When I was a child I used to sit in the car looking out of the window at the people waking up on the street, bending over the water pump, washing with no thought of onlookkers as if they had created an invisible wall of dignity. It was the onlooker left feeling crass and intrusive for allowing the gaze to linget too long. I would wonder, what if the little girl over therem braiding her hair was me, what would it be like? And then she would look up and smile and I would smile back, that simple movement of the mouth crossing a massive divide.
In the early mornings truck would arrive on Chowringhee and, stopping at regular intervals, discharge their cargo of beggars: the man on the flat trolley with no legs and only stumps for arms, the boy with his face eated away from leprosy so that you could see his bones where the flesh had gone, the woman with her baby lolling unconscious in her arms. So many of them - the maddies, whe, when the shift was over would straighten up and walk to the chai seller for tea and a gossip, These were professional beggars; they live under Howrah Bridge - George the driver took us there once and it was Dante's Renaissance hell in a twentieth century city, the night shift asleep on charpoys. It was like some etching of all we fear in our lives and yet this was their life.
If you live in a city like this you become blase, after awhile the beggars and their horrors become commonplace and mundane. Wars and natural disasters changed this, people thronging into the city in search of food and work and all too soon reduced to begging, selling their children to the beggar master for their limbs to be tied into contorted shapes that would elicit sympathy from passers by.
The film 'Slumdog Millionaire' got it pretty right but arguably only skimmed the surface. The biggest trade at the moment is in young Nepalese girls who have been born with AIDs - they are sold to the brothels of Calcutta and Mumbai. Many of them as young as five or six. Without wishing to labour the point they aren't going to Sonnagutchi or Manoranjum to play with dolls,
I return to my earier question, do you believe in fate? Then these children have no hope - this is their fate. I don't believe that we can trivialise the horror they endure until they are too ill to be of use and are thrown onto the streets and, if they are lucky, piccked up by Granmas or one of the other charities working in there streets. This is where they will go to die - I hope their thoughts are with the beautiful mountains that weep for them as we do.
And you know what? don't know that I could have smiled as that little girl did - I think I might have turned away so that I couldn't desire what I didn't have.
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