SAMINA'S STORY (PART II)

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.

*****

"There was so much food that we could never get through all of it.
Big fat chickens and rice."

*****

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.