I had started telling, about a month ago, the story of my liaison with the kids at
Ehsaas, the NGO that SK and I volunteered at this summer.
We heard of it by word of mouth, it was SK's idea to go check the place out. We made an appointment with Shachi Singh who runs it, and turned up at the Charbagh branch. It was there that we really got to know what
Ehsaas does.
Charbagh is where the railway station is in Lucknow. Like most railway stations in India, Charbagh is home to many who are homeless. Among those are hundreds of children, either abandoned by uncaring parents, runaways from homes they were better off without, or sometimes just lost. The kids are all lost, actually. Until someone comes to take them by the hand and lead them away from a place where their highest role is fetching tea and happiness is drowning themselves in
sollusann [solution, whitening fluid solvent, inhaled to get a high].
Ehsaas is a four room outfit on the roof of the Transport Building, a strangely apt place to house these kids. This is a
halfway-house for children literally hunted out (with the help of the Peer Group and those who can spot a new face soon) and brought to the NGO. Their final destinations vary.
By and large, they will go through some basic haphazard schooling here, then move to the Vikas Nagar branch, where they will have better food, clothes and lessons. stage three is joining the school system.
Some who are lost are escorted to their homes, as far away as even Calcutta. Of course, some are too small to know their address or hometown. Like Ganesh, the new kid who wrote his name in Telugu while the others who could write all wrote in Hindi on the backs of their drawings. We drew a lion that day. I went crazy, it was a big clue they had missed, the people who had picked him up didn't know where he was from at all. Shabana and I then tried many versions of "Where are you from?" in Hindi, which he seemed to follow. After some teasing out, what he said was "Begumpet". I nearly died. For me, and my obsession with coincidences, this was too much. "Begumpet is in Hyderabad! He's Hyderabadi!" He didn't know Hyderabad, though. He did know his house was near a municipal school. I managed to find out his parents' names too, which he had apparently said before. Well no wonder he understands Hindi, and no wonder he can't speak it fluently like the others.
Ganesh is the most adorable child. He has that twinkle in his eye. Smart kid. Very smart. I stopped noticing his face and his feet after the first few minutes. He has feet that are curled, as if they were trying to make a fist. His head has some sort of little growth where a punk mohawk would be, as if he was born conjoined and then separated. He's what, five? Beautiful child. I brought Amma to Ehsaas one day, she wanted to make a donation and meet the kids and all. Since she speaks Telugu I wanted her to talk to Ganesh. She asked him where he lived, he said he lived at the station, in I think a shop with somebody, or something like that. When she tried to ask where he had come from, he only repeated that for a while, and then finally said his parents had left him there. He didn't cry, he didn't flinch. It scared my mother a little I think. God knows what goes on in a child's mind. He has a sister. And a grandmother in Bombay.
I was born in Hyderabad. It's always been to me like somewhere I need to go back to, like the place calls me home. My grandparents were living in Begumpet when we were moving to Lucknow. That flat in Mount Santoshi Apartments is the last memory I have of Patti (my grandma) in
her house. She didn't live very long in Lucknow, in the house we waited six months to be allotted, because it has a garden. She loves gardens. She was dying, we didn't know it. Now if anyone tells me somebody is not eating at all, I'll tell them to rush to Oncology.
SK and I were in Lucknow only for a month or so more, Shachi didn't want us to get involved in the main teaching work. We were to do some craft, music, things like that. Maybe a little general knowledge, teach a little on the sly. I have no idea what we did finally, I doubt if we did any good that lasted longer than two hours every other afternoon.
One day SK brought a globe. We were trying to tell the kids how when it's day here, it's night in America. Yes, they know America.
Amreeka. Like we know Elysium. They come up with the most random versions of the Universe, as it were. Well, if you've been fed only myth about how god (I forget which, N tells me Brahma) created the world, you believe that, right?
Then when I found some books in English on nocturnal creatures, one on dinosaurs. So strange, to tell them we descended from the apes, I could be Darwin incarnate. I felt, again, only too keenly, the acute language problem that had never let me be. Although I'm beginning to realise that language is not English, Hindi, Tamil, but the peculiar parole of your own unique experiences, which when they are so very different from your interlocutor, can be only a barrier to communication, instead of the common ground you hoped it would be.
Washim. Pronounced Vaseem. I know I should not have favourites, but I fell in love with Washim. He reminded me of my little brother. Not that I have one, nor was he like any of my three cousins. He really needed to go to school. Oh, I've slipped into past tense. Well, by the time we left, they were to join school anyway. But he is just too smart for the others. He's a
Bumbaiyya, as they call him. From Bombay. Dry humor. Couldn't have been more than 11-12. He'd take my pen and sketch endlessly. He had already drawn all over the walls. I really wanted to be his friend. I don't think he wanted to be friends with anyone.
Of course, Congress (
Kaangrace, more like; and no, I don't know why the name) was really not interested in making friends. Poor guy, he's very mixed up. I don't even know what to think...he must have been through something so ugly to talk like that. Navin was aloof, it was fine till they got into their maara-peeti vaale moods. With so much pent up energy, so little space, and so little love, they do start fighting often.
One day I took the guitar. Sanoj, from the Peer Group, he liked it a lot. He also thought I looked like an
Angrejin, a foreigner. I think it was the skirts. Or maybe the short hair. I found it very funny. I told Sanoj I get that a lot. Sanoj makes great tea. The kids are a storehouse of outrageously inappropriate Bhojpuri songs.
They were watching
Sasura Badey Paise Wala. How to translate this! Let's say
Ma Homie's Got Lotsa Cash. My dad was really pissed off when he heard this. N also said, How can they subject the children to this? I don't know why, but even knowing that it's probably no kiddie movie, I didn't see the harm. I wouldn't give it to my kids to watch though. Why not? How are the kids at
Ehsaas any different? Other than that they won't be rich, spoilt and living in the lap of luxury. Then why the difference in what they watch on DVD? I'm still trying to make sense of all these questions.
I tried an experiment one day. Four
katoras [bowls] of poster colour, red, green, yellow, blue. I shut the doors, the room was dark. Made the kids calm down, sit and be quiet first. Then asked them to close their eyes. Lots of titters, peeping through one eye. Then when they ad settled down, I didn't want idly shut eyes to dream up something horrible. I asked them to think of a time when they were happy. They when they opened their eyes, I asked them if happiness has a colour.
They picked their colour. Washim was quite disdainful of this whole exercise. I'm sure he saw through me, I was just playing by ear.
Then I wanted them to play around with the colours, so I asked them if they had one thing to choose as their favourite in the whole world, what would they pick?
It was crazy. The kind of things the kids said were everything from the absurd to the profound to the dogmatic.
I don't know what I was doing there.
Pata nahin. But it was good. I'll go there next hols I think. To see. Maybe it didn't mean anything, who knows. I worry about Ganesh, Congress, Gunja who was the only girl there. I wonder and don't want to contemplate why so few girls were found, and what worse fate might have come their way. Washim. I saw a kid the other day, on the road, he looked just like him. Washim being Washim, he might have run away. It might actually be him.
Ehsaas. I can't translate that. Something between emotion, sensation, feeling, and responsibility?
