India's Lost Generation

Amongst Calcutta’s 100.000 homeless children

 

 

“One day I was standing on the station platform at Sealdah. Someone shouted ‘Thief’. The police came running, but they did not run after the thief. They just grabbed me and beat me with sticks and then took me to jail. I was put in a cell and the big police captain came and grabbed my hand and took out a knife. He said, “We will cut off your little finger, because you steal.” Then the men came again and beat me. After three days they let me go and I returned to the train station.”

Until recently, Papusheck was one of Calcutta’s 100.000 street children. The capital of West Bengal has been home to a transient homeless population for decades. In the West, Calcutta is associated with poverty and desperation and the city’s tragic reputation remains deservedly apt in the new millennium. Almost every pavement houses entire families who sleep, eat and wash in public, live off refuse and begging and find themselves at the mercy of all the dark forces a city of more than 10 million inhabitants can muster. Half of these so-called pavement-dwellers are children.

Papusheck’s story is typical for many of the kids that end up walking the streets of Calcutta. “I ran away from home. My mother and father died. My sister and two brothers and I moved in with my uncle. I was sick, there was nothing to eat. I had asthma and my uncle lived in a Bengali village that was under water from the monsoon rains for much of the year. I could not stay there, so I ran away. I came to Calcutta.”

Papusheck, like many other children, doesn’t talk about the real reasons for his escape. Mental, physical and sexual abuse abuse, hard work, unsympathetic, impoverished parents and a host of other reasons linked to chronic poverty cause children to abandon the only certainty they have in life – their family. The root cause for this migration of minors is chronic poverty driven by overpopulation. None of India’s political parties address the country’s most serious problem. Vast uneducated vote banks serve both the government and the opposition. It’s up to the children to find a life for themselves and opportunities are thin on the ground.
The 5-year old Papusheck traveled hundreds of miles from his village by himself, only to find himself in Sealdah Station, sharing the platforms with hundreds of other children, running from the police and begging. When Papusheck arrived in Calcutta, he had never been to a school and could not read or write. Station life was tough.

“I was always hungry. But I got together with other children and we bought glue. When we inhaled it, we could sleep for a long time and forget about the lack of food. Sometimes I would sleep for two days.”

Begging in India is a risky profession at best. For a child, just surviving another day, is a real challenge.
“Sometimes people gave me a few Rupees. But often we were beaten and kicked, not just by the police but by the people passing through the station as well. Most of the food I got was from the rubbish.”

While the local government remains largely disengaged from the issue and state sponsored shelters and homes have been closed in recent years, more than 200 NGOs work in for the homeless and destitute. Nevertheless the numbers of children living on the street continue to increase. But many of the NGOs are primarily concerned with raising funds to support their staff or follow political agendas rather than explore the needs, immediate or long-term of the street children.

Papusheck is one of the lucky few who got off the street and his story is a case in point. Some four years ago he was picked up by CINI (Children In Need Institute) who forced the boy back to his village. A few weeks later Papusheck was back at Sealdah Station, sniffing glue to keep the hunger away. He was picked up a second time and offered a home at a small charity in South Calcutta. Life has never been the same.

Sanjay Chakraborty is a 33-year old engineering lecturer who devotes his spare time and funds to the endeavour of a lifetime. Together with German founder Wolfgang Müller, he is running the Ali S.K. Memorial Society for the Children, located in a suburb of South Calcutta.

“We offer shelter and a new life for 27 children at the moment. Papusheck is the oldest boy we have here. He is 9 and half now.”

Papusheck looks somewhat older than other undernourished street kids his age.
Sanjay laughs, “We had to get birth certificates for all the children here. In fact Papusheck is probably 14 years old, but we would not have been able to get a certificate for a boy his age. In any case, we had to pay the relevant authorities for each of the certificates. Government officials don’t care about the homeless.”

Papusheck has no regrets. He can read and write and even speaks English. He is self-confident and smiley, though a distinct tough demeanor and a serious gaze linger in his persona. He knows there are countless others out there, right now, fighting for survival.

The scope for abuse of India’s most unfortunate is gigantic. Half a billion people are very poor, more than 300 million live such precarious day to day, hand to mouth existences that they have little time, energy or opportunity to extract themselves from their dire circumstances.

Sanjay Chakraborty agrees, “It’s common currency in India for poor families to produce as many children as possible, just to sell them into prostitution or force them to beg.”

Once in the cities, many of the young beggars are sucked up into a huge net of rackets and mafias who demand their cut, just like the parents, off the childrens’ begging efforts.

Sanjay Chakraborty, along with most other Calcutta residents, has witnessed this many times.
“The gangsters use the kids to commit crimes. The children always have a perfect alibi. They live on the street. It is their home. Late at night, the police will not stop homeless people. So homeless people and especially children are forced into crime.”

Other, darker issues complicate matters further for the most vulnerable. Pedophilia is rife in India and goes largely unreported. At least half a million child prostitutes are said to be working in the country, more than 50.000 of them in Calcutta. In several recent cases in Goa, foreign pedophiles, notably a Swiss couple, got off with light sentences and legislation to fight international and local pedophilia is still some way off.

In Calcutta, the NGOs themselves may add to the children’s problems. For Wolfgang Müller and Sanjay Chakraborty, who receive their donations from private sources in Germany and the UK, as well as from the Italian Government, politics and religion do not belong in the lives of the street children.
The 39-year old German paints a dire picture of the ‘aid business’ in Calcutta, “As far as I know, we are the only charity working with the homeless children that does not have a religious agenda. We will take any child, regardless whether he is Christian, Muslim or Hindu. We do not preach anything here. If we were a religious organization, funding would be much easier. To my mind, many of the Christian organizations operating in Calcutta simply offer a religious agenda to attract finances. It’s a way to generate income.”

Howrah Station, 6pm, rush hour. Tens of thousands of commuters rush to and thro, pouring out of packed carriages and across crowded platforms. The main station hall is also packed. Hundreds of passengers sit waiting for their trains. Amongst them the street kids wander, sleep, stare, work and steal.

B.J. Kumar has been polishing shoes in Howrah Station for over a year. He won’t tell where he got his polish and brushes. B.J. is running a business, competing with scores of other shoe-shiners who operate in the station area. But B. J. has the edge on his competitors. He is only ten and filled with an enthusiasm and motivation. His winning smile nets him many customers and he is fluent in Bengali and Bihari. B.J. even speaks English.
“My business good,” he intones seriously, as he wipes down a commuter’s sneakers. The man pays with a 10 Rupee note. B.J. pulls some coins from his shirt.
“My service only five Rupees,” he smiles proudly.
Suddenly he grabs his brushes, whips his shoe-shining box from under the man’s sneakers and dives into the crowd. Seconds later the police pass, leisurely swinging their sticks.
B.J. soon finds another customer outside the station entrance. In broad daylight the dark rings under his eyes, the torn rags he wears and the worn brushes in his tired, calloused hands convey a different expression.
“I sleep inside every night. I have nowhere to go. I sleep on the stairs.”
He is not alone. The main stairway is already crowded. A group of young women, abandoned by their husbands, have set up camp and are cooking rice. A few steps further up, two boys lie fast asleep as commuters pass, unseeing, uncaring, uncared for.

Inside the station, the kids are gathered round the TV screens. Absorbed by wall-to-wall advertising, they take a break from their perpetual search for food. Occasionally the police drive them away, but they are soon back, lingering under the flickering images that promise a better life.
Puja and Lackri are both 5 years old. They are on a mission and have no time for TV. The girls, with their two-year old half-naked baby brother in tow, stand by one of the platform gates, where vendors have set up shops selling snacks and drinks. The girls pester all customers. Foreigners get the most persistent attention. “Uncle, uncle,” they shout at a passing tourist and run in hot pursuit of their potential meal ticket. Eventually they make a big score, a bunch of bananas. But the skinny and undernourished girls are not about to wolf down their dinner. They cross the station hall to find their mother.

Gita is thirty and pregnant. Together with her friend Sunda she lives on a straw mat in Howrah Station. Apart from her three children and the sari she wears, she owns nothing. She is a Dalit, an untouchable, she is with child and she has no husband. In deeply conservative India, where women, both Hindu and Muslim, are second class citizens at the best of times, Gita is the lowest of the low, attracting zero sympathy from the thousands passing her every day. Her children are her only income.
“I came here from Bihar. My husband drank and beat me. He beat the girls. I had to leave my village. But I cannot leave Howrah Station, there is nowhere to go from here.”
The daughters dutifully pass the bananas to their mother. Gita divides up the fruit and makes sure the youngest one gets two pieces.
“We stay here all day. In the evenings, when it gets quiet, we try to sleep but at midnight we have to leave the station building. The police chase us out every night. At 4am we come back. It’s safer in here and if it rains we don’t get wet.”
The two women are talking about food. It’s Friday evening. In less than two days they will get something to eat. It’s a future worth savoring in daily conversation. Gita, the kids and Sunda visit a near-by Ashram (Hindu charity) every Sunday, where they, along with hundreds of other destitutes, will be able to get a real meal – rice, vegetables, maybe some curd. Until then the women keep talking about the only certainty they have – Sunday dinner.

Raju is 14 years old. The Bengali boy is the leader of a small ragged group of tough urchins that wander the station. He too speaks some English and claims to be able to read and write. He’s just come back from the rubbish strewn, polluted banks of the Hoogly River, where he takes his daily bath. Raju owns no soap or towel and the shirt on his back is wet. Today he is hanging out with another, younger boy with bad skin. Raju is trying to keep his friend alive. “He very sick. He cannot talk. I don’t know how old he is, where he comes from, not even his name.” Visiting a doctor is out of the question. Daily earnings rarely amount to more than a few coins.
The boy with no name stays close to his older protector at all times. A shadow in a world of shadows, he looks like he might even forget himself, if he’s left alone long enough in childhood misery and pathetic destitution. Raju smiles at his young friend and they drift into the crowd, swallowed up in seconds, searching for their next bite to eat.
The ‘Calcutta Stare’, a mixture of nervous, traumatic alertness and jaded resignation, is common to all the street children of Calcutta - Raju, B.J., Puja and Lackri and their 100.000 nameless companions all have it, no matter how industrious or ambitious they are in their world of little opportunity.

Twenty kilometers away, at the S.K. Ali Foundation in South Calcutta, 14-year old Papusheck is getting ready for school. His new life is modest. He shares a tiny room with several other kids, sleeping on straw mats. He owns little more than his clothes and a satchel for his schoolbooks. But Papusheck knows that he is safe.
“Sometimes I get angry and fight. I don’t know why. Life is good now.”
The stare is softening, the posture relaxes. A fourteen year old is looking forward to a football game in the afternoon. Papusheck forces a vague smile, the beginning of something, then he’s off. He has things to do.

For more information please visit www.calcutta.de

More stories by Tom Vater

Books by Tom Vater

Permission to reproduce any material on this site, either wholly or in part, must be obtained from the author.
Text: © Tom Vater 2001-2008; Images: © Tom Vater/Aroon Thaewchatturat 2001-2008, unless stated otherwise.