The Second Window

Ministerial Meandering

The second window

Out of the other window of my shaky hotel room in Ahmedabad, I looked down onto waste ground.  Or so I thought.  

In the early morning light - a sort of grey-brown soup, as dawn traffic began to stir up city dust - I could make out an old bed frame in the middle of the partially fenced space.  No mattress on the frame - just bare springs - but there was a body on the springs, which moved.

The man only wore a soiled dhoti or lungi around his waist, and scratched as he rose stiffly from his bed.  He was somewhere between thirty and forty at a guess, and he shuffled over to the side of the wasteland on his bare feet to a small barrel.  Taking a tin cup, he dipped it into the barrel and drank its contents, then threw a second cup of what I assumed was rain water over his head and bare chest, rubbing each with with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

Clearly not rushing to join the lemming commuter rush, he squatted for a moment, then scuffed dirt over the area.

At this point, a door opened in a battered, corrugated hut immediately beneath my window.  Actually, it would be wrong to attribute the title ‘door’ to what was simply one of the panels that made the hut, as it was pushed aside, and a lady carrying a small child emerged, with a toddler hanging on to her dirty saree.  They made their way across the yard to the barrel, and all made use of the water and the dirt for their morning toilet.  Then, as a group, they joined the man and wandered back to his bed with its lethal springs, for some kind of discussion.  Perhaps on how to invest their fortune - or then again - perhaps not.

At this point, daylight, and - feeling lightly ashamed that I had slept in a bed with a mattress and sheets -  I thought I might see if the hotel had anything resembling a dining room.  The answer was ‘No’ - but before I pulled myself away from the window, I noticed more people emerging from the corrugated hut.  Let me say that this edifice could not have been larger than a very modest garden shed, but from it came another family of five or six - but no man - and these were followed by yet more children.  I think there must have been around ten in all.  I was amazed that they all could fit into such a tiny space.

Later, when I had the opportunity, I spoke with one of my Indian colleagues on the faculty of our teaching programme, and asked him why they would all jam into such a space when there was room to sleep outside where it would have been cooler.

He told me that it wasn’t safe for small children to sleep on the streets - particularly little girls.  They would be picked up and stolen in the night, straight off the pavements, and sold into sexual slavery, from as young as 5 or 6 years old.  There was safety in numbers, he said, and the man may have been father to some of them, and was sleeping outside as a guard.  It was really only a matter of time before some of the children would be taken - but the adults had no way to feed them anyway.

I am aware that sex trafficking happens all over the world, but the poorer places of third world countries is often where it starts.  The slums offer better protection than the waste ground outside shabby hotels.  A slum is at least a community that looks after its own.

Sometimes we need to remember just how lucky we are - and thank God for it.

Philip+