HELP THEM....TO SMILE

Loneliness and social isolation are dominant motifs of city street life. Around half the homeless men and women, boys and girls whom we spoke to in Patna, Chennai, Madurai and Delhi said they never celebrated festivals, three fourths said they had no friends whom they could trust and more than half felt that they belonged to no community, even of the homeless. Sixty-two out of 85 homeless people we spoke to in Patna sadly felt they had never been helped by anyone — government, neighbours, charity — during their entire lives on the streets.

The majority of homeless people, in all cities, of all ages and gender, find one kind of solace in their loneliness in some kind of drugs or intoxication. Most street children are introduced to the easy but deadly escape from pain and loneliness offered by soft drugs early in their days on the streets. Thinners are readily available at any stationery shop for Rs. 25 a bottle. Shopkeepers know that the children who buy these are not using them for painting, but they do not hesitate to sell to the street urchins who flock to their stores. Two bottles are enough for a day for one child. They soak a rag and inhale the fumes of the solution, and it transports them to a world free from hurt and violence. But it also destroys their lungs, rendering them vulnerable to TB, and damages their brains and memory. Many children graduate to hard drugs like smack, but fortunately others are able to steer themselves away, as they know that for those who succumb to smack, it is virtually the end of the road

Sharing to survive

Street boys, cut off from their families in their village and alone in the city, tend to live in gangs, sharing everything — food, clothes, intoxicants, sleeping under the same sheet — teaching each other trades like rag-picking and recycling drinking water bottles, protecting each other from street violence and the police, and feeding each other in sickness.

They find other ways of enjoying life as well, some healthy, some less so. Street entrepreneurs have set up makeshift video parlours, especially on lanes where they sell their rags and waste. These are nothing more than a space marked off by faded curtains with a television set. For five rupees, you can watch as many films as you like. The parlours are packed with the rejects of the city, street boys and lonely migrant workers, rickshaw-pullers, head loaders, construction workers, watching raptly Hindi cinema interspersed with pornographic films. But a third of the homeless people we spoke to (and nearly half those in Patna) say they have no source of recreation at all; they could not afford to enjoy for even brief moments to savour the glitter of city lights.