Being behind bars is not where you usually want to be but when bars replace glass windows on some Indian trains the result passes for air conditioning.
By Ray O’Hanlon
The train wasn’t moving very fast to begin with so the slowing down as we entered the station was barely noticeable.
What was noticeable was the small army of young boys waiting on the platform for our train, Indian Railways New Delhi to Patna.
Local or express I can’t quite recall.
It seemed local. Very local.
And here was yet another stop in what would be a 22 hour odyssey across the North Indian plain.
Being in a second class car, resistance to the coming assault was futile.
The boys on the platform had us sized up to the square inch.
So when the wheels screeched and the train lurched to a halt it was like a special forces’ full- frontal attack.
With smiles of course.
These lads were quick with their smiles.
And their sales pitches.
“Chai Chai Chai” they cried in unison.
Others were not selling the sweet tea in little clay cups, but rather tiny bananas known as “lady fingers.”
There was no glass in the train car windows, just horizontal iron bars.
These of course allowed the smiling assault force to cling to the side of the train while offering its wares.
The tea and bananas were welcome enough and didn’t cost much.
The imbiber was expected to later throw the clay cups onto the tracks where they would shatter into pieces.
This, we were told, was all to do with Hindu belief in birth, destruction and rebirth.
The Hindus were well ahead on the recycling thing.
The engagement with the young merchants was invariably focused and brief.
Soon enough, the train began to rumble and lurch and they dropped back to the platform.
I waved and some of them waved back.
I wondered what life would have in store for them.
Perhaps, and this is with the passing of considerable time, they would find work in the 21st century high-tech version of India.
Or perhaps they would be selling on train platforms for life.
India is an ancient land of modern level inequality.
Which is to say massive inequality.
But at least these kids – you can see the screen version in movies such as “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Lion” – were up and about, keeping busy, and earning a few rupees.
It was in New Delhi that a less active version of Indian life made itself evident.
It was early morning, the sun not long up so the temperature was still in the vicinity of sane.
I was standing on the roof of a hotel where cabin-like rooms were placed to catch whatever passed for a breeze.
Looking down into an adjacent alleyway it was evident that the municipal authorities had failed, for some time it seemed, to remove the garbage.
It was a mess.
Only the mess began to move.
This wasn’t garbage, at least not all of it.
It was a mass of people who had been sleeping in the alley. And now they were rising to meet the new day and its same old struggles.
These images are from 1984, not very long before the assassination of Indira Gandhi, an event that would bring murderous death to some who traveled by train across the north Indian plain, Sikhs mostly, as Gandhi was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards – on her way to an interview in the garden of her home for an Irish television documentary.
India can be a most unforgiving place.
The aforementioned movie “Lion” tells the tale of a five-year-old boy from a rural village who falls asleep on a train and awakens in Calcutta where he ends up having to survive on some of the planet’s most unforgiving streets.
Calcutta is called Kolkata these days, but for its street kids it’s the same place no matter what the name on a map.
But there is always hope.
And the HOPE Foundation.
HOPE, an Irish-based charity, works with "street and slum" children in Kolkata.
Seemingly there is a distinction. The street is a little ahead of the slum presumably.
Which must mean that a railway station is a veritable nirvana.
It would be nice to think of at least one of those long ago Chai boys running his own tech empire in Bangalore, and providing decent jobs to others who were once street, slum, and station urchins, boys and girls both.
You never know.
Meanwhile, more on the HOPE Foundation at www.hopefoundation.ie
Editor's note: There is an ad in the current issue of the Irish Echo for an event entitled “A Taste of India,” a gathering in support of HOPE. Circumstances have forced a cancellation but organizers are now looking to a rescheduled event in January.
