Column

Sometime ago, I persuaded a colleague to put the rice he was sending back in his plate to the canteen into a bag and give it to the poor children outside the office.

He refused, saying it was not quite right, the food was left over.

Angered, I forked the remains of his meal into a plastic bag and walked down to the little gate of our compound. A few very dirty children were playing there. They stopped their game briefly to look at me. Will you eat? I asked, one nodded, and I held out the bag. In a trice, it was gone.

More recently, perhaps inspired by my determination not to waste food, he did something similar, and I saw him walking out with a bag in his hand.

He came back a bit disturbed. But I was too busy to notice. It was only later I heard what had troubled him.

Five kids ate what I had left behind, he said, and I could see the sight, five little children pouncing on the bag and sitting down cross-legged around it to wolf it down. Kids, as we all know, are always hungry.

Today, the same kids are a bit worse off than they were a few weeks ago. The ‘home’ they knew, the makeshift shacks on the pavement, have been removed, the pavement has been fenced in, and the families sit on the road, seeking the shelter
of trees.

Luckily for them, the road broadening men have not got to these trees yet.

I watch the little babies, bare bottomed in colourless shifts, and the older children , playing on the road, and managing to avoid the speeding traffic and wonder how we can continue to pretend they don’t exist.

On the other hand, the city does need a clean up. Letting squatters line the pavements makes the road inhabitable, every night as I leave the office, I worry that as I turn, I will be distracted and find myself hurting a sleeping woman or man lying just across, on the road.

Walking on the stretch of road is almost an impossibility, the smells are revolting and the lack of hygiene shocking.

Indeed it is a Hobson’s choice. We do need a clean, habitable city, but these are human lives, and not very different in their wants and needs and dreams from our own.

Mumbai has always been a city with a heart, though I did not think so when I first came here. Jumping the platform to cross the tracks to be on time at a brand new job in a bewildering city, I twisted my ankle painfully the first week of living here.

Of course there was no question of resting it, so I would hobble to work, crepe bandage in place. At VT station, people rushing past would give me dirty looks — my slowness was an impediment in their progress, a barrier in their speed.

I decided this was a heartless city. But acts of kindnesses also pointed the other way, and told me, that under the surface this was a city with a heart.

I am wondering if that will change as we become more ‘Shanghai-ish’. Will there be no one who will stop to help the old man pushing his hand cart upslope… trying to hurry because he is holding up traffic and the cars are setting up a clamour?

Will no one stop to lead a child who waits, bag on shoulder, to cross at a busy intersection, on his way to school?

Will someone have time to notice the blind man who sings to God at the corner of the foot overbridge at the station? Or smile at the beggar boy who peeps through the car window, entranced?

Then, two days ago, I saw that mighty monster, a BEST bus, holding up a line of traffic. When it finally moved, we very irate drivers realised that the driver had been waiting while a very small, spindly legged puppy took its time to cross the road.

Mumbai’s heart is in its place, I thought, with a sigh of relief. Someone might even find a way to shelter the newly homeless who line the roads outside the office.

Email:ssaran@dnaindia.net