‘The city of dreams!’, is the sobriquet that is often
repeated in relation to the city of Mumbai. It was a phrase that dominated most
of my childhood in Chennai, as my father would travel to the city and come back
with tales of a place that never slept and trains that would take you to every
nook and corner. It was the trains, more than anything else that caught my
fancy. Trains had always symbolised freedom to me. The wind in your hair, the
rush of adrenaline to catch the seat by the window and the journey itself, made
me yearn to travel by these local trains. I got my first chance this summer as
I got an internship in the city. However, all these ‘dreams’ of mine were
crushed, not by the crowd as one might suppose but by the number of children I
saw begging on these trains.
These children were highly trained in, if you may be bold
enough to say, the art of begging. They went from passenger to passenger
singing in shrill voices, hardly stopping to give their vocal chords some rest.
It was a voice that pierced through your heart and through any apathy that you
may hold for those who refuse to work for a living. One can’t expect a child of
four or five to be employed; neither can you rudely refuse those pleading eyes that
speak of a hunger that fractures any resolve you may have. They were all
dressed in tattered clothes which had clearly been cast away by the original
owners.
It was one such child who entered the compartment I was
seated in that made my heart feel heavy and instil a sense of helplessness in
me. All of five years, she ran up to the train just as it was set to leave the
Mumbai Central station. Dressed in a green ‘ghagra’, you might not even take
her to be a beggar at first sight. But then the singing began. Two lines were
all she sang, repeating them over and over again, invoking the lord. I didn’t
understand much of what she sang but the desperation in it put me on the edge
and it took all my willpower to turn my head away as she approached. The child
then to my utter disbelief laid her head on my knee, a sign of complete
surrender. I looked at her in shock, sympathy engulfing my heart. She lay there
for more than a minute, continuing to sing, begging for some money. A
bespectacled old man next to me, who clearly travelled by these trains often,
looked at me understandingly and said- “Don’t fall for these tricks. It is an
emotional ploy.”
I nodded at his statement in acknowledgement and turned to
see that the child had already gone, paving her way through the crowded
compartment. All the voices that spoke of fulfilled dreams in Mumbai weighed
upon my memory and I couldn’t help but think of the irony. There went a little
child, whose dreams never even had the chance to blossom for they were nipped
at the bud. Her singing became fainter as she moved away and finally she was
out of sight. But the song never stopped. It continued to reverberate within my
head through the day. It was not her face that surfaced in my memories the
entire time but the eerie melody of the song she sang. It represented to me a
sense of hopelessness and the inability to wrought change. Every note the child
hit in the pitiful song, falls as a blow to a system that failed her.
Priyanka Thirumurthy
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