KANPUR
We left Bombay at 8.30
this morning. Thirteen of us. Five of the Mahila Milan ladies from Byculla,
four from the Railway Slum Dwellers Federation in Govindi, two young women
from SPARC - the NGO - who work with the RSDF people, Shekhar - who has the
money and the tickets and is in charge, and me. Our destination is Kanpur,
a thousand miles and twenty four hours, to the north.
As we cross Thane Creek, Samina and Shehnaz are discussing Samina's latest
tale of family woe. Safina, her youngest daughter, who's a great kid and studied
to tenth standard, got married last year. Safina's now a salesgirl in a department
store. Her husband - I've forgotten exactly, but it's a good white collar
job.
And blow me down if they didn't end up in the hut bang opposite Samina's on
Jhula Maidan.
And that's precisely the problem.
Samina has a tap with running water inside her hut. So Safina comes over to
wash her new family's dishes at her mum's. Now this might seem sensible to
you and me. But not in the world of Indian families. When a girl marries she
becomes part of her husband's family. So Safina's doing a No no. And getting
a lot of stick for it from her mother-in-law.
Shehnaz isn't terribly sympathetic. Surely you could see this would happen,
her living bang opposite.
Shekhar puts in his two cents worth: why doesn't she do the dishes in her
own hut?
They don't have the room!
Well, we can't do anything till we get back from Kanpur, can we?
Shehnaz has been needling me all morning long, about something I rashly promised
years back. “Shehnaz. If you want me to dance, you have to sing!”
.. A very rash promise! But at the time I made it I never thought I'd be sharing
a train compartment with Shehnaz for twenty four hours plus!
“You have to sing first! I have to have a lot of courage to dance!”
Shehnaz starts to sing rather feebly.
“You can do better than that!”
It doesn't take much to get them going. Sakina leads Shehnaz, Samina, Fatimah
and Laxmi in a new one to me - old as the hills for any Indian over thirty
- about a woman who begs her lover to stop pestering her with love. All the
time the bogies are going clickety click over the rails like so many tablas.
Something very odd's just happened. My feet have hit something soft under
the seat. Something that moves!
Shekhar rushes to explain.
“Julian! He swept the compartment and he earned 40 rupees ..he ll get
down this station and he ll go back to Byculla “
I look down. It's human. It's a boy! And there are two more under the seat
opposite.
Stowaways! No tickets. The way Shekhar tells it, I must be the only person
on the entire train not to figure out what's been going on for the past hour.
“Sadak Chaap?”
Earning a fast buck cleaning the compartment In just this one hour, he's swept
three whole carriages. For 40 Rupees! A day's wages for a Sadak Chhap!
The kid gives me a big smile.
“I expect my compartment to be swept clean!”
The kid agrees. He's cleaned everywhere else. We're going all the way to Kanpur.
And I am messy.
“So, we'll do it just for you, Uncle! If you pay us first! Have to be
quick though. This is our station coming up!”
Somehow all my money gets recycled back into Byculla or Sadak Chaap..
Kalyan station, the first stop since Mumbai. One of the Sadak Chhaps is getting
down here, to jump on a train going back into town. The other two are coming
with us all the way, to generally assist, and have a good time seeing their
fellow street kids in Kanpur.
Kalyan - and the time-honored ritual begins. Chai wallahs, coffee wallahs,
banana wallahs - the whole shabang of Wallahs of everything clamber into the
train and start their sales pitch, in all their glory.
It would take a genius to starve on an Indian train. Everyone's cooked multiple
meals of chappatis, dal, sabji, and I don't know what other regional delicacies
and packed them in their stainless-steel tiffins.
I'm the exception. I packed my clothes, my equipment, set my alarm, got to
the station in plenty of time, fretted over finding the carriage and the others...and
forgot to prepare a Tiffin!
My only hope is that Shenaz, Laxmi and the others knew I wouldn't remember
to bring a Tiffin - it may surprise you but I actually do possess one! Have
they cooked a bit extra?
“Julian. Breakfast? Breakfast?”
“Nashta?...I have three bananas.”
“These are puris, puris.”
It's a puri with gram flour and jaggery, unrefined sugar cane, all ground
together with wheat flour. As far as I'm concerned, just about anything cooked
by Shehnaz I like.
Whatever it actually is, it's delicious!
A girl - probably no more than seven or eight years old - appears begging
for her supper. She has her own rhythm section - two small pieces of stone
that she knocks together.
It never ceases to amaze me - Me, who can play no musical instrument - how
human beings can make music out of just about anything.
And so it goes - the great Indian train ride - endless meals, the half-hour
halt in some out of the way country station in the heart of Madhya Pradesh,
near the geographical centre of India.
As night falls, that other great staple of Indian railways appears - the bedroll.
Sleeper beds are lowered. Tiffin's are packed away. Teeth and face are washed.
By the time we reach Bhopal, at ten thirty, all our party is asleep.
And on through the night - one thousand miles. Destination: Kanpur. If I didn’t
know why we came before I got on the train I do as soon as we reach Kanpur
and are whisked off on the back of motorbikes.
A young man called Sachidar proudly takes me across through a slum. ”We
are building these ten. These are ten toilets..we will build walls from this
side and that side.”
Toilets. Yes, toilets. This is why we've come all this way!
It's ten thirty in the morning. We're standing on some waste ground on the
edge of Shivkatri slum in Kanpur. Three masons are busy mixing cement, finishing
the foundations for a public toilet that will be up and running in less than
two weeks. The cement's poured into a wooden frame. The excess wiped off with
a flat board. The whole grey wobbly cement jelly flattened and massaged till
it's smooth and firm.
Sachidar is the director of the Kanpur Slum Dwellers Federation.
“Now, they are having to put up ten percent of the money, the community?”
“Yes, the community has deposited so far two thousand rupees.”
“And when they finish they are supposed to look after them and maintain
them?”
“Yes, the community will look after and maintain this.”
But Sachidar's Man-Management got problems. That's why Samina, Laxmi, Shehnaz
and the others have come up here.
“The community thinks that this, that these types of things has to be
done by government. We have no any collection. We should not deposit any money
in any contribution in this process. So, this is the problem, to get the money
from them. But the leaders and the members of Mahila Milan, and other people,
are trying to tell them that. If we will not contribute anything, we can't
get anything.”
Sachidar explains that Meera Ali and Sitabhai from Mahila Milan in Bombay
came last year to teach them how to make - ladis - the heavy cement slabs
that make the roof. They've shown costs can be cut to just one tenth of the
normal price if the slum dwellers themselves provided most of the labor.
And there's a desperate need for toilets because cholera has just broken out.Sachidar
says cholera is a very basic problem in the whole city. About one hundred
people have died in the last fifteen days. The basic problem is drinking water
and the toilet facilities in the city.
Sachidar's convinced the city to put up half the cost of building toilet blocks.
Ten percent comes from each slum community. The balance from the British government.
And this is not just for one or two toilets. Sachidar's ambitious!
“This is the first one? Or the second one?”
“This is the second one. First one is..first one was built before a
year and that is running well.”
“And how many are you contracted to build?”
“We thought to build fifty toilets of ten blocks.each - that’s
five hundred in all!”
~
“Trains don't go here very often, on this track?”
SA: Yes, the train goes very occasionally on this route. The train goes for
the factories, for the mills “
It's later this same afternoon, Sachidar and I are walking alongside a railway
track that runs behind the high walls of some of Kanpur's many cotton mills.
“Ten kilometers of all these people living next to the line.”
“Yes, and in those ten kilometers there are nine slums in this route.”
“And nobody has any form of toilet here?”
“No, there is not any form of toilet and drinking water facilities there
And walking with us are Parab and his team from the Bombay Railway Slum Dwellers
Federation. This is Parab's third time here. But he's never been able to get
government funding to build modern toilets back in Bombay. So, he's also here
to learn.
“So it looks like Govindi, Parab?”
“Yes. But no trains every two minutes.”
At the next crossroad stands Sachidar's pride and joy - the first public toilet,
completed last year. Ten toilets, a place to wash clothes, and a large concrete
reservoir of fresh water for flushing.
Each family pays five Rupees a month to hire a man to keep them clean. Usually,
that's what they'd spend a day just going to a public toilet. I look inside
each toilet. Remember, the middle-class and most government officials say
poor people foul up toilets. They can't be trusted!
They're spotless! And the man in charge really didn't know I was coming!
And then Sachidar leads us back to one of the settlements. The slum dwellers
have been waiting for their colleagues from Bombay for over an hour, and it's
very. very hot.
Sharada, Sandhya and Parab are quietly talkingm among themselves. In front
of them are ninety men and women from the local railway slum cooperative.
They hand in passbooks and money. Everything is entered in a large green ledger.
There are two things going on here: Yes, Parab and the two girls are showing
how savings should be entered. But these savings will also be transferred
from the local bank to swell the central Mahila Milan account in Bombay, so
they can be used as collateral for government housing loans.
So this slum is a distant outpost in a federation of poor people that stretches
far beyond Byculla or even Bombay.
This methodical scene is suddenly interrupted by, of all things, a goods train,
shunting along this backwater to? Who knows where?
Parab then starts explaining how railway slum dwellers in Bombay have it a
bit different. They have to live with one hundred trains a day, not one!
“But we don't have toilets. And that's what we want to learn while we're
here. How did you convince the city to give you toilets!”
This is why Samina and the other Mahila Milan ladies also come to Kanpur:
to spread the word and learn in return.
In a crowded room, fifty women from Chaukhrea Basti or slum are asking questions
and listening to Samina tell them how in the bad old days she used to sit
by and let the police seize her handcart and all her livelihood.
Then, one day after Mahila Milan had been formed, she went to E Ward, found
the man in charge of impounded property. She verbally - and physically beat
him up. No more trouble with the law since then!
Sachidar is pleased: “So they come and they support. They talk to the
people directly. So people think that there are the people in other places
who are like us, and they have sorted out their problems by coming out. So,
if we are going to do like that, we can do. So this is the basic thing which
we get from the other places's people.”
In this Kanpur basti, the slum dwellers are having a hard time with the authorities.
The military have ploughed up their vegetables gardens and the city refuses
to build them a new access road. The slum dwellers have a hard time understanding
that they have rights too!
That's why Samina's telling them this little story:
“So, if you're having problems with the authorities here, stick together,
go and complain to the top, and see if that produces results. If that doesn't
work, then we'll come from Bombay and go to see the authorities. But we're
not here to fight your battles for you! You have to do it for yourselves.
We're only your last resort!”
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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