The BAREFOOT DOCTOR

Every year, thousands of boys all over India flee their homes and their families. For many, it's an abusive mother or father or schoolteacher. For others, a lack of love, knowing they're unwanted, an extra mouth to be fed; or it can be simple boredom with village or small town life. Many of them are in the early teens. But some are as young as seven or eight.

Almost all of them head for a big city - Delhi or Kolkata (Calcutta) or Chennai (Madras), or Mumbai (Bombay) - movie capital of India, a place where dreams for some can come true. Most of these runaways reach Bombay by stowing away on trains. Their first home is usually a station platform. Their first job, serving chai - Indian milk tea - to passengers. And it's here that many contract their first major illnesses, from sleeping rough or eating contaminated and rotten food. This is the story of Dinesh, a street-kid who became a self-taught doctor for just such boys. Julian and Kamal Wadhkar met him one morning at busy Dadar Station, during rush hour.

Just getting to Dardar Station is a mess. The street leading to the station is up. They're laying new sewage pipes. Morning commuters, like us, have to slosh through mud and broken pavement to get to the footbridge that crosses the tracks. There are boys selling fruit, boys selling flowers, boys selling just about anything on the footbridge. Dadar's the heart of middle-class Bombay. It's one of the busiest stations on the electrified Churchgate commuter line. It ferries more than two million commuters in and out of the downtown every day.

It's also the first stop for the express trains that link the rest of the country to Bombay. The obvious place for any runaway kid to get off a train and try to start a new life in this city. Kamal has arranged for me to follow Dinesh for the morning. He meets us at the foot of the footbridge that spans the tracks. Dinesh gazes down intently onto the crowded platforms. He's looking for newly-arrived runaways. They're all his potential patients.

You see, Dinesh is a doctor, of a sorts. He doesn't look like one. No white coat; no stethoscope, no black doctor's bag. No shoes, come to think of it. But he does have a plastic shopping bag. And inside, I can see a thermometer, some bandages, a pair of scissors, various ointments and some pills. Dinesh is also a very young doctor. He's all of twenty two years old. He didn't go to medical school. He's a former Sadak Chhap or Street Kid. His self-appointed mission now is to find runaways who are sick and need urgent medical attention.

OK! Dinesh has seen someone on Platform Four. We're going to have to move fast. The three of us rush down the staircase and onto the platform. The kid-in-question can't be more than ten or eleven. And he isn't exactly friendly! "I'm with that woman over there!" He snarls at Dinesh: "I'll bash you if you don't go away!" Dinesh backs off: the kid will probably get away in the confusion of passengers as yet another train's coming in.

Commuter trains to Churchgate run every two minutes. I reckon they stop for about twenty seconds. You've got about ten seconds to get out or you'll never make it. It's a human tidal wave. So we know in advance we haven't got a hope in hell of finding that kid again. Dinesh is not very happy. A bit like losing a fish that was biting your line. Almost there. Now it's gone!

Dinesh hasn't seen this boy before. He thinks he's new to the city. "They all, first time when you meet them, they all say I live here in Bombay. I've not come from outside. But I can make out from their faces, and the way they talk that they are not from Bombay."

My attention wanders: just for ten seconds. But it's all Dinesh needs. I snap to. Dinesh is talking to two boys. Probably telling them what Sadak Chhap is all about. How they govern themselves. And they have a Father (Kumar- all of twenty five years old) who helps them. A woman's just come up to Dinesh and stuck her face in his. In this noise it's difficult to make out exactly what she's saying. But she isn't asking the time of day!

"What was that all about, Dinesh?" I ask.
"He's from another shelter run by one of the missionaries in Bombay, called the Don Bosco. They had a night shelter for these children. He was staying there. He was very happy there in Don Bosco. But now his mother's brought him back to her home. He's not very happy about it."

The woman certainly isn't! From the body language I'd say she's telling Dinesh to get lost. You'd think Dinesh was trying to kidnap the boy! I bet the boy's run away. Probably isn't the first time. Probably feels a lot happier with these kids. And I bet that's why she's mad at Dinesh! She doesn't want to admit the truth.

But none of us have time to dwell on what-might-have-beens. OK. Two more boys, this time on platform number 6. Back up the stairs and over the bridge again. You know, many of these kids, they're also here to make money. Kamal tells me that most of the kids are here to clean the incoming express trains, pick up any recyclables or leftover food before it gets to Bombay Central.
The boys come from Wadala every Sunday morning to watch the TV screens, for free. After a free breakfast of Kichri - that's rice and dal cooked together - they get that at 7.30 in the morning - it's not clear from whom. Then they come and watch the TV for free here on the platform. But only until lunchtime. That's when the Remand Home police come here looking for runaways. And the boys are scared stiff of being caught and put in The Chiller Room - that's solitary confinement. So they skidaddle out of here as soon as they've had their lunch.

But not just yet. Dinesh is looking at one of the boy's legs. Kamal, who knows a thing or two about life on the streets, says Chandrakant - the boy in question - has pussing sores all over his legs. Dinesh is looking into his shopping bag, I guess, for Dettol, a well-known brand of disinfectant. He rubs some disinfectant into the sores. He asks the the brothers to come back to Byculla with him.

"If you come at 8.30 in the morning, all these children bring their food from Matunga. And they come to this platform. They sit here and they eat their food and they watch TV." she explains. These two boys - Chandrakant and Ganesh - are brothers. They're very, very young street kids. Chandrakant is six, Ganesh just five! And they're glued to the TV screen. And the cartoons.

The scabies is quite bad. If Chandrakant comes to Byculla at least he can be thoroughly washed by the Sadak Chhaps. But the minute you say: come with me, these kids get really scared. They think it means the Children's Remand Home!

The compromise is Sion Hospital, close by. That suggestions calms the boys. Dinesh unwraps a small wad of newspaper from his medical arsenal. Some white powder called Benzilbear. He's going to apply it very gently to Chandarkant's sores. Try and dry them out. If it works he won't need to go to the hospital. If it doesn't, then he needs to go to the hospital before it spreads. Scabies is probably about the most common problem Dinesh has to deal with. While we're talking he discovers a whole lot more sores on the back of Chandrakant's legs.


We're going to have to take him back to the office and put some more gram flour to dry these sores. And we don't have any more with us here!"

"Dinesh, where did you learn all this sort of First-Aid?"

His answer is uncharacteristically long: "I learnt this..a year and a half ago. There was this woman in the office called Ujjawala-didi. Ujjawala-didi used to go all over Bombay treating Street Kids. I tagged along and watched. And then she went away. So I decided to see if I could do what I'd seen her do. I went to Chowpatty, where most of the children come on Sunday to have their bath. And they rest in the afternoons. And that's how I started treating them."

"So you're virtually entirely self-taught?"

"
Yes, I've learnt simply watching others at work."

Dinesh would take boys to the hospital, watch how the doctors treated them, the medicines they used.He went back to Byculla and asked Kumar, who was then in charge of the Sadak Chhaps, to buy the same medicines.. And then set out of his own to find his patients.

"So you mean you virtually set up this system yourself?"

"Yes, I did it on my own!"

I wonder if Dinesh ever aspires to eventually become a proper doctor, with a white coat, a stethoscope and...a pair of shoes on your feet?

"No, no! .... like this. I want to be the same person. I don't want to be a formal doctor."

Back to the other brother - Ganesh. He's got a nasty-looking boil on his thigh. Dinesh is going to treat this with Neosporin. Now, we've been here at Dadar for about an hour, and Dinesh has treated three boys. Usually, he sees about a dozen on an average day.

"Dinesh, what's the extent to which you can give medical treatment? Is it just bandaging or putting medicines? Or can you do things more complicated than that?"

"Apart from doing simple things, like dressing the wounds and treating scabies and other things, the kind of complicated things I do is take the children to the hospital, admit them to the hospital if they need surgery. Then I talk to the doctors and social workers...there's a need for a surgery sometimes, they meet with an accident or something. Throughout the operation I'm standing there with the child. And later on also, I'm there attending on him day and night if he needs help, any looking after...

.Sometimes, they ask for lot of money for medicines, or for X-Ray. Then I go and talk to the Social Worker and tell her that these are all Sadak Chhaps. Their parents don't live in Bombay. And these children are on their own and they can't afford to pay so much money. Then they give the treatment free..And the children won't have to pay. And after that, I bring them to Byculla office."

Kamal and I were getting in the way, so we left Dinesh to go about his business. A few months later, I learnt he'd given it all up. But why? Or where he'd gone, nobody seemed to know. But I'll bet there's already another Barefoot Doctor roaming Dadar station, treating scabies, making the lives of the Chandrakants and Ganeshes off this world a little better.

 

Essay
Episodes 1 - 4
Episodes 5 - 8
Episodes 9 - 12
Episodes 13 - 16
Episodes 17 - 20
Episodes 21 - 24
Episodes 25 - 28
Episodes 29 - 32
Episodes 33 - 35

Main Episode List
Cast of Characters
Credits
MP 3

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