Bombay to Burgh

I was booked third tier A/C sleeper, which was a real relief. The cattle cars that the second-class passengers have to fight their way into looked out of my league, frankly. Later, at Howrah station in Calcutta, I would see the lines of passengers vying for the cheap seats, and the battered coaches passing full of people packed in against the barred windows. A ride to Calcutta in there for me would be the equivalent of living through a 28-hour humanitarian crisis. I got to my seat and joined a few other young men who were already in. One of these guys turned out to be a real friend – Mohit, in imports, from Goa. We had a great conversation about India’s development, though he was of the opinion that the tribal and rural segments of society were somehow “anti-development” in their struggles against the land-appropriation tactics of corporations. I’m to find that this is a common view; it demands a real shift in thinking to redefine development in terms of ensuring the concerned population’s potential for self-realization, rather than that which can be represented on the balance sheet. I enjoy differing opinions though; I still have a lot to learn about prevailing thought in India, anyway, so my own judgment sometimes is better left unspoken.

The train ride was a cool 28 hours – departing on Friday evening, July 30 and riding on through the night. The only noise other than the murmur of conversation during the daytime and were the chai wallahs, who walked down the aisles every few minutes or so carrying stainless steel valved pots of hot tea. As they strode the aisle, they’d croak “chai chai chai” (Abhilash loves my impression of these dudes). The other vendors who advertised “Cheeps, KureKure, Beescuits…Cheeps, KureKure, Beescuts” at all hours of the day and night. KureKure is a Frito-Lay product: basically cheese puffs flavored to local tastes (curry, spicy masala, etc. It’s alright.)

Before I left the office on Friday, where I had met Steshia for a pre-trip briefing, Carmine from the CRY Shop team pulled me over. “OK, I’m going to mother you,” she said. “Don’t eat anything that’s uncooked - no salads, chutneys, yogurt. And don’t drink local water. And don’t stray away from the group,” she admonished good-naturedly in her rich British-Indian accent. I got variations of these same travel tips from everyone who cared to offer, but nobody told me to beware of the food served on the railway. Though the sleeping conditions were clean and fairly comfortable (I saw only one unticketed cockroach in the passenger coach), the food was of prison quality. Once Mohit told me to go to the pantry because I had wanted to get a packet of biscuits. I wish I hadn’t seen the conditions in that car, for when the guy reached up to get a box from the storage hold, dozens of roaches scattered. For some reason, the railway rats don’t bother me as much as the cockroaches, even after a solid six weeks of cohabitation. The toll exacted on my sensitive gut landed me in the train’s toilet for 4 to 5 consecutive trips.

A word on the Indian Railways toilets. In Development Policy Administration class, we talked about a provocatively named NGO called the WTO – the World Toilet Organization. This WTO contends that the number one threat to public health lies in the absence of proper sanitation throughout the world. I wonder if they’ve petitioned Indian Railways at all so far. Indian Railways’ toilets employ a very simple plumbing scheme – they empty straight down onto the tracks below. I saw a Youtube video on this before my first trip, but for some reason forgot about it until now. Aside from the menace to watersheds located along the railway path, to the uninitiated it is a vaguely threatening sensation to be exposing your soft-and-tenders to the rush of air and noise from below, the tracks a blur at the end of the short wastepipe. The metal-clad bathroom is incredibly noisy, too – like sitting in a bomb-bay. Luckily, I’d brought the course of Ciprofloaxcin from the international travel clinic, and after starting immediately on that the problem cleared up within a day or two.

I spent the bulk of the journey’s second day camped out in my bunk. The uncle who had booked the lower bunk (on which the three passengers are to sit during daylight hours) had boarded very early in the morning, and was resting below. Mohit said that I could have raised an issue over it, since I paid for the seat. But I figured it wasn’t that huge of a deal, since I did not have a window seat anyway, and I could read over my project executive summaries undistracted from the goings on below. I did get a chance to see the passing scenery, as the areas where the toilets are located at the end of each coach have a pair of doors that the railway staff opened, ostensibly to let in fresh air. There was always a railway employee crashed out in this area during sleeping hours, so I imagine that they liked to keep it somewhat aired-out when possible. Mohit and I spent a while just switching sides, standing in the doorway of the speeding train. The wind whipping past and the unfamiliar scenery – mainly green country fields, with occasional small villages and towns - was exciting. “Just like Sholay,” I joked to Mohit over the clacking of the train, referring to a train heist scene in that hit Bollywood movie from the 1970s. I told him that I was unwilling to get down at any of the backwater stations that the train stopped at briefly, based on what I saw in another recent movie, “Jab We Met”. The two protagonists wind up stranded after taking too long at a station stop and of course much romantic misadventure ensues. I doubt if the latter would be in the cards for me in such a case, so I stayed put except for one extended stop when I got off somewhere with Mohit at a station in Madhya Pradesh.

We passed a huge industrial complex, with dozens of smokestacks stabbing the horizon and belching out thick, white clouds of waste. “That’s India’s largest steel mill,” said Mohit. It was really an awesome sight – if fearfully pollutive as well. I’d never seen a steel mill in operation before, since the industry in Pittsburgh collapsed just about the time I was born. There was one of the “Commanding Heights” of India’s economy that remained viable and vital to its continued growth as ever, just a few miles away. Around that time, I leaned a bit too far out of the coach to get a snap of an engine that we were passing. The conductor of the neighboring engine waved his hands out the window frantically for me to get back inside,. I did just as the doorway zoomed past a light array that though I wouldn’t have collided with it, would have put a scare into me. I snapped a cool picture of him telling me to get the hell back in, anyway.

When I got back to my seat I did some more reading and maybe some sleep – the trip is all sort of one undifferentiated and uneventful mess with one exception. At one stop, a boy, himself pauper-thin and with matted hair, dressed in a thin dirty t-shirt, ragged shorts, and no shoes entered into the coach from the toilet area door. I watched with as he clambered nearly on all fours, collecting all of the garbage from the floor of the coach and pushing it out with his hands. Once he reached our area, he looked over his small pile of trash up at me and the guy sitting beside me, with lucid eyes, and made a small grunting sound while motioning with hand to mouth. The guy next to me gave him a rupee coin; I fumbled, in mild amazement, for a coin dropped it into his hand. Without another sound, he continued to shuffle the trash outside. Intrigued, I got up to follow him. When he reached the end of the coach, he reached beneath a lower berth to fish out a tray of half-eaten food from which he removed two trays of rice and vegetables that had been sitting for several hours, likely. I continued to follow him through the door into the toilet area. He pushed all of the trash that he’s collected out onto the track below through the open door. At this point it looked like he was going to make a move into the next coach, but a railway employee barked at him sharply and rapped him on the head with his knuckles. The kid scooped up his food and leapt out of the coach onto the platform. I watched him as he sat down, like a dejected animal, near one of the I-beams supporting the station’s roof, and dump the food onto a newspaper that he had spread out on the ground, digging in with his hands. The train started to roll away at that point, and I could do nothing but shake my head at what I’d just witnessed.

“Those children are part of the railway syndicate,” Mohit later explained. “Any money that you give to them goes to the parties exploiting them. Sometimes, their parents sell them outright to the syndicate, which uses them to beg in that manner.” It was sobering thought. It seems like the more desperate-looking the front, the more exploitive the scam is. Abhilash told me earlier about an absolutely ghoulish practice, wherein the syndicates that control the traffic light beggars will forcibly (or even consensually) amputate limbs or otherwise maim beggars in order to increase their potential daily haul. Homo homini lupus.

I didn’t retrieve my laptop from my bag for the entire trip, and thus missed out on a ton of blogging that I could have done. When I got on the train, I again took the advice of my co-workers and chainlocked it beneath the lower bunk. This made it secure, but it also rendered everything except for the few items I’d kept in the outer pocket (a handful of sweet limes, a packet of biscuits, and my mp3 player). I could have watched a DVD too, which would have cut into what reading time I did have. Mohit was watching a movie in his upper bunk – I asked him what and it turns out he had been watching “Hostel.” Not the best movie for a trip to an unfamiliar place – he said that his buddy recommended it to him as a funny movie about a bunch of fun-loving guys who go on a college trip. Some buddy. “He didn’t watch the whole movie, though,” said Mohit, who has a stronger constitution than I for having sat through the whole film, especially on a trip.

Finally, at 5:30 a.m. on Monday, August 4, we stepped out at the end of the line – Howrah station in Calcutta. I awoke from having slept for only a few hours the night before on the jostling train thanks to the stomach problems. Mohit and I detrained together and made or way through the already steaming and crowded station to the prepaid cab stand. After I paid Rs. 200 for a taxi to the Mandira guest House, Mohit negotiated a taxi for himself driven by a Sikh guy with a graying waist-length beard, We parted ways and exchanged contact info – he later called me once I was in the cab to make certain I was OK. Yet again, someone sent my way just when I needed the help. The cab I got into was one of the famed yellow Ambassador brand cabs. These cars resemble a 1950s-era American car, perhaps just a bit smaller. They remind me of the 1947 Ford Roadster that my dad talks about having owned and drag raced on the streets of Wilkinsburg as a youngster. Anyway, the cabs in Calcutta are all “Ambies”. The Ambassador was produced by the Birla family as some sort of a payback arrangement to the Indian National Congress following independence, according to the consensus of a conversation that we had at work one day. I had thought that they were government-produced, but this was in fact, not the case.

Ambies are not the only immediately distinguishing feature of Calcutta to the newcomer. The pull-style rickshaws (like the kind one might see in kung-fu movies) are common here, as are pedal rickshaws. One of the most striking sights was that of the Howrah bridge – an immense steel suspension bridge that spans a tributary of the Ganges (name forthcoming). Seeing that bridge made me really, really like Calcutta though – Pittsburgh’s Fort Pitt Bridge could have been the Howrah Bridge done up in miniature. Otherwise, for some reason, Calcutta reminded me of Philadelphia. As the former capital of India under the British Raj, and with the associated British architecture just about everywhere in sight, the comparison is not without merit methinks. One notable structure is Queen Victoria’s house, which overlooks a large park where Sushanto from CRY told me that cosmopolitan couples now use as a makeout spot. Visible from one flyover on the way to the old part of town where I was to stay was the “Indian Museum”, the collection of which had been assembled by the British.

Then there are the hammers and sickles – spray-painted on walls, hewn out of wrought iron on fences, and flying on flags near the domestic airport and from the backs of some of the autorickshaws. I had never thought in my life I’d be traveling through a communist-ruled territory. The truth of the matter is that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who has ruled West Bengal for some 30 years has become soft in its principles over the past decade. As the story goes, the party decided that development was not possible without embracing economic liberalization, so there you have it. I saw just as many McDonald’s, Pizza Huts, and Spencer’s (A UK chain store) locations as I did elsewhere in India, and the mall contagion is spreading wildly here, too. Prothik of CRY said that the party has been disparagingly redubbed “The Capitalist Party of India (Marketing)” by its critics as a result. It’s interesting in light of this to see the hammer and sickle displayed with such fervor. I wonder if it’s mostly the work of a vocal minority who are disgruntled with the party’s heel-turn.

I reached the Mandira Guest House, the taxi passing a small pond surrounded by kuccha slum dwellings before entering the middle-class residential neighborhood where this and a few other guest houses were located. What looked like almond and leafy subtropical trees grew amid the buildings and houses here. Jodhpur Park was the name of the neighborhood, and the CRY Calcutta office was located only a few blocks away. I was dog-tired, and the heat was creeping up past tolerable levels. Luckily the Mandira owner required only a few raps at the window to rouse him to the fact that I was waiting outside of the locked gate, eager to get a wash and a few hour’s rest before I was to meet with Biswajeet from CRY at 11:00. I got to my room on the third floor of the sturdy, concrete house, which I believe I referred to in an earlier post as a comfortable pink-walled air raid bunker. After firing up the AC, I slept very briefly – for due to a mixup Biswajeet arrived at 10 rather than 11. After a quick shower, we boarded a pedal-rickshaw for the short ride to office, where I was to meet the Development Support team and depart for the project itself in nearby Kamaharti Slum District. This was to be a two-day visit, with the first being a meeting with the staff and the second, an actual visit to Kamaharti slum.

WARNING: Digression… 

I continue this post again, from Kolhapur at Jeevan’s family’s homestead. The breeze through the white marble-floored sitting room is temperate, the view of the Maharaj’s palace with its domes and clock tower, breathtaking. To the rear of the building in the distance are ghats, upon the ridges of which are visible an occasional fort or some other evidence of a hill station. I’m comfortably whiling away some time after breakfast (some kind of Maharashtran variant of polenta, spiced with mirchi and parsley, and kela – bananas of the normal sized variety) before seeing about what the day’s plan of action is, as Jeevan is fond of calling. She’s here receiving a course of ayurvedic treatment that involves a 10-day fast, yoga, and meditation as well as some other remedies. I’ve joined her and her father with their yoga instructor/doctor for the early morning practices. It’s the first time I’ve ever tried yoga, despite numerous opportunities (and much urging from my good friend Jon Kubacka, a yogic devotee in his own right), but in a strange way I am glad I got to experience that in India. The breath control, stretching and tension/release aspects of it were very relaxing, though the long-term benefits are not going to be evident right away. On my second day in Kolhapur, I went to visit Panhala, a hill station that had historic roots as a fort of Chhatrapati Shivaji. Here we saw ancient stone ruins, some of which even predated Shivaji’s strategic use of the secluded mountain perch. The views again, were amazing and it always blows my mind to lay eyes on sites and structures that are older than the United States. One Muslim tomb (there was much evidence of Mughal conquest and its influence in some of these otherwise Maharashtran structures) dated back to 1009 AD. A highlight was seeing more wild monkeys near one of the fortifications, chattering amongst themselves and scooping up the roasted corn cobs discarded by other tourists. We also visited a junior college where a younger relative of Mr. Vilash – a business associate of Jeevan’s family who was traveling with us – attends. The campus of which abutted one of the historic sites of the huge granaries used to keep food stocks for Shivaji’s army. The college’s science campus housed 1200 students, said the principal, Mr. Bose, who we met with in his office. He stared the institution in 1994 with seven students. The reputation of the private school was such that their enrollment increased dramatically in the interceding years. The institution, ensconced in its mountain surroundings, reminded me of similar private schools in Ligonier, Pennsylvania - right down to the historic element.

But jumping on back to Calcutta: Biswajeet and I rode the rick to the CRY office to meet with the friendly lot in Development Support. The good cheer and passion that everyone exhibits outright about their jobs is really inspiring. The team was all smiles in introducing themselves and telling me in detail what their individual roles were, and preparing me for some of the sights at Kamaharti. Satya Gopal Dey, who writes extensively on development issues facing marginalized populations in the Northeastern area of India that CRY’s Calcutta office administrates. He showed me an article that he’d put together which criticized the use of military as a police force in Assam state. I also met Gladson Dundung, a frequent contributor to the CRY blog and an tribal-rights activist and lecturer. He himself comes form the tribal regions of Jharkhand state, formerly a part of Bihar. His writing on the effects of globalization vis a vis corporate land-reclamation through the practice of the government of India’s establishment of Special Economic Zones presents the flip side of the free-markets so touted in my classes. It’s alternative viewpoints like these that really interest me. Free markets and unrestricted commerce might be a short-run boon at the macro level, but when one focuses in on traditional, tribal populations that for all intents and purposes are driven to extinction as a result, anyone with a conscience has to question. I interviewed Gladson for an upcoming segment on Rustbelt Radio on 88.3 FM on the following day, so once that has been edited and aired I’ll post the link or file.

I left for the project office with Sanjeev Singh, the project coordinator, and Biswajeet. After a drive through suburbs that became more and more sparse and squalid, and across a set of railroad tracks that appeared to double as a habitation site (with people literally living on the tracks). Finally we were driving past mounds of rotting trash, vegetable waste and to the right of us, a stream that seemed to be at a standstill flow, teeming with more garbage and stinking in the heat. The street was crowded, with people running small stalls even right next to this waterway and picking through the garbage for recyclables, ostensibly. Biswajeet pointed out a landfill to our left as we drove on, which only added to the oppressive smell that hung in the air. The air cleared by the time we arrived at the concrete schoolhouse where the office was situated on the third floor. We ascended the stairs to the computer room, where about a dozen young women and one young man who worked for SPAN were waiting to hold our discussion. It is interesting to note that the people living in Kamaharti slum are all Urdu-speaking Muslims, who migrated to this part of Calcutta from surrounding states to work in the jute mills. Bags woven from jute were a major industry in this area, until the mills shut down some time ago, leaving many of these folks to take up far less lucrative jobs as rickshaw pullers, street sweepers, even rag pickers. Throughout the slum, overcrowding, violence, and alcoholism are rampant. Mr. Singh noted later that toilet facilities are a major public health challenge. Often, 30 families will have to share one toilet. With the average size of a family being 8 members, the chances of everyone properly waiting their turn decreases significantly. Consequently, urination and defecation on the street and in public areas is common. SPAN started work in this area about ten years ago with the intent of empowering the community itself to overcome these problems, availing of government assistance where possible to do so. CRY began supporting SPAN in 1999, and since then the coordinators have even further modified their approach toward capacity building of the people. They’ve made a great deal of progress, and one can see it in the faces of the community members who have taken up this mantel of change. During the second day of the visit, we met with some of these people for several hours, discussing each issue (domestic violence, public health, education) in detail and how the situation had violated the fundamental rights of each child, and what was being done toward remedying the situation permanently.

A problem that I’ve seen at nearly every site I’ve visited so far is the difficulty in obtaining birth registrations for children born among the poor communities. In order to receive just about any type of government assistance, a person requires a birth registration. The red-tape associated with this process is often insurmountable for people living off-the-grid, so to speak, who may be illiterate or otherwise unaware of the importance of birth registration. So, through fear of bureaucracy or simple ignorance, populations become disenfranchised over time. Two young ladies from Kamaharti rose above these challenges, as well as their own physical disabilities. One had lost her legs at the waist after being struck by a passing truck as a young child; the other had a compromised range of motion of her left arm. Disabled children in this area are offered a special vocational scholarship through the Birla Institute of Technology – children may learn a variety of trades free of charge, providing them with a fighting chance of earning once they enter the job market legitimately. However, BIT requires a disability card as proof of one’s eligibility for the scholarship. To get one of these government disability cards, one requires a birth registration card, of which both the young ladies lacked. At the encouragement of SPAN, both of them did the groundwork in contacting the various government offices to first secure their birth registrations retroactively, and then the disability cards. Now they both attend BIT, where they take classes on crafts, sewing and doll making. The attitudes of the two, in light of their own disabilities and the conditions in which they’d grown up and currently live, were striking.– Smiling like a normal, hopeful teenager, and Parveen, polite, serious and determined in her black hijab– Surely she’ll community leader for sure. Having done taken care of their own problems, the two now reach out to other disabled children and families to show them how they, too, can attain their right to identity under the Indian government.

Ek Saath (”One together”) is a group of children that formed, again at SPAN’s encouragement and direction, to function as activists within their own slum community. The 15 members of Ek Saath perform street dramas illustrating among other issues, the importance of education and literacy. Two of the group performed one such brief street drama for us, wherein an old man played by one of the youths receives a letter from his son, which he cannot read since he himself is illiterate. He asks a young passerby, also partially literate, to read the letter. The passerby misreads the letter, leading the old man to believe erroneously that his son has died. The children’s group also publishes a magazine, also called Ek Saath, which includes written and artistic contributions from all involved. The content largely aims to inspire other children and parents to think about issues like education, child labor - the importance of having a real childhood. Ultimately, it presents a simple proof of the possibilities: If these kids are doing it, others can too.

The overarching sense of pride and accomplishment was immediately evident when talking with these children. They were not the slum-dwellers one might expect, living hopelessly and desperately in a hand-to-mouth fashion. The work of SPAN, supported by CRY America, instilled these youngsters with a confidence that they would otherwise never know. They now have dreams, future professional plans – many of them want to write or publish their own magazine when they grow up. These are the kinds of subtle shifts in tactics and, ultimately, thinking, that lead to the treatment of children as citizens with goals and desires of their own. To see one such element unfold so well, especially through a creative process like Ek Saath that was started and carried on by the children was beyond inspiring.

After several more interviews, night began to fall in Calcutta. We left the general-purpose building where we were meeting to take a walk through the slum itself, so that I could get some pictures for the photo essay I’m to assemble for CRY America. The congestion and confusion of the streets became apparent here, as we were assailed by all kinds of early evening traffic - pedal rickshaws, the occasional car or three-wheeled ‘goods carrier’, pet goats customarily kept by the families. Stalls and shops of all kinds squashed up right next to residential buildings that appeared to be pukka, but which Sanjeev later assured me were most definitely not in the interior. People sleep 10 to a room, and privacy is an unthinkable luxury. The slum has electricity to a degree, as evidenced by a transformer, but load-shedding (rolling blackout, in order to distribute a finite amount of power among a large number of locales) is daily reality. We happened upon a class going on in one open fronted building, where a professor was teaching English to a handful of students. He invited us back for a second day, to meet with some more prominent members of the Kamaharti community for further discussion on the issues, but my travels would be taking me to amazing Orissa for the next few days. One day when I return, I’ll take him up on this offer.

The other day while I was picking up some eyeglasses I’d purchased from an optical store at Infinity Mall in Andheri, a wretchedly thin boy of about 8 or 9 rushed to the side of the taxi once he saw that I was white. He wore a filthy dhoti, and his eyes were reddened and carbuncled. In his arms he clutched a toddler, and wailed tearfully at me for a handout in the most pathetic manner I’ve seen since being here. In this game, the con is watertight, the mark is practically in the can every time. “Ek minat, ek minat, beta,” I said wearily, nearing meltdown from a nearly hourlong cab ride that I would have avoided altogether in favor of a cheaper, faster train ride were it not for the load I was carrying. I dropped two rupee coins into his tiny hand and he started then to beg for 10 more. The cabbie drove on, leaving him behind, as we were searching for an ATM so I could draw some more cash to pay for the fare he’d exacted from me with a roundabout trip through neighborhoods I’d never seen. I was a sitting duck for scammers on this day – my last in Mumbai before I left for the U.S. via a night flight. Once I drew the cash from an Indusland ATM across the way, I entered the mall to see the two little boys merrily play-wrestling on the sidewalk, all traces of desperate hunger seemingly vanished in the absence of the mark. I can make judgments, come up with theories and try to justify why people are driven to this behavior. I can even feel smugly self-righteous for giving, not giving, outright ignoring, staring blankly into their faces even when they approach and tug at my arm. But I get the feeling that it’s never a matter of simple poverty – i.e.: I am lacking in A, so I will beg for it from X person who is not deprived. I just don’t know the situation of these child beggars, and I never will truly. We can approach an understanding through our case studies and focus group discussions, and the myriad other tools at our disposal. But what if things are so much more complex than observed choices and behaviors?

I do give unreservedly to the hijra. Mainstream Indian society coexists with them, but does not accept them to the degree where traditional employment is an option. Abhilash tells me that aside from dancing at weddings and child naming rituals (a practice which amounts to extortion in his hometown of Bhopal. The head of the hijra group will actually meet with the family in advance of their event to negotiate a payoff to ensure that they stay away and don’t create a nuisance with their dancing and – yes- ‘flashing’) they sustain themselves through prostitution and this form of begging. When they enter the train compartments, things steam up. They’ll sidle up to men and flirt, sometimes as Abhilash says, attempting to stroke the faces of clean-shaven guys.

I saw this nearly happen on a train ride with Nivenden, our third and final roommate who moved into Abhilash’s place just a few days before I returned from Orissa and Calcutta. We were on a train from Thane to Chinchpokli, on the way to work, when a conspicuously-dressed hijra boarded, dressed I a south Indian manner with a colorful sari and white flowers in her hair. The guy sitting next to Nivenden got up to get down form the train, and I said to Nivenden, jokingly, “Aren’t you going to offer the seat to the lady there?” He looked at me quizzically, and started to explain that it wasn’t really a woman, but I headed him off. The hijra stopped in front of a young man who gave a few rupee coins, placed hands on the donor’s head and murmured some kind of a blessing, before moving on down the aisle.

The blessing/curse associated with hijra compounds the relationship between them and India’s mainstream society. Apparently, people are more willing to give to hijra to avoid a curse, since such a pox from one who leads such a harsh life would be catastrophic to a family. Here, some of the lowest appear to wield some kind of upper hand, indeed.