This out of the way at the start: today's column is not about some major current political issue. It won't offer you a single figure, not one quote from some forgettably quotable person. Today, I'm writing about something I saw that has obsessed me for a few days, and I'm going to let the writing take the column where it will.
Here's a thing I like to do. While I feel mildly shamefaced admitting it, I'm betting a number of you like to do it too. You know those little ketchup packets you get at fast food restaurants? After I tear one open and squeeze its contents onto my food, I steal a quick look around to see that nobody's watching. Then I sort of pull the thing through my lips, sucking at it, squeezing the last drops into my mouth.
Well, the other day I found someone doing something similar. Only, it wasn't ketchup packets. She was working with larger plastic bags that had evidently been used to carry food. The bags in which my home-delivered Chinese food come, for example. When I empty them, they look a lot like the ones in the small collection this lady had on her lap. Picking them up one by one, she was sucking at them, swallowing the last few drops of whatever gravy they had contained.
You don't really need me to explain this, do you? Dressed in rags, the woman sat on the street not far from where I live, next to a pile of garbage from which she had extracted the bags. The gravy from the bags was her dinner.
Must have been a home-delivery bonanza that day. Not only in the sense that there was an abundance of thrown-away bags in the garbage dump, but also in the sense that they were home-delivered to her. You get my drift.
Visit any garbage heap -- and in Bombay, you never have to go far to stumble over one -- and you will too often find someone digging through it for food. Someone who, much like you, is another human being. The steaming, putrid dump on the road to Bandra station? Hurrying past two days ago, I saw another woman and two filthy pigs rooting around in it. The monsoon-soaked one at the other end of Carter Road? In a mounting downpour last week, three kids in bare feet picked little edibles out of it. And there's the lady with the plastic bags, draining Chinese take-out gravy into her mouth.
India. It makes you look at so much misery. Every day. You can look away if you want to, and we all learn that specific and very useful skill early. But you can't escape it even if you want to. Because that woman, you see, she doesn't really give much of a damn for your sensibilities, your carefully learned skills. She will go right on picking through the trash for plastic bags to suck on. It's been happening for years, and it will keep right on happening for many more years. Whether the country suffers through a hollow socialism, or a greatly hyped liberalisation, or an empty Hindutva, or a so-called globalisation, or a meaningless secularism -- whatever the ism that's currently fashionable to discuss or glorify or trample, one thing never changes. In India, you never have to search hard to find misery.
How long have squalid hovels lined the road and railway near Mahim station, their occupants picking their way over stinking pools of black goo to fill pots from leaky drains on a nearby building? How long have you had to be sure to drive carefully near such hovels at night, for otherwise you might run over entire families who sleep right there on the filthy road? How long
has it been that pairs of skinny, undernourished children sit outside fancy shops and restaurants in any Indian city, imploring passers-by for a few coins even though they are probably too young to comprehend what they are doing?
In my case, it has been over three decades. These have been common Indian sights going back to my earliest memories, common since I first became aware, in my single-digit