Their body language makes it clear they aren’t rural folk. They are not people who, overcome by flood or famine, have abandoned a plot of land, or fled their arid farms – house, cowshed, temple, evening gatherings, village plays – in terror, bundling up a few paltry belongings and finally taking sanctuary as penniless beggars here on this pavement. I wonder whether they even are beggars – I have never seen them beg.

They are quite detached from things. Under the open sky, this detachment is fitting. They sleep, wake, eat and rinse their mouths unselfconsciously beneath the krishnachura tree on the pavement. They make love there too. I don’t know how they find any privacy, given that every nook and cranny of the deserted road is visible in the light from the tall street lamps. The pavement was empty when I moved into the flat. They came some time later. The wife had a two-month-old baby girl in her arms. And before the year was out, she was holding a ten-day-old infant. There is no doubt that they have sex right there on the pavement.

But it isn’t as though they have no possessions at all. They own plates, bowls and polythene sheets. They have blankets for winter, they light coils of mosquito repellent when they sleep. They also have a small gadget to listen to music; I’ve seen it. I believe they have other belongings too, all neatly arranged in a wooden packing case.

The group consists of two men, about twenty-two or twenty-three, a boy of eleven or twelve, and the woman – between sixteen and twenty – plus the two babies. I have often seen another young man and woman, about the same age, visiting them. I’ve learned from their conversations that one of the two men is the woman’s husband, and the other her brother. I have never seen signs of suffering on their faces. I don’t think they have any regrets. They don’t think of this form of existence as a failure. This is the way I see them, day after day – the man sleeping, the woman sitting with her legs stretched out before her, leaning against a tree, a distant look in her eyes. The daughter, about a year old now, parts her mother’s dirty, tattered blouse to fasten her mouth to her emaciated breast. The mother doesn’t even seem to feel the contact. Her expression is dense, exhausted, dispassionate. The very next moment the baby might crawl to the edge of the pavement where the mouth of the drain yawns wide without a lid to cover it. The child may fall in at any moment, but she doesn’t. A lively, restive baby might have pitched headlong into the stream of moving cars a couple of feet away. But she’s frail; she doesn’t scream or cry, doesn’t demand food. All she does is sleep. When she wakes, she gropes for her mother’s breast. And crawls back without fail from the edge of the pavement, back to her mother.