30/09/06

We both slept soundly and awoke without trouble, meeting each other out in the dimly lit courtyard, whispering the events of our evening’s rest to one another and wondering out loud what we might witness that day.

Ambling down the eerily vacant and soundless street to the local station we passed an old lady picking the white flowers from a jasmine bush and men laid arm to arm on wooden planks covered only by their shirts. Vertically-fixed fluorescent tubes lined our path and buzzed in the silence that surrounded us.

The train ride was calm and we managed even to find some seats. A woman, scrawny and gaunt was dozing in a corner, huddled beneath her sari with her legs up to her chin. When she brought the cloth right over her head, the fan that blew from above her brought out the pronouncement of her joints and she seemed no more than a sack of bones. Other men sat slack-jawed, dropping off and reawakening as their chins struck their chests.

By the time we arrived at Sealdah, the sun had risen and an urgency had whipped everyone around us into anticipative action. After the soft rocking of the train and the relative lack of people around us I think we were lulled into a false sense of security. The pace of the chaos that ensued certainly took a few minutes to adjust to.

It is worth at this point describing a first impression of the station that is to become our daily area of work. There are perhaps twenty platforms split, it seems, into two large buildings. The larger of the two is Victorian-looking with consecutive cast-iron and glass ceiling arches as you might see at Paddington. It is joined to the smaller by a large concourse area, partly indoor. The smaller of the buildings is plainer in style and at the very right of this building is the beginning of platform 10A.

Every square foot of space was occupied by a person for as far as the eye could see. All around us could be seen the saddening reality of what we’d spent months talking about and seeing only photos of. Children, so very young, of every age in fact, from three-month old babies dribbling on their mother’s grubby saris to surly-looking teenagers viciously slapping one another in shorts and torn shirts, were everywhere, conspicuous by their inertia among the blur of the passers-by. They lived here, every day. They seemed to ignore, and be ignored by, the bustle that flutters about them.

Platform 10A is relatively quiet. All these inhabitants of the station are present without the surrounding distraction of commuters. Most seem at this time to be dozing, a lot of them undoubtedly drugged up, on stone benches, on paper on the ground, beneath scraps of whatever it appears they can find. This I suppose is nothing new. There are plenty of similar cases in any of the major cities in the world. Most people have encountered men and women sleeping rough, even in the most insular city in an English county. The most shocking thing at Sealdah however, was the children. Mothers curled up on the filthy floor with, say, their baby, their two year old and their four year old with nothing either to lay on or under. It was so difficult to really grasp how someone might live like this, even when it’s there in front of your face.

That day was a clothes distribution day, a special day as it only occurs once every few months. There were 250 shirts to hand out, all identical (to avoid the previous squabbles over colour and style) and all with varying sizes to fit 2 year olds - 15 year olds. There were also a number of all-in-one pieces for babies.

The children came in waves, slowly at first and finally swamping us minutes before we had to leave. As soon as we arrived at the post, the three other volunteers scooped up the nearest child with one arm and reached out a hand to another. They gathered round eagerly, giggling, clambering all over us, bouncing around and generally behaving like the loveliest children you could ever hope to meet. Their appalling situation was, for the time being, partially forgotten and a playground environment put in its place. We encouraged each one of them to remove their old shirt and replace it with the new so that they might not be tempted to simply walk away and sell it or have it stolen from them. The delight on their faces was astonishing and the desperation of those too old to qualify, equally so. To see a mere shirt being so strenuously coveted by every one of the ragged throng that gathered around us was a humbling experience.

Later that day after a scrub and a snooze, we were given a guided tour by Kamala of the most impressive temporary temples erected in honour of the festival. They are extraordinary efforts of devotion, especially as they are to stand only days before being dismantled and destroyed. Some people, we are told, take enormous loans out to construct their elaborate temples only to spend the rest of the year having to pay it off. Some pictures are included.