‘Sometimes I find a Rupee the garbage’ “Why you do this?” I ask Saheb whom I encounter every morning scrounging gold in the garbage dumps my neighbourhood. Saheb left his home ago. Set amidst the fields of Dhaka, his home is not even a memory. There were many storms that away their fields and homes, his mother tells him. That’s why they left, for gold in the big city where he now lives. “I have nothing else to do,” he mutters, away. “Go school,” I say glibly, realising immediately how hollow the advice must sound. “There is no school my neighbourhood. When they build one, I go.”
“If I a school, will you come?” I ask, half-joking. “Yes,” he says, broadly. A few days later I see him running to me. “Is your school ready?” “It takes longer build a school,” I say, embarrassed at made a promise that was not meant. But promises like mine abound every corner of his world.
After months of him, I ask him his name. “Saheb-e-Alam,” he announces. He does not know what it means. If he knew its meaning — lord of the universe — he would have a time believing it. Unaware of what his name represents, he roams the streets with his friends, an of barefoot boys who appear like the morning birds and disappear noon. Over months, I have come to recognise each them.
“Why you wearing chappals?” I ask one. “My mother did not bring them from the shelf,” he answers simply.
“Even she did he will throw them ,” adds another who is wearing shoes that do not match. When I comment on it, he shuffles his feet and says nothing. “I want shoes,” says a third boy who has never owned a pair his life. Travelling the country I have seen children barefoot, cities, village roads. It is not lack money but a tradition to stay barefoot, is one explanation. I wonder if this is only an excuse to explain a state of poverty.
I remember a story a man from Udipi once told me. As a young boy he go to school an old temple, where his father was a priest. He would stop briefly the temple and pray for a of shoes. Thirty years later I visited his town and the temple, which was now drowned in an of desolation. In the backyard, where lived the new priest, there were red and white plastic chairs. A young boy in a grey uniform, socks and shoes, arrived panting and threw his school bag on a folding bed. at the boy, I remembered the prayer another boy had to the goddess when he had finally got a pair of , “Let me never lose them.” The goddess had his prayer. Young boys like the son of the priest now wore shoes. But many others like the ragpickers in my neighbourhood shoeless.