he roams the
streets with his friends, an army of barefoot boys who appear like
the morning birds and disappear at noon. Over the months, I have
come to recognise each of them.
“Why aren’t you wearing chappals?” I ask one.
“My mother did not bring them down from the shelf,” he answers
simply.
“Even if she did he will throw them off,” adds another who is
wearing shoes that do not match. When I comment on it, he shuffles
his feet and says nothing. “I want shoes,” says a third boy who has
never owned a pair all his life. Travelling across the country I have
seen children walking barefoot, in cities, on village roads. It is not lack
of money but a tradition to stay barefoot, is one explanation. I wonder
if this is only an excuse to explain away a perpetual state of poverty.
I remember a story a man from Udipi once told me. As a young
boy he would go to school past an old temple, where his father was
a priest. He would stop briefly at the temple and pray for a pair of
shoes. Thirty years later I visited his town and the temple, which
was now drowned in an air of desolation. In the backyard, where
lived the new priest, there were red and white plastic chairs. A youngboy dressed
in a grey uniform, wearing socks and shoes, arrived
panting and threw his school bag on a folding bed. Looking at the
boy, I remembered the prayer another boy had made to the goddess
when he had finally got a pair of shoes, “Let me never lose them.”
The goddess had granted his prayer. Young boys like the son of the
priest now wore shoes. But many others like the ragpickers in my
neighbourhood remain shoeless.
My acquaintance with the barefoot ragpickers leads me to
Seemapuri, a place on the periphery of Delhi yet miles away from it,
metaphorically. Those who live here are squatters who came from
Bangladesh back in 1971. Saheb’s family is among them. Seemapuri
was then a wilderness. It still is, but it is no longer empty. In
structures of mud, with roofs of tin and tarpaulin, devoid of sewage,
drainage or running water, live 10,000 ragpickers. They have lived
here for more than thirty years without an identity, without permits
but with ration cards that get their names on voters’ lists and enable
them to buy grain. Food is more important for survival than an
identity. “If at the end of the day we can feed our families and go to
bed without an aching stomach, we would rather live here than in
the fields that gave us no grain,” say a group of women in tattered
saris when I ask them why they left their beautiful land of green
fields and rivers. Wherever they find food, they pitch their tents that
become transit homes. Children grow up in them, becoming partners
in survival. And survival in Seemapuri means rag-picking. Through
the years, it has acquired the proportions of a fine art. Garbage to
them is gold. It is their daily bread, a roof over their heads, even if
it is a leaking roof. But for a child it is even more.
“I sometimes find a rupee, even a ten-rupee note,” Saheb says,
his eyes lighting up. When you can find a silver coin in a heap of
garbage, you don’t stop scrounging, for there is hope of finding
more. It seems that for children, garbage has a meaning different
from what it means to their parents. For the children it is wrapped
in wonder, for the elders it is a means of survival.
One winter morning I see Saheb standing by the fenced gate
of the neighbourhood club, watching two young men dressed in
white, playing tennis. “I like the game,” he hums, content to watch
it standing behind the fence. “I go inside when no one is around,”
he admits. “The gatekeeper lets me use the swing.”
Saheb too is wearing tennis shoes that look strange over his
discoloured shirt and shorts. “Someone gave them to me,” he says
in the manner of an explanation. The fact that they are discardedshoes of some
rich boy, who perhaps refused
to wear them because of a hole in one of
them, does not bother him. For one who has
walked barefoot, even shoes with a hole is
a dream come true. But the game he is
watching so intently is out of his reach.
This morning, Saheb is on his way to
the milk booth. In his hand is a steel
canister. “I now work in a tea
stall down the road,” he says,
pointing in the distance. “I am
paid 800 rupees and all my
meals.” Does he like the job? I
ask. His face, I see, has lost the
carefree look. The steel canister
seems heavier than the plastic
bag he would carry so lightly over
his shoulder. The bag was his.
The canister belongs to the man
who owns the tea shop. Saheb is
no longer his own master!
“I want to drive a car”
Mukesh insists on being his own master. “I will be a motor
mechanic,” he announces.
“Do you know anything about cars?” I ask.
“I will learn to drive a car,” he answers, looking straight into my
eyes. His dream looms like a mirage amidst the dust of streets that
fill his town Firozabad, famous for its bangles. Every other family in
Firozabad is engaged in making bangles.
It is the centre of India’s glass-blowing
industry where families have spent
generations working around furnaces,
welding glass, making bangles for all the
women in the land it seems.
Mukesh’s family is among them. None
of them know that it is illegal for children
like him to work in the glass furnaces with
high temperatures, in dingy cells without
air and light; that the law, if enforced, could get him and all those 20,000
children out of the hot furnaces
where they slog their daylight hours, often losing the brightness of
their eyes. Mukesh’s eyes beam as he volunteers to take me home,
which he proudly says is being rebuilt. We walk down stinking lanes
choked with garbage, past homes that remain hovels with crumbling
walls, wobbly doors, no windows, crowded with families of humans
and animals coexisting in a primeval state. He stops at the door of
one such house, bangs a wobbly iron door with his foot, and pushes
it open. We enter a half-built shack. In one part of it, thatched with
dead grass, is a firewood stove over which sits a large vessel of
sizzling spinach leaves. On the ground, in large aluminium platters,
are more chopped vegetables. A frail young woman is cooking the
evening meal for the whole family. Through eyes filled with smoke
she smiles. She is the wife of Mukesh’s elder brother. Not much
older in years, she has begun to command respect as the bahu, the
daughter-in-law of the house, already in charge of three men — her
husband, Mukesh and their father. When the older man enters, she
gently withdraws behind the broken wall and brings her veil closer
to her face. As custom demands, daughters-in-law must veil their
faces before male elders. In this case the elder is an impoverished
bangle maker. Despite long years of hard labour, first as a tailor,
then a bangle maker, he has failed to renovate a house, send his
two sons to school. All he has managed to do is teach them what
he knows — the art of making bangles.
“It is his karam, his destiny,” says Mukesh’s grandmother,
who has watched her own husband go blind with the dust from
polishing the glass of bangles. “Can a god-given lineage ever be
broken?” she implies. Born in the caste of bangle makers, they
have seen nothing but bangles — in the house, in the yard, in
every other house, every other yard, every street in Firozabad.
Spirals of bangles — sunny gold, paddy green, royal blue,
pink, purple, every colour born out of the seven colours of the
rainbow — lie in mounds in unkempt yards, are piled on fourwheeled
handcarts, pushed by young men along the narrow lanes
of the shanty town. And in dark hutments, next to lines of flames of
flickering oil lamps, sit boys and girls with their fathers and mothers,
welding pieces of coloured glass into circles of bangles. Their eyes
are more adjusted to the dark than to the light outside. That is why
they often end up losing their eyesight before they become adults.
Savita, a young girl in a drab pink dress, sits alongside an
elderly woman, soldering pieces of glass. As her hands move
mechanically like the tongs of a machine, I wonder if she knows
the sanctity of the bangles she helps make. It symbolises an Indian
woman’s suhaag, auspiciousness in marriage. It will dawn on her
suddenly one day when her head is draped with a red veil, her
hands dyed red with henna, and red bangles rolled onto her wrists.
She will then become a bride. Like the old woman beside her who
became one many years ago. She still has bangles on her wrist, but
no light in her eyes. “Ek waqt ser bhar khana bhi nahin khaya,”
she says, in a voice drained of joy. She has not enjoyed even one
full meal in her entire lifetime — that’s what she has reaped! Her
husband, an old man with a flowing beard, says, “I know nothing
except bangles. All I have done is make a house for the family to
live in.”
Hearing him, one wonders if he has achieved what many have
failed in their lifetime. He has a roof over his head!
The cry of not having money to do anything
except carry on the business of making bangles,
not even enough to eat, rings in every home.
The young men echo the lament of their
elders. Little has moved with time,
it seems, in Firozabad. Years
of mind-numbing toil have
killed all initiative and
the ability to dream.
“Why not organise
your s e l v e s into a
cooperative?” I ask a
group of young men
who have fallen into the
vicious circle of
middlemen who
trapped their
fathers and
foref a thers.
“Even if we getorganised, we are the ones who will be hauled up by the police,
beaten and dragged to jail for doing something illegal,” they say.
There is no leader among them, no one who could help them see
things differently. Their fathers are as tired as they are. They talk
endlessly in a spiral that moves from poverty to apathy to greed
and to injustice.
Listening to them, I see two distinct worlds— one of the family,
caught in a web of poverty, burdened by the stigma of caste in
which they are born; the other a vicious circle of the sahukars, the
middlemen, the policemen, the keepers of law, the bureaucrats
and the politicians. Together they have imposed the baggage on the
child that he cannot put down. Before he is aware, he accepts it as
naturally as his father. To do anything else would mean to dare. And
daring is not part of his growing up. When I sense a flash of it in
Mukesh I am cheered. “I want to be a motor mechanic,’ he repeats.
He will go to a garage and learn. But the garage is a long way from
his home. “I will walk,” he insists. “Do
you also dream of flying a plane?” He is
suddenly silent. “No,” he says, staring
at the ground. In his small murmur
there is an embarrassment that has not
yet turned into regret. He is content to
dream of cars that he sees hurtling down
the streets of his town. Few airplanes fly
over Firozabad.