by Suketu Mehta
The next day, he felt like killing himself. He couldn’t show his whipped face to his parents. He went to meet Aparna’s parents, to complain about the boarder. When the boarder was summoned, he claimed Babbanji was harassing Aparna. Babbanji presented her parents with the love letters she had written him.
In front of them all, her mother asked Aparna, “Do you love him?”
She replied, “No.”
They read out loud a poem he had written to Aparna, which she had shared with the boarder:
“Why are you seeking for your loneliness one who could go away tomorrow?
I am a breeze of wind; here now, gone later. . .
Forget me, flower of my garden.”
They were mocking him. “I had tears in my eyes but I wouldn’t let them out. That moment I decided that science was not for me; the reason I was going to kill myself, this poem, would be my destination, my reason to live. I decided I wanted to write.”
He went home and wrote a letter to his parents, who were at work. When I come back to Sitamarhi I will be something. For all the people whom I am leaving, I will come back with an answer. Then he got on the bus to the nearest train station. “All I had was this bag”—he pulls out a yellow plastic bag such as you go vegetable shopping with—“in which I had this file [with all his poems], a sheet, and this.” He searches deep in the recesses of the yellow bag and pulls out a garment, a crumpled and slightly soiled undershirt, maybe white originally but turned light blue through washing and use, heavy with a man’s wearing. He holds it in the air in front of me, and for the first time in his story his eyes are full of tears. “I love my papa. I took my papa’s undershirt. For remembrance. From childhood he has been both mother and father to me.” His voice breaks, and he quickly puts the undershirt back in the bag.
He took a train going to Lucknow, in the north. Babbanji woke up as the train was pulling in to Lucknow, in the morning. He looked at his wrist; his watch, which his father had given him when he stood first in his class, was gone. He got out at the station and pondered his next step. At the station he saw two trains waiting: one going to Delhi, one going to Bombay. The Delhi train was sparsely filled, with some politician types, some journalists. The Bombay train had a vast mass of people waiting to board it. The police were holding them back. Mingling with the mass, Babbanji found that the crowd was composed of all types of people: rich, poor, those who had reservations, and some who looked to be runaways like himself. He had never been to Bombay or Delhi, but he had relatives in Delhi. He had heard that Delhi was not as congested as Bombay, that the hardships of daily life for the poor were not as great there. Babbanji did not know Bombay through the world of the Hindi film; he knew only, from his father, that the city was home to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Bhabha Atomic Research Center.
All this ran through Babbanji’s head as he was waiting on the platform in Lucknow between the two trains. On the one platform there was the Delhi train, half empty, promising a quick trip to a city where he had uncles who would let him stay with them or, if not, lots of space on the broad sidewalks to sleep on. On the other platform was the Bombay train, waiting to be overrun with bodies, taking him a much longer distance to a city where there were unimaginable stresses of living, where he knew not a soul. “I thought, Why are all these people going to Bombay? What is there in Bombay that from all directions there is the cry, ‘Bombay! Bombay!’” Waiting on the platform between the two trains, the young man made his decision. If all these people were going to Bombay, it must be for a reason. These people must know something. And so Babbanji forced his destiny. He took his place in the vast throng waiting to get on the train to Bombay.
The journey took two days. He spent a day standing and the rest holding on to his little clutch of ground on the floor of the unreserved compartment. At the stations the police would hold back people from the unreserved bogies and let in people who had bribed them. But to the young poet, the physical discomfort was outweighed by the thrill of direct observation of the masses, the fuel it gave his work. “This was a great experience for me—how people come to Bombay. There were one hundred ten seats and about two thousand people. They were poor people, laborers; they were fitted like animals, people on top of people.”
Finally, the Bombay—Lucknow Express pulled in to Victoria Terminus and Babbanji slowly descended onto the platform. “I touched the ground and did pranaam to it,” he says, lifting his hand to his forehead. “I took its blessings. I thought, This is my karmabhoomi,” the land of his destiny.
At V.T. Station, he was accosted by some officials who asked him for his ticket. They took him to a room and, since he had no ticket, told him he would have to pay 300 rupees or go to jail for fifteen days. They searched his pockets; he had 130 rupees left, and they relieved him of 100. Then Babbanji fled from V.T., took a local train as far as Bandra, and wandered around Carter Road, by the sea. He now had only 22 rupees; 8 rupees had gone for the local train ticket. He stayed hungry for three days, living on water. Then he ran across a watchman in a marble shop, who noticed his condition and sent him back to South Bombay, to someone in Horniman Circle, who gave Babbanji no help. As he was walking around the area, he ran across a bookstall owner, Ram Babu Joshi. He hired Babbanji. “He sold books at outrageous prices after sizing up the customer.” His language was also most foul; after a while Babbanji could not stand his curses, so when Joshi fired Babbanji for attending the writers’ salon, he was not unhappy.
He came back to Flora Fountain and found a more amiable bookseller, Vijay. Vijay pays Babbanji 50 rupees a day. The money starts going first thing in the morning, when he has to pay 1 rupee to go to the toilet in a nearby facility and 5 rupees to bathe. The owner had suggested a nearby dhaba that serves lunch for 17 rupees, but Babbanji can fill his stomach with some rotis, for 6.5 rupees, and 2 rupees for bananas. Dinner is 14 rupees in a nearby “hotel,” rotis and some vegetables. “I’m lucky I’m vegetarian, otherwise it would cost forty rupees or more.” So, miraculously, Babbanji manages to save from his salary; he has disposable income. He uses it to buy books, from pavement stalls all over the city. He shows me a recent acquisition, History and Problems of Indian Education, for 30 rupees, because he is interested in Muslim education.
Near the bookstall is a little stand that sells sandals. In the night, after business closes, the owner folds down his stall, spreads a piece of plastic on the planks, and it becomes a bedroom for four or five people, who sleep in the open air: himself, Vijay of the bookstall, a cobbler, Babbanji, and another man who lies down next to Babbanji after he is asleep and goes away before he wakes up, so that he has never spoken to him or seen his face, only slept next to him every night.
Babbanji takes me around to the dhabas and the toilets he uses: where he eats, and where he lets it out. In the maidan behind Churchgate is a tent, under which vast pots of food are constantly being stirred by sweating men. This is where you can get a meal of rice and dal for under 10 rupees and live another day. You would not know there was such a site in the heart of Bombay unless you looked for it; it is well hidden from the commuters rushing to the station. There are two toilets nearby; the Sulabh Sauchalaya, set up by a private charity, is much the worse of the two. There is a line of people even now, in the heat of the afternoon, in front of each of the three toilet stalls. In the mornings the line snakes out of the door, down the steps, and onto the footpath. Babbanji has made a calculation. A human being needs eight minutes to go to the toilet. “But by the time you take your clothes off, people are banging on the door; they start banging in two minutes, fifty people banging on the toilet while you sit.” Babbanji has taken to getting up before six-thirty in the morning, so he can go to the toilet in peace.
On his first day in Bombay, Babbanji also figured out another survival skill of living on the streets: Never close your eyes when you bathe. There is a hose attached to the sink of the Sulabh Sauchalaya that lets out into a bucket. Babbanji waited his turn, squatted in front o
f the bucket, filled it up, and started soaping himself. He heard a sound, opened his eyes, and saw the man behind him grab Babbanji’s entire bucket and pour it over himself. He had stolen his water. Babbanji wanted to take issue, but the man was big and menacing. He started washing his head from the trickle issuing from the hose. But the man behind him had grabbed his place in the bathing queue, and Babbanji was forced to sit to one side and watch, the soap drying on his skin. Then the man behind the interloper took pity on him and gave his turn at the bucket to Babbanji. “Here, finish your bath.” All this is in full view of, and just in front of, the line waiting for the toilets. There is no privacy while you bathe; you have to bathe in your underwear and have a hundred eyes watching you. Frequently brawls break out between the bathers. The Nepali who manages the place charges 5 rupees for the bath and 1 rupee for the toilet, when the rates are clearly posted: 3 rupees for a bath, half a rupee to use the toilet. Still, the rush is so great that the road in front of the toilet is rutted and the paving broken from the stream of soapy bathwater that runs out past the feet of the line and into the road.
How does he like the footpath life? I ask him.
“I like it very much. I have no problems. I don’t want a home; I am more free on the footpath.”
“How do you find Bombay?” I ask him, as others have asked me. “The flats, the cars?”
“These things don’t attract me. I don’t want to live in these flats; they imprison people. On the footpaths you can establish relationships, friendships. If I become rich, these relations will be spoiled; if my poor friends come to visit me the security guards won’t let them in. The footpath is the friend of the poor. How many people it accommodates to sleep on!”
A recent survey showed that two-thirds of the city’s footpaths are unusable for pedestrians, in large part because of people like Babbanji. The battle over the footpath is a battle over rights: of the pedestrians to walk on it (the original purpose); of the homeless to sleep on it; of the hawkers to make a living on it; of the vehicle owners to park on it. The city is in a continuous agonized debate over whose need is the greatest.
I ask Babbanji what he remembers of Bihar.
Two things. First, his father and his admonition to him: “Son, make something of yourself. Do something with your own hands. If you are a thief, be the best thief.” Second, “the Bihari heart, their hospitality, the readiness with which they accept outsiders. This I don’t find here.” In Bombay, Babbanji points out, even a drink of water costs money; to fill a water bottle with water fit to drink costs a rupee or two. “In Bombay people don’t have heart, this I have found out in one month.” But he knows exactly what he wants to do now. “I want to be among writers. I want to keep writing.” He has titled his collection And the Candle Burns On.
When most people hear that Babbanji is a poet, they ask him to recite a shayri, a recited form of rhyme that infests modern India. “I don’t like shayris. I write poetry. Shayris are for entertainment; poetry tells the truth. People start clapping when they hear shayri, not when they hear poetry,” he points out. He likes the circle of poets he met at the writers’ salon in the courtyard. “It is a meeting of intellectuals, of society people. There is an exchange of thoughts.” He is learning to see things their way, to speak in the language of a critic. He quotes a visiting poet from London. “He said it correctly: Poetry is dead in India today.” Writers have been helping him. Babbanji sometimes wonders why, what we stand to gain. “Maybe they want to foster talent, and when I am recognized I will mention them. If people ask me, ‘How did you rise up from the footpaths?’ I can acknowledge all of you—Adil, you, Madan.”
Babbanji tells me I can use his life story for my book and asks if he can suggest a title for it. I nod, and he says, Untold Life. “It’s the life about which nothing is told. There is plenty of discussion about the lives of the rich, but nothing is spoken about the lives of the poor.” Alternatively, he suggests Secrets of Arrival. I tell him I like his first title. The world outside—and that includes the people in Bombay I grew up with—know nothing about these lives because nothing has been told about them.
Babbanji’s main hunger is for time: time to write. “If I get time I can write a book in a day. I write minimum five—six poems a day.” The bookshop is open from eight to eight. After work, he walks the short distance to the sea, near Marine Drive, sits below the block of flats that cost $3 million each for the people who live in them, looks at the same view for free, and writes. He had never seen a sunset in Bihar, he is convinced, after seeing the sun set on the Arabian Sea. “It was very beautiful, very beautiful. I bent down to write and lifted my head after two or three seconds and the sun had set.” I too, as a child, had gone to the rocks behind Dariya Mahal at dusk, pen and paper in hand, witness to this intersection of great beauty and great sadness, eyes straining to see where fire ended and water took over.
Among his favorite poets is Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In his notebook, he has copied out one of the prime minister’s poems, “Seam in the Hot Milk,” about two brothers fighting, an allegory about Partition. “Who am I writing for?” he asks himself. “I want my poems to reach the public of Bombay; I don’t want them to stay within myself. These poems should be read by poor people. I don’t want them to be in five-hundred-rupee books. I want to write for a publication put out by the Bihar Welfare Association.” He wants to tell them what Bombay is, what the footpath is.
In his free time, Babbanji travels around the city, looking at sunsets and destitution. He goes to disaster areas, such as the site of a recently collapsed building, and writes a poem titled “Builders’ Hands Stained Red.” Babbanji takes me to the winding lanes behind Flora Fountain. There is a group of African drug peddlers and addicts who sleep and conduct business here. One morning Babbanji was passing by this spot when he saw a crowd had gathered. The police had raided the addicts, who line the roads here in the morning. The cops jumped out of their trucks and went after them. Those who could ran away, but one of them had both his feet amputated and was hobbling along on his crutches. The police caught up with him easily, broke his crutches, and felled him with a blow of their lathis. Then, in full view of the crowd, they assaulted the crippled addict with their sticks, raining blows on him as he attempted to slither away on the ground. Babbanji felt greatly moved and composed a poem about the incident from the addict’s point of view.
He has also been going to Santacruz, to a shantytown where people live over an open sewer. He heard a group of people singing on the trains and took 3 rupees out of his pocket and asked one of them to sing “Zindagi ka Safar.” When they got off the train, he followed them home. Babbanji looked at the sewer; it was overflowing with all kinds of plastic—plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic odds and ends separated from their original entities—and Babbanji thought of his school science project, which could turn plastic into petrol. “And I thought, This is a treasury!”
Another place he recommends to me is a two-hundred-foot-long ditch between Bandra and Mahim, filled with sewage, totally black. He tells me how to get there: “There is a little jungle, some flats, and below it, for hundreds of meters on the banks, slums. For two to three hundred meters you have to cover your face because of the stench.” There is a colony of people living there, migrants like himself. It is empty from eight in the morning to seven-thirty in the evening; the migrants are not beggars. He wanted to see how people could live there in such conditions and wrote poetry about them. “The ditch water is used to grow spinach,” he tells me. He finds this remarkable. So do I.
AFTER MONTHS OF LOOKING, Babbanji is unable to find a proper job in Bombay. He has many reasons for avoiding steady employment. “I want to be free. If I take a job I will be bound. This poetry is something that can’t be done without seeing. If I can’t see Bombay how will I write?” So, forced by the demands of his craft, he has left the bookstall and is seeking a part-time job that will give him time to write. He drifts in and out of favor with the bookstall owner, who won�
��t let him sit there in the day. Babbanji now passes the day sitting on the steps outside the high court.
“Suketuji,” he begins, one day, “there is a need of some money.”
“How much?” I ask, suddenly wary.
“One hundred fifty.”
It is nothing, really—just $4—but by giving him money at this juncture, I am directly influencing the course of his life, the course of the story. Instead, I buy him 500 rupees’ worth of meals at the Samovar restaurant in the Jehangir Art Gallery. That entitles him to fifteen good lunches of rice and vegetable curry. I won’t give him cash. “I won’t take pity,” he had said to me. Babbanji often goes to the Jehangir Art Gallery and wanders about the paintings. He says he likes the Sabhavala exhibition, although I suspect he’s been taught to, by his illustrious friends in the poets’ salon. At the Samovar, I watch the way he eats his cheese sandwich. First he lets it lie on the plate in front of him. Then he eats one quarter at a time, slowly. As long as a little bit of the sandwich is left on the plate in front of him he won’t be hassled by the waiters to leave. So he balances his hunger with the need to stay in a shaded place in the afternoon. It is a precise calculation: how much of the sandwich will he allow himself to eat, at what pace.
