SAMINA'S STORY

If a Muslim in Mumbai (Bombay) offers you mutton it's a fair bet they really mean goat. A goat's a very adaptable fellow. Far more useful than a sheep. It can exist on anything in the city. The goat doesn't need grass to chomp on. Anything that grows, through cracks in the pavement will do. As will pants, shirts and bras left out to dry on a clothesline. So it's no surprise to find a mob of goats on the pavement outside Jhula Maidan in Byculla, the district in Maumbai where our story takes place.

Jhula Maidan'a small municipal park. Very small, maybe the size of asoccer pitch. It's perched on the corner where Apna Jhopadpatti runs into Maulana Atad Road, diagonally opposite the Alam Masjid (or mosque).

And it's home to fifty or more families, many of them Muslim, who live in huts built against the walls of the little dusty park.

And it's where I start my working day.

And the first person I invariably see is Samina. Samina thinks I'm nuts. And she isn't afraid to say so, to my face. But it's usually an affectionate nuts. Samina may groan and moan about life, but she's a big-hearted woman who's been through a hell of a lot, even before we first met, almost ten years ago.

And how Samina got to live here on the pavement outside Jhula Maidan is typical of so many of the homeless in India, and so different from the experience of homeless people in the West that it bears retelling.

"I was married off when I was ten years old. That's how the story starts. Nothing unusual, Because it takes places in Bihar, (if you get out out the atlas, it's the chunk just below Nepal) one of the poorest and most backward areas in the whole of India, where child marriage is the norm. You can get betrothed as early as five or six. But you don't actually get physically married until puberty, say thirteen or fourteen. Then you go to live with your husband in his family's house.

Samina's future mother·in·law had just the one son, and she desperately wanted to see her son married off before she died. But when Samina arrived as a daughter·in·law, trouble broke out almost immediately. I have to admit it: Samina may be big-hearted but she does have a quick temper. Not an easy person to live with!

And not one to meekly obey her mother-in-law! They quarreled about just about everything. About Samina's eating habits and her cooking. The only person Samina did get on with was her husband. But right from the start Mulla (his nickname) displayed one major flaw.

"He didn't like to work," Samina admits. "He didn't like to work and he didn't want to work. You see, he was the only son and so he was terribly spoilt. His parents never ever insisted he should go out and work

No work means no money to give Samina to buy food or clothes, or whatever. She goes and asks her In-laws for money. You can guess what they tell her!

The result is that Samina and Mulla set up house on their own, and go to work on a building site, carrying mud and bricks. Not an easy time.

"There were some days when we starved. There were some days when we managed to eat. Somehow we carried on.

But then Samina had her first daughter - Zarina. An extra mouth to feed. Something would have to change.

"I sat my husband down. Now, look here, I said. Your stomach, my stomach. And now we're about to have a child, that child's stomach. So how are we going to survive? How are we going to feed that child? Eh? How we going to feed ourselves? We've got to go and get some real work.

Mulla knew how to weave cloth. So Samina took a loan from her father and bought a loom. But life never runs smoothly for Samina. Her sister-in-law - Mulla's sister - picked a fight with her. The upshot was that Samina and Mulla got thrown out of the village. No more roof over their heads.

There follows a long saga of false starts, eager reconciliation, and then more shattered dreams. And through it all, it's the adolescent Samina who somehow feeds all three of them., scavenging at the local railroad station in Madhubani, a place where I, believe it or not, have actually stood many years ago, in a different life.

"Goods trains would come, and they would unload all the goods at the station. So when I went to have a bath I would take a sack with me, then go to the station, and as they were unloading, whatever fell to the ground - bits of rice or grains of wheat - I'd quickly pick it up, stuff it in my sack and bring it back home. And that, quite simply, is how we survived!"

"Because that husband of mine just couldn't be bothered to work. All he's ever wanted is to be well-fed and to go to the movies. Even back then, when we were starving! That's all he wanted. But he was never willing to go out and actually earn money to help pay for his pleasures. He figured that if his parents wouldn't sweat their guts out to support him, then it was my duty as his wife."

Result: they could never make ends meet. Many days they quite literally went without food. To keep up appearances in front of the neighbors, Samina would pretend to cook, But in reality she'd never even light her chula or stove.

Samina's parents got wind of this. They started slipping her the odd half kilo of rice or lentils. And started fighting and blaming themselves for the mess Samina was in. They were desperately unhappy for their daughter. And unhappiness in turns begets more desperation.

Samina, probably by chance, overheard them talking about her one day:

"They knew I was stubborn and I wouldn't go quietly. And they knew I'd probably get chucked out my husband's house again. I don't think they could face the shame. This is what my own mother said" If she comes back here, we'll give her poison. It's the only way out. "

"You can bet I was upset! Wouldn't you be? From that day on, I decided that whatever is going to happen to me, it's going to happen in my husband's place. I swore that from I'd never go back to my parent's house except dead.

So Mulla and Samina decide to leave Bihar. Mulla goes first, alone, to Bombay, a thousand miles and change from Bihar. It's the rainy season, when work is scarce, even in Bombay (as it was then called). People in the great metropolis sometimes have to resort to begging to make ends meet.

But Mulla thinks this is great. He rushes back to Bihar to tell Samina the good news.

Samina is singularly unimpressed.

"I know what you've got in the back of your mind. You'll sit at home, and I'II be the one who has to go out and beg. No thanks!"

"No, I promise you, Samina. You'll sit at home and 1'11 go out and earn enough for all of us. 1'11 turn over a new leaf. You'll see! Honest, I will!"

And so off they go, the four of them - Mulla, Samina, two year-old Zarina, and an infant son, just born. Third class rail, from Madhubani to Bombay.

But the baby gets sick. A doctor in Allahabad, where they have to get down to change trains, gives them free medicines. They get back on the train.

...and that child was just terribly sick. It took us seven whole days to come to Bombay. We traveled without food, without water, absolutely bone-dry, and that baby of mine was very, very poorly. And to make matters worse, halfway through the journey the ticket collector saw us and threw us out of the train, because of course, we were traveling without tickets. So then we had to wait in the back of beyond for yet another train. Well, we got one. Same story: dodging the inspectors and nothing to eat or drink."

"Sometimes a tea-seller would walk through our compartment. he'd look at Zarina, see a small child with an absolutely hungry face. And they'd give her a cup of tea, sometimes a bhajiya (vegetable patty) to eat. But that was it. And this is how we eventually came to Bombay. Almost as soon as we got down from the train, somebody saw the baby and said: "That baby is very ill. You've got to get it to a doctor." We found a doctor, he wrote something on a piece of paper, told us to take it to Nair Hospital. And they admitted him."
 
"The third day, the hospital asked my husband to get blood for the baby." (In India, if you're poor, the hospital makes you find medicines and things like blood at the Blood Bank)

" That husband of mine - what a big coward! he takes the piece of paper from the Sister and goes to stand in line at the Blood Bank. He stands and he watches what's going on. There's a man lying on a bed nearby and he's giving blood. My husband panics. He runs back outside, where I'm waiting with Zarina: "They're taking blood from people. They're going to take blood from me! What the hell am I going to do?"'

You can guess the rest.

Mulla runs away, bolts the hospital, hides. A couple of days later, the Nurse comes on foot to where they're sleeping on the pavement outside Jhula Maidan, asks Samina where the blood is.

Samina doesn't know. She doesn't have any money to buy blood. Quite possibly, at the age of twenty, she didn't really understand how important the blood was. She did nothing.

Today, she knows her mistake and its consequences.

"I think I lost my son because we didn't give any blood. At first, he improved. We didn't see why we had to give him blood. Then he got diarrhea. It got progressively worse. On the seventh night all he said was I want my father! I want my father! If I would close my eyes he would open them, scratch my face and say I want my father, I want my father! That's all he said the whole night. And that's when he died.

Men from the Alam mosque came and picked up the dead baby. Brought it back, washed it and buried it according to Islamic practice. And Samina just sat and poured her heart out, little Zarina snuggled up beside her, right there on the pavement.

A woman who lived in the chawl(low-income apartments) opposite saw Samina in great distress. One day, she called down to her, asked her to come up to her rooms. There, she opened the Koran and started reading from it. I don't think Samina's ever been particularly religious. But she admits it gave her some sort of inner peace.

Samina got work · I don't know what. But work. Mulla, maybe out of shame, went and worked full-time pressing oil from peanuts in a small factory next to the Khatau Mills on Tank Pakadi lane. Pay was a fraction of what it is today. But in those days - the early 1970s - food also was dirt cheap. Samina says you could eat very well indeed for just one Rupee! (5 cents)

"There was so much food that we could never get through all of it. Big fat chickens and rice. So I'd catch some street boys and tell them to come in and share the food. Oh, it was a great time to be eating, back then!"

The first job Samina had in Byculla was washing dishes and grinding the spices and flour for the woman who'd soothed her, reading from the Koran. She was also asked to wash the floor and do the laundry. Not quite as simple as it sounds.

You see, Samina has never seen, let alone imagined, what a flush toilet was. And doing the laundry in rural Bihar meant something entirely different in Bombay.

"In the village, you take the clothes, go to the river, sit on a stone, scrub it on a stone, and then rinse it in the river. Now, over here, when this woman told me to wash clothes, I said: Where's the river? "

"She went and found me a patla, that's a sort of small stool, almost a footstool, that you sit on to do something like washing clothes. But the real novelty were washing powder, bleach and water that comes out of a tap and is hot! Never seen that before! Here I am, first time in the Big City, and everything is so convenient.

Everything's right there in the house. Water comes out of the tap. Don't have to go off to the well. Great rest for city folks.

After another few months, Samina bumped into someone from her village back in Bihar. The woman asked where Samina was working, how much she was making, told her to quit. She'd find her work at double the pay and half the workload. And she did at three times the money.

That's where Samina made another mistake. One of the woman Samina worked for was a schoolteacher. She offered to take Zarina to her school and deduct the cost of school uniforms (yes, they have those in even the poorest school in India) and pencils and books from the wages she paid Samina. Samina got scared:

"I said: No! No! I'm not going to give you Zarina. See, I was very worried. Suppose something happens to Zarina? The woman said nothing would happen. She'd take her in the morning and bring her back in the afternoons. But I was new to the city. I'd already lost one baby. I only had this one child left. I didn't send her.

Samina got other work in the same building. Pretty soon, she was working in seven apartments, making a thousand Rupees a month, which back then was a lot. She began work at six in the morning and finished by three in the afternoon.

"At that time, I didn't have a hut. After about six or eight months in the city I was ready to make my hut. Once I'd built it, I got a big old oil drum for storing water, and bought tin cooking pots and plates and cutlery, the things all Indian women have, whether they're rich or poor. That meant getting up at 4 in the morning to go and fetch water for the day's washing and cooking, Afternoons, when I got back, I'd do my housework. And I found I could cope."

 Samina had two more daughters - Khatija and Safina. You might have thought that earning a thousand Rupees, plus a husband earning would have been enough to set them all on the road to prosperity.

But when you're the poorest of the poor, there are many things you don't know. Samina saved all right. But she got taken to the cleaners more than once. She lent money to her own father back in Bihar. He lost it all.

And then Mulla had a hernia. He refused to be operated on because he got scared, once again, at the thought of blood. He lost his job, took to the bottle and ended up spending most of the day sitting on a handcart outside their hut on Jhula Maidan, pleasantly sizzled.

There would be other disappointments. But the biggest problem, in fact a daily nightmare, was the systematic demolition of the hut Samina had built.

"See, every fifteen to thirty days, the City would come along, pull down our huts and cart everything off, including our belongings inside, to their lockup on Clare Road.

So I'd have to go and borrow five hundred Rupees, go out and get more plastic PVC, burlap, bamboo, and build the hut all over again. And then two weeks later, they'd be back, destroy the whole thing and cart it off, and back to Square One.

Which brings us nicely back full circle to the beginning of our story: how and why and handful of pavement dwellers, including Samina, decided one day they'd had enough, after ten, sometimes fifteen years of this constant harassment.

And they decided to do something about it. And that something would change their lives, and those of millions in Bombay, in other Indian cities, and in cities all over the Developing World, as far afield as South Africa and South Korea.

But that's all for another time.

 

 

 

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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