Last Word: The pavement women

(Published in The Kolkata Telegraph, August 2005. In the week since I wrote this, Amina got in touch to say that her husband has found a permanent job as a courier for a local NGO. They're moving soon, to a better home. The only downside is that it's located in yet another slum cluster that's been targetted for demolishing--but that, says Amina, is something she'll worry about next year. Her other friends on the pavements of Mathura Road haven't been as lucky. And winter is just a month or two away.)

At first there were no pavement people. Then when the slum near our South Delhi residential colony was demolished two years ago, the footpaths and roads outside the Nizamuddin dargah slowly filled up with the homeless—all men.



Then the families, losing the battle to stay on the respectable edge of slum life, began to spill over the edges of the dargah into the streets. You'd see either girl babies or women whose faces had been polished into agelessness by fatigue and hardship, as though, for homeless women, you go straight from infancy to old age without passing childhood in between.



Every big city, from Calcutta to Bombay, has its homeless. Delhi has an estimated 1,40,000 homeless people—and that's a conservative estimate. There is little provision for any of the homeless, less for homeless women. Some NGOs have shelters for women. The government-run shelter for homeless women was shut down last year, just before winter set in.



For weeks, the pavement women and I passed each other by. I walked down those pavements often, but though the kids and I got friendly, the women had seen too much. They're tired of the journalists, the NGOs, scared of the police, terrified of the truck that might corral them like stray cattle and take them to the "beggar's home". The "beggar's home" is a place of terror: they will be separated from their families, locked up. More than even violent drunks or a hard winter, more than rapacious cops, they fear the truck.



Amina and I get talking only after she and her family have found a home—a plastic sheet over a doorway-sized space—in the dargah. She hails me: "You're the one who walks so much, you gave my daughter bananas once." She wants to know why I wanted to talk to them. I have no answer; I can't change their lives.



But she talks anyway. Her family is one of the city's silent casualties, their slow progress from village to railway platform to slum arrested by the demolition drive that sent them skittering into the street. Her eyes grow distant as she remembers her three street years.



The loss of privacy is hard, but you get used to it, she says. Winters are the worst; babies and the old die, warm clothes are yearned after but must be guarded ferociously. She got so used to the dust and dirt that she couldn't stop lifting up her youngest to smell her, all day after the first bath in their new home, a bath in dirty water--but, oh, she smelled like a baby, not garbage.



"The worst, Didi," she says, "was not the beatings or the cold, it was the nights." When sleep was an illusion broken by quarrels and fights for space, by police raids and traffic. She used to think about sleep all the time. Wonder what it would be like to spend an hour asleep, uninterrupted.



Amina has to visit another pavement family. She doesn't know whether their baby will survive this winter; the mother has gone mad, she says matter of factly. But as I start to get up, she stops me. "Wait, you'll have tea." And I see in her face something I never saw all those months we walked past each other: the pride of a woman who, finally, has something to offer me from her own home. "Yes," I say. "Thank you."