Pause in Paucity

As your flight from the Mumbai airport upraises into a crest of comfort, you can sight the adjoining public squalor around the runway. And you cower.

Go to Gurgaon’s swish sky-scrapers’ construction sites and right in the middle of the workers’ racks you see a hulking billboard that says “Book your apartment today!”

It’s few of those ironies that bring a different emotion in each wrinkle of your face.  India is a country that is scraped sore with wounding stories that are part of someone’s every day. You don’t need to be associated with an NGO or a governmental organization to see this. You need to want to see this.

My train passes this every day and it makes me want to padlock my eyes but peek through at the same time. This is what I see within those two seconds of pass. There are tin houses and through the creaks of one, is a mother cooking on charcoal and midst of its asphyxiating fumes are two children getting their garbage bags ready for the day. The third is on a cradle made of the same garbage bag.

The scum once seeping down has desiccated and the pipes leak water through its kelp strands. Trash aligns the peripheries of the square footage and flowerpots inline within. The old—a shapeless contour of bodies barely coated with soiled shirts and ripped slacks, push their vegetable carts with their hands that now look like a papier-mâché of veins and skin. Candy stores of the rich is cotton candy here. Laundry is by the hand-pump. Salons are open-air and so is defecation. And temples every few meters.

I see men playing poker outside and their wives drying clothes on the tracks’ separators and I know that this is where it shelters. The inequity. But that is the last of anyone’s worries.

First is vulnerability.