THE SOUL OF THE BUSINESS
A PRIVATE   FAITH MADE DANGEROUSLY PUBLIC 
The Making of a Paper
 By SHOMA CHAUDHURY
 In Gratitude
 By TARUN J TEJPAL

Life’s Not A One Way Track: former streetkids on the railway lines Photos by Lakshman Anand

Most Indians don’t know much about street life and homelessness, the guides tell me, which is why this project was launched. ‘I want to extend an invitation to the PM to take this tour,’ says Javed, looking me firmly in the eye. ‘How else can politicians understand what it’s like for kids like us?’

This morning, on route to New Delhi Railway Station, a beggar woman pushed the bandaged bloody leg of her infant daughter into my auto rickshaw. Abject necessity transmuted into a macabre theatrical event. Elsewhere, infants tumbled in and out of traffic lanes, circus children trained in commercial acrobatics from the first moment they learn to walk. A tiny boy collects change from their temporary audience, charmed by the kids’ dexterous bravura or with eyes averted from the insistent reminder of the scale of inequity so many Indian children begin facing in life. The story of beggar children in India is long and complex, residents and travellers alike warn of heart-wrenching scams and elaborate techniques for extracting money from unsuspecting benefactors. However, whatever means streetkids are forced to survive, their desolate childhoods are the reality we’re consistently failing to address.

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), there are 1,00,000 to 5,00,000 street children in Delhi and as many as 1,80,00,000 lost, abandoned homeless kids throughout India. Youth workers believe the capital’s population of dispossessed children is more likely to be around 2,50,000 but the disparity in these figures may also indicate shifting definitions of what technically constitutes an abandoned child in 21st century India. Is a runaway kid an uncontrollable menace to social stability or a self-protective refugee of misery? Are the working children of beggar parents who are deprived of schooling, healthcare, the daydreams and discoveries of stable childhoods, any better off than their orphaned peers? Is a child abandoned when she or he is too frightened to go home?

Of the many children arriving daily at the New Delhi Delhi Railway Station, a substantial percentage come from impoverished regions in Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan. Some are fleeing endemic poverty, parental maltreatment, alcoholism and sexual exploitation while others are orphans of experience, natural disasters and the oppressive feeling of being a burden to their impoverished families. Still more seek a child-like vision of freedom by escaping village life for the glittering mirage of the big city. An average of 250 trains pass through New Delhi daily and as many as 20 runaway children are aboard each one of them. Youth workers believe there are as many as 2,500 children living on the railway station’s platforms and surroundings, and another 3,000 in the nearby Hanuman temple.

I have arrived at the station a few minutes early. Young touts gather like moths, spinning inventive lines and practiced compliments. I try not to smile at these hustling masters of solicitude.

Instead I meet a team of teenage tour leaders, former streetkids, who sought refuge at the Salaam Baalak Trust (SBT) after years of living in the station and have been sheltered, counselled, nurtured and educated within its extensive programmes. Now, on the doorstep of adulthood, Javed, Shekhar Sahni and Sadhna Singh have launched an enterprising new programme to raise awareness about homeless ‘railway station children’s’ lives. Together, the trio has devised a route map and script for guiding expeditions of school children, ngo workers, government officials and local and international visitors through the nether reaches of their former station home.

“This is our gathering place,” says Javed as the rest of our party of a pair of mba graduates and SBT British volunteer John Thompson who has mentored the guides’ enterprise, are shepherded into earshot. He begins by introducing himself. He is an 18-year-old who came to the station eight years ago as a runaway from his village in east Bihar. “I lived here for the next seven years before joining the SBT,” he says, beaming with pride. So how was it? We are all dying to ask, but our guides have an agenda they are determined to stick to. As we walk towards the first of their sites, they relax and their stories tumble out. “I was beaten up here,” Sadhna says, almost as an aside. I want to ask him to tell me more, but the incident is so commonplace in a homeless station child’s life, being beaten is almost an anti-climax. Between the Posse Boys, gangs of older teens who pray on vulnerable younger kids, to police harassments, beatings, predatory adults, drugs, unhygienic and sub-human conditions, and no health support system, any kids face many forms of everyday abuse, degradation and violence.

Our guides have developed uniquely sanguine outlooks, but life on the hard side of the tracks leaves many scars. Javed says his childhood years in the station were not all bad, but is quick to add that the Trust has given him a strong sense of self-determination and “a bright future”. “When I came to Delhi, I wanted freedom,” he says. Many kids travelled a lot, stowing away on board trains heading in directions they had never heard of,” he adds, laughing quietly. I want to ask him if he missed his childhood but the past is the past and he is now looking forward to completing his qualifications for entering a Masters in Social Work. “I want to go back to my region, to help educate families, to work with the rural poor, to show people how to avoid this kind of a life,” he says, purposefully.

Home On Wheels? Kids find shelter and food aboard

Scratching for food, shelter and safety everyday, they are at risk of nutritional deficiencies, respiratory infections, skin diseases, worm infestations and severe emotional problems

Did you miss your childhood in these years of scrounging for survival in the station? It’s a hard question for any of them to answer. But when younger kids at the Trust’s residential shelter eagerly open their lockers to show their private life spaces, I realise the jars of pens, combs, clothes, some frighteningly neat, others desperately empty, all belong to kids who have never had a personal space of their own.

We arrived on Track 12. “We call it the ‘vip section’ because this is where we found the best food,” Shekhar tells us. Station kids learn the train timetables off by heart. Nearby is the ‘Washing Line’, where trains arriving from UP and Bihar remain for several days, so its easy to slip aboard, rifle under seats for left-overs and sleep out of sight of the station cops. Sadhna points to another spot on the platform. “I bathed every day at the government’s expense,” he laughs. We pass eight station employees engrossed in a game of cards, untroubled by the myriad of pilfering, hustling and abuses taking place around them.

At the end of the platform, another small miracle is unfolding. Several dozen kids of all ages sit quietly on a mat playing board games or listening to a story. They are children of homeless railway worker families who have been persuaded to give back a piece of their kids’ precious childhoods every afternoon. Instead of being roped into selling garlands, magazines or miniature flags, these children are attending SBT’s outdoor school, learning basic literacy skills, eating lunch, playing games and napping. Our tour guides pause with unconcealed pride as a grubby toddler waddles up to shake hands. “See how confident they become with schooling?” They marvel as the infant breaks into an earsplitting grin and reaches for everyone’s hands in turn. Although their own childhoods were torn from them by unforgiving circumstances, our guides are immensely proud of the Trust and its role in these little ones’ future.

As their stories gain momentum, the drama of the dangers faced in their daily existence intensifies. We assemble on a railway overpass and peer through an iron mesh at a miserable pocket of space under the bridge. “Up to 20 kids a night sleep here, it’s a safe place for them, out of the cops’ arms length,” they explain, stretching out their own adult limbs to demonstrate to the difficulties of reaching into the tiny crawl space.

Most Indians don’t know much about street life and homelessness, the guides tell me, which is another important reason for launching their project. “I want to extend an invitation to the prime minister of India to take this tour with us,” says Javed, looking me firmly in the eye. “How else can politicians understand what its like for kids like us?” “How else can they direct funds to the right kinds of programmes and activities,” asks another kid who has joined us with his own gruesome stories about being beaten repeatedly after being placed in a government refuge by police.

The SBT’s programme is different from typical refuge NGOs. Founded by filmmaker Mira Nair, who started it all with Salaam Bombay, the curriculum emphasises theatre and other arts to help youngsters express themselves and gain confidence. Unsurprisingly, many are now serious movie buffs. The SBT guides are media savvy. cnn-ibn has filmed a segment on their redemptive stories while another filmmaker is making a documentary about their tour programme. Posters advertising the station journey are about to hit Delhi’s streets, hotels, universities and corporations. “We want to be listed in the Lonely Planet Guide,” says Shekhar, who loves engaging with people. “Its great practice for my future life as an actor.” He is thrilled to be accepted into a second series of the National School of Drama’s Sunday Club. “My stage name is going to be ‘Shubhangam’ he tells me. It means good beginning!”

It’s not hard to be inspired by the guides’ individual triumph over formidable odds. They are confident, thoughtful and radiate worldly sincerity. “No one judges you here, you have to learn to make your own choices, that’s what’s so precious about SBT,” says Shekhar. In the weeks between my first tour and my return, the guides have blossomed into organisational wizards, each with e-mail ids, contact phone numbers and reassuring remarks to put visitors at ease. “Your eyes disappear when you laugh,” Javed tells me, “You’re looking well,” says another. “How’s it going?” I ask. “Oh please, don’t ask,” says Shekhar, “I had a tough day, a fat school girl got tired and emotional, it was hard getting the last lot through.” Any other problems? “Not really, but I have stopped wearing white on the tours, it’s hard to keep clean,” Javed adds.

“It was strange running these tours in the beginning,” Shekhar reflects.

“I wanted to disappear when I saw the cops, I was uncomfortable talking about the beatings and so on. But the other day, a policeman joined our group and started listening in.

At the end he reached out and shook my hand. It was a shock, but I guess they are getting to know us differently now.”

We follow our guides over to the rag picking section, a sulferously rank compound piled high with stinking rubbish. “Shhh, don’t go too close!” they caution, “we don’t want to make them nervous.” Between the legs of a cow, I see two small bedraggled boys picking through the refuse, looking for plastic stuff, silver, metals, iron and edibles for recycling. Other kids carry parcels in the station or clean shoes, some earning up to Rs 100 a day in various hustles and tips.

“We just spent everything on movies and snacks.” Others get hooked on to sniffing solvents, smoking crack and ganja or drinking rough home-made country liquor. Numbed, addicted children are even more vulnerable to insidious abuses and gut wrenching humiliations. All of them are prey to scams and predatory exploitations and within weeks of hard living, scratching for food, shelter and safety every day, they are at risk of nutritional deficiencies, respiratory infections, skin diseases, worm infestations, typhoid, scabies, boils, viral hepatitis, and severe emotional problems.

All three tour guides are determined to balance their stories of wretchedness with their optimistic plans for their life futures. Life in the station is fraught with unspeakable hazards, but they emphasise the pluses too. Strong friendships are build and new families invented in the community of drifting children. For some, it’s very hard to give up their stolen lives of perilous freedom. After making contact with the Trust’s 24-hour drop-in centre, also located at the station, Javed remembers his initial difficulties adjusting to the shelter’s structures. “I was naughty,” he says which is another reason he enjoys working with newcomers to the organisation these days. It takes a big leap to gather your life together at that age after all. Shekhar is just as philosophical. “I was a street kid, a very good survivor!” he says smiling, “I made sure I fitted in within days. Now it’s a skill I am using for positive purposes in my life.”

To book tours, contact Javed on 9810975284 or Vikas on 9891845387
or by email at sbttour@yahoo.com www.salaambaalaktrust.com