I’d watch people eating like a hawk—they were poor people like my family, so they didn’t usually leave good food behind, but they might drop something or not finish it entirely. I would hang around waiting, my feet so tired that I would juggle between two legs, standing on one at a time to give my other foot a rest. There were no bins, so when a person was done with something, he simply threw it on the ground. I worked out what leftovers could be safely eaten, just as back at home my brothers and I knew which food to scavenge on a railway platform. Bits of fried food, like a samosa, were pretty safe once you scraped off the dirt, but they were highly prized. If a samosa was to fall to the ground, the race would be on to snatch up the remains before the other scavenging kids. Mostly I relied on things more easily spilled, like nuts or a spicy bhuja mix with dried chickpeas and lentils. Sometimes I’d race for a bit of flat bread. There were struggles among those equally desperate for scraps, and occasionally I found myself roughly shoved aside or even punched. Children didn’t come out with pretty faces in the aftermath of such a skirmish; we were like wild dogs fighting over a bone.
Although I stayed mostly near the station and the river to sleep, I began to explore a few of the surrounding streets. It might have been a return of my natural wandering inclinations, but my explorations were also driven by the hunger that was my constant unwanted companion. I hoped that around that next corner might be something to eat; some source of food that the other street kids hadn’t found, a kindly stall holder or a box of rejects from the market. A place this big was full of possibilities.
It was also full of trouble.
On one expedition I remember finding myself in a dense couple of blocks of tumbledown houses and shacks put together with bamboo and rusty corrugated iron. The smell was truly vile, as if something had died. I became aware of people looking at me strangely, as if I had no right to be around there, and encountered a group of older boys smoking leaf-wrapped cigarettes. I was starting to feel unnerved and stopped in my tracks as more of them began to look at me.
One boy, waving his cigarette around in his hand, stood up and approached, talking loudly in a language I couldn’t understand. His friends chortled. I stood there, wondering what to do. Then he strode straight up and slapped my face, twice, while he kept on talking at me. Dumbfounded, I started to cry, and he hit me again, hard. I dropped to the ground and wept while the boys laughed even more.
I realized things could become worse and that I had to get out of there, so I tried to collect myself. I stood up, turned around, and started walking away at a steady pace, as you might do from a dangerous dog, my face stinging. Maybe if I showed that I didn’t want to invade their turf, they would leave me alone. But when they began to come after me, I broke into a run. Through the tears in my eyes I made out a narrow gap between two buildings and darted toward it, just as I felt a rock that one of them had thrown sting my arm.
I wriggled through the gap and emerged into an enclosed yard. I couldn’t see any way out, and the boys were shouting on the other side. The ground was a sea of garbage, which washed high up the far wall—perhaps I could climb it and get out that way. As I picked my way across the yard, the gang appeared through another entrance I hadn’t seen. They started grabbing things out of a rusty bin, and their leader shouted at me. Then the first bottle sailed through the air and smashed against the wall behind me. More bottles followed, exploding around me—it was only a matter of time until someone got their aim right and hit me. Stumbling and ducking, I reached the rubbish heap and mercifully it held my weight. I climbed all the way up, hauled myself on top of the wall, and ran along it, praying the boys wouldn’t follow me. Bottles kept smashing on the wall below and whizzing past my legs.
Maybe seeing me run was sport enough for the gang. They’d chased me off their territory and didn’t bother to follow me as I wobbled along as fast as I could. A little farther on I found a bamboo ladder leaning against the wall in someone’s backyard. I climbed down it and charged through the house and out the front door, past a woman sitting with her baby. She didn’t even seem to notice me run by, preoccupied as she was with her infant. I headed as fast as I could back toward the bridge, looming in the distance.
• • •
On the river, I was always on the lookout for a safe place to rest, as well as searching for food. Often when I returned to somewhere I’d slept before, there’d be others already there, so I moved on. Other times, I’d just come across a better prospect. Sleeping rough and the constant stress of being on the lookout meant I was always tired. Picking along the riverbank one twilight, I found myself heading under the bridge’s huge structure for the first time. Beneath it, I came across a few small wooden platforms gathered together, with offerings like coconut pieces and coins, along with pictures and little statues of a goddess I recognized—Durga, the warrior form of the supreme goddess Mahadevi.
She was seated on a tiger, with her many arms whirling weapons, which in the stories I’d been told she had used to slay a demon. She was a fierce vision to behold, lit by flickering terra-cotta lamps. But there was also something comforting about the little lights winking in the gathering darkness all around me, and I sat there under the bridge, looking out over the river. Ever hungry, I found the offerings too tempting—I collected some of the bits of fruit and coconut and ate them. I also took some coins.
For the first time, I felt relatively safe. I didn’t want to leave this place. Along with the shrines, there were some planks set as a platform to hang out over the water. I checked that its boards were stout and stable, and clambered onto it. It felt as if I was in a sacred place, where people came to pray to the goddess. On the hard wooden planks, listening to the sound of the river flowing by beneath me, I thought about my family, wondering how they were and how they must be thinking the same thing about me.
But as I recall it, the feelings I had were different by this point than when I’d first arrived—less sharp, less painful, but somehow deeper, too. Even if home was the same, I was different. I still wanted to get back there, desperately, but the feeling didn’t completely swamp me. I hadn’t given up hope of returning to my family, but I had become more focused on survival, on getting through the days. I suppose I was more aware of living here than of living at a home I couldn’t find. That home—the home I’d lost—felt farther away with each passing bit of food that I foraged, with each night I slept out in the open. Maybe I had come to feel to some degree that this was my home now, at least for the time being.
When I woke up the next morning, one of the wild-looking holy men in saffron robes was meditating nearby. Soon others arrived and joined him, some stripped to the waist and some carrying long decorated walking sticks. I left quietly. I knew that I had slept in their place and taken some of their offerings, and that maybe they intended the boards over the water to be another little shrine to Durga. But they hadn’t harmed me, or even woken me, and in that moment I felt secure in their company, almost as if we were on parallel journeys.
• • •
Some days, with little else to do, I would go back to the rail yards and wander among the many lines of track. There were always others about, looking for whatever they could find or else just filling up their days, like I was. Maybe they were lost, too, wondering which track might lead them home. Occasionally, a train would go by, sounding its horn to warn people out of its way.
One quiet but very hot day, I walked around until I was dazed from the heat, then sat down on a track, nearly falling asleep. A man dressed in a grimy white shirt and trousers came over.
“What are you doing hanging around such a dangerous place?” he asked.
“I’m lost,” I replied in my halting way.
He replied more slowly and carefully so I could understand him. “Children are hit by trains and killed here, and others have lost arms and legs. Train stations and railway yards are dangerous. They aren’t meant to be playgrounds for children.
”
Encouraged by the fact that he seemed to be patient enough to listen and work out what I was saying, I said, “I don’t know how to get back home. I’m all alone here.”
After listening to my story—the first time I’d been able to properly tell it to anyone—he told me he would take me to his home and give me food and water and a place to sleep. I was overjoyed; at last someone had stopped to help and was going to save me. I didn’t hesitate to go with him.
• • •
He was a railway worker and lived in a little shack by the side of the tracks near the point at which they all converged at the entrance to the immense red station. The shack was made of corrugated iron sheets patched with some panels of thick cardboard, and was kept up by a wooden frame. He shared it with a group of other railway workers, and I was invited to join them all for dinner.
For the first time since I had become lost, I sat at a table and ate a meal that someone had cooked and that was still warm—I can still practically taste the lentil dal with rice that one of the workers made over a little fire in a corner of the shack. The workers didn’t seem to mind that I was there, and didn’t complain about having to share their dinner. They were very poor, but they had just enough to live by different laws than people on the streets. They had a roof, and enough for a plain meal, and a job, however hard it was. They could only offer me a tiny amount, but it made all the difference because of their willingness to feed and house a stranger. It was like crossing into an entirely different world from the one I’d been living in, and all it took to make it was a few sheets of corrugated iron and a handful of lentils. For the second time, it felt like the kindness of a stranger had saved my life.
There was a simple spare bed in the back of the shack made out of straw, and I slept there almost as comfortably and happily as if I was in my own bed. The railway worker had mentioned that he knew someone who might be able to help me, and that he had arranged for this man to visit. I was overwhelmed with relief—already it seemed like the whole experience was a bad dream. Soon I would be home. I spent the day in the shack after the men headed off to work waiting for my savior.
As promised, the next day another man turned up, and he also spoke carefully in plain terms that I understood. He was well dressed in a neat suit, and he laughed when I pointed at his distinctive mustache and said, “Kapil Dev,” referring to India’s cricket captain at the time, whom he looked like. He sat down on my bed and said, “Come over here and tell me where you are from.” So I did as he asked and told him what had happened to me. He wanted to know as much as possible about where I was from so that he could help me find the place, and as I tried my best to explain everything, he lay down on the bed and had me lie down beside him.
Many lucky and unlucky things happened to me on my journey, and I made good and bad decisions. My instincts weren’t always sound, but they had been sharpened by weeks of living on the streets making conscious and unconscious decisions based on a perceived cost/benefit analysis. When we survive, we learn to trust our instincts. Perhaps any five-year-old would have begun to feel uneasy lying beside a strange man on a bed. Nothing untoward happened, and the man didn’t lay a hand on me, but despite the marvelous, intoxicating promises I was being made about finding my home, I knew something wasn’t right. I also knew that I shouldn’t show him that I didn’t trust him, that I should play along instead. While he was saying that the next day we would go together to a place he knew and try to get me back home, I nodded and agreed. At the same time, I knew beyond question that I should have nothing to do with this man, and that I had to make a plan to get away.
That night after dinner, I washed the dishes in a worn old tub in the corner near the door, as I’d done the previous two nights. The men went into their usual huddle for their chai and a smoke, and were soon completely distracted by their conversation and jokes. This was my chance. I picked the best moment I could and bolted out the door. I ran as if my life depended on it, which in retrospect I fear it did. I hoped that by taking them by surprise, I’d get enough of a head start to escape pursuit. Once more I was fleeing into the night past the railway tracks and down streets I did not know, with no idea where to go, no thought but escape.
I was quickly exhausted and slowed down once I was in crowded streets—maybe they wouldn’t even care that I was gone, and even if they did, surely they couldn’t have followed me this far. Then I heard someone call out my name from quite close behind. That sent a jolt through my body like an electric shock. Immediately, I ducked down, although I was already much shorter than the people all around me, and headed for the most crowded parts of the narrow street, near the bustling stalls hawking food along the curb. When I looked around, I could glimpse a couple of men who looked like they might be following me—grim, hard-faced men looking around and moving fast. Then I realized one of them was the railway worker I’d first met, who no longer looked much like the kind man who’d taken me in. I hurried away from them, but the street soon became so crowded it was hard to move fast, and I felt that the men were getting closer. I had to hide. I found a small gap between two houses and ducked into it, crawling back as far as I could before I came to a leaking sewage pipe large enough for me to hide in. I backed into it on all fours until I couldn’t be seen from the street, ignoring the cobwebs and the foul-smelling water running over my hands. I was much more scared of what was out there than I was of the dark pipe. If they found me, there was no way out.
I heard one of them talking to the fruit juice seller whose stand was near where I was hidden. I even have a frightening memory of peering out just as the railway worker himself looked into the gap toward the pipe, searching with hard eyes that seemed for a moment to stop on me but after a hesitation moved on. Did I really come that close to being discovered? Was it the man who had taken me in that I saw? I can’t be sure now, but the scene has remained with me as such a vivid image, perhaps because of the power of the betrayal—I had trusted this man and believed that he was going to help me, only for the ground to open up beneath me and try to swallow me up. I’ve never forgotten that terrifying feeling.
I stayed hidden for some time, until I was certain he and the others had left, then slipped out and made my way through the darkest of the alleys and streets. I was heartbroken that all my hopes had come to nothing. The man that I’d trusted, who I thought felt sorry for me and would help me, had betrayed me. More than ever, I wished Guddu was there to protect me; he wouldn’t have let anyone hurt me. I was too young to know what the man might have done to me if he’d caught me, but I knew it was a fate I wanted to avoid, and I was extremely relieved to have escaped. At least my survival instincts seemed to be strong; even if I’d made a mistake initially by trusting the man, I did know enough to run away when things took a bad turn. At some level, I took strength from the sense that I was learning to look after myself.
4.
Salvation
I was so scared of being found again by the railway worker and the other men that I didn’t dare remain near the railway station. Despite my occasional forays into the nearby neighborhood, until then I had been too cautious to travel far from the point at which I had first arrived in the city. But now I had to. I decided to cross the river for the first time.
The walkways on either side of the long bridge were as crowded as the platforms at the station, but with many different types of people. Most were hurrying to and fro by themselves or in groups, looking very busy, but some were just hanging around as though they lived there above the water. I had to dodge families shuffling along in knots and people ferrying enormous piles of goods on their heads. I passed beggars missing limbs or eyes, some with faces ravaged and eaten away by one thing or another, all calling up with their metal begging bowls for a rupee or some food. The road in the middle was crawling with traffic of all kinds, including rickshaws and bullock carts, and even stray cows wandering through the fray. The scale of it all overwhelmed me. I pushed th
rough as best I could, and got off the main road as soon as I was on the other side.
Now, in quieter surroundings, I aimlessly wandered a maze of alleys and streets, keeping watch for both trouble and help. The railway worker had made it harder to tell the difference. Although being tricked had taught me a lesson, maybe it had also taught me that I couldn’t survive on my own for very long—the dangers were too great and too hard to see. My suspicion of people had been reinforced but so had my need to find that rare person who could genuinely help me, like the homeless man by the river. I wanted to stay away from people but also find a way out of where I was. That meant I needed to keep extremely alert going forward. I had to be wary—I was terrified of falling into the hands of someone like the railway worker again—but I also had to take an occasional chance if I felt someone could help me. I mustered up the courage to approach people a little more. At some point, walking along one of the streets of my new neighborhood, I came across a boy about the same age as me talking aloud to himself, or to the world at large. When he saw me watching him, he said hello and we shyly talked for a bit. He knew more Hindi words than me and how to speak more like an adult, so he probably went to school, but he was friendly and we played around on the street for a while. Then he said I could go with him to his house. Cautiously, I followed.
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