Abandoned

I was engaged in talking with my friend when the taxi we travelled stopped at the traffic red signal in the streets of Kolkata. A touch on my right hand startled me and I turned to look at what that was. I saw a small, dark, shaggy dressed boy begging me to give him money. “Kuch nahin khaya madam, paise di jiye na. Bhook lag raha he madam paise di jiye” I was sympathized with him but I didn’t want to give him money and encourage him to continue with his mode of earning. He slowly drifted to the other side of the taxi and told my friend “Madam paise dijiye, kuch khaya nahi subah se, agar mujhe aap paise denge to aapki bhalayi hogi, apko acha pati milega, ache bache paida honge….” While my friend conversed with him I remembered a picture drawn by a friend of mine of a boy in shaggy clothes standing in front of a school gate, looking curiously at the students passing by. I was asked to write a story on that picture and I scribbled something onto my notepad which was something like this-


It all started with an incident that happened in a dark night at a park in a street. A lady of about 28-30 years of age walked around the park, frantically searching for drums of waste so that she could grab some waste food to feed herself. Her way of dressing and body language showed that she was mentally not alright. Many men used to come at this time to the park to drink and on that night too three men came in. They began drinking and when it was time for them to go home they saw this young lady. One man among the three came to her and said “Hey, are you looking for food? This is not the right place to look for food. Why don’t you follow me and I provide you with food?” She looked at him, smiled and nodded her head in consent. She followed him and his companions to a darker side of the park. The next thing heard was her screaming for help as the ‘helpers’ changed their color and gang raped her. No one came to help her and all she could do was bear the pain and cry. She started living her normal life in the streets. People used passed bad comments at her; some kids threw stones at her, some were afraid to even walk beside her. With the passage of time she started gaining weight along with the growth of her tummy. She was hungrier than she was and started snatching food from places. It became unbearable for her to handle the situation when her water broke and in the silence of a monsoon night she gave birth to a boy child. She had something besides breast milk to feed the baby, poison. She poured some of it into her mouth and some into her child’s mouth and breast fed him. Within half an hour she was puking. She knew that she was going to die. She held her baby tight to her weak body. It was crying out loud. Her eyes closed slowly and she passed into eternal sleep with a crying baby held onto her. The baby was still crying. It was dawn and a city corporation vehicle came to the spot where the lady was with her baby. Her lifeless body lay there still. Two men took her body in the vehicle to transfer it to a burial ground. Her baby was nowhere to be seen. He was taken away by a beggar. The child grew up and started begging too. Every day, when it was time for the nearby school to start working, he used to run over to the gate and stand there looking at the school kids pass by.

When the traffic signal turned green and the taxi started moving I was trying to think of reasons of how that boy ended up in the streets.