Meanwhile, around the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, a boy-child sleeps alone. When he gets up in the morning and opens his fist, he will find money in it. This happens to him quite regularly, somebody putting money in his hand. He knows the other street-children who sleep near him do not get money in their hand because they sleep together, huddled, to protect themselves from strange men who come in the night. They come in big cars, smelling of nice scent, they press the money into his hand after they are done. The child thinks of the money, and the picture he will see with it in an air-conditioned theatre. He smiles in his sleep.

And in Bangalore, in the dead of night, an eight-year-old inert body is tossed out of a car onto a rubbish heap. In the morning they will find her, comment on the fact that she appears not to have been a street child. Perhaps, they will wonder aloud, she was kidnapped from another city? Or maybe she ran away? But why should she have done that, she looks like she came from a good home.

From a ‘good’ home. How will they tell? From the well-trimmed nails? From her clean ears? From her neatly cut hair?

How do you tell the class of a child from a tiny body pitted with cigarette burns?

Why, at all, do you need to tell the class of a child?

It is a child.

A child. Someone’s child. Our child.

Whom somebody has abused.

Somebody has used her like an ashtray and stubbed his cigarette all over her; somebody has then thrown her out of his car like garbage.

There she lies naked, her torn panties tightly clasped in her clenched fist.

Notebook Two

Daughters & Mothers

Click. Click, click.

She is under the bed, her grandmother is on it. She knows her grandmother’s eyes are closed, that her mouth is moving silently as she prays. Rising around them in the room is a bluish grey swirl of incense, a whole big bunch of sickly-sweet smelling agarbattis lit and placed upright in a tightly-packed cup of uncooked rice. As her grandmother prays she rotates one hundred and one loosely-strung fat beads with her right hand. Her prayer beads, they click, click.

‘Dadi, what are you praying for?’

Click, click, click, fast, furious, click.

‘Dadi!’

‘Hush, I am praying, can’t you see?’

‘I am under the bed dadi, how to see?’

An impatient rattle of the prayer beads, dadi is cross, ‘Will you let me finish praying? Then I have to cook the evening’s dinner and I have to clean the dishes and so much housework! Your mother will only come like a memsaab when I finish everything. Now let me pray, will you?’

‘All the time you pray, why do you pray so much, God is not giving?’

‘Hush, the mouth this child has.’

Her dadi is seated on the only bed they have, it would have been high and mighty if it was not so wobbly; a four-poster bed which nevertheless lords over the ten feet by ten feet square they live in, cook in, eat in, sleep in, bathe in. For the toilet they go outside their room. They join the line which wends its way through the corridor connecting ten such rooms to each floor, four floors in all, a toilet at the end of each. They are the smallest family in the entire chawl, only seven to the room, and they are all poor in the building. But they are about to become rich, her dadi just says.