Just Another Family

During our trip we've come across street beggars in every town we've been in. There were a couple on Darjeeling, many in Bangalore and hundreds in Puttaparthi. They range from young kids of six or seven to old men and women and then there are the deformed and disabled. Sadly they are a fact of life in this country of over 1 billion.

Each day we venture out near the Main Road of Puttaparthi we are immediately surrounded by outstretched hands asking for food, money or both. Some of the young women are holding babies. While some are genuine, many are part of a well organised team of street beggars, often run by unscrupulous criminals who take their cut of the proceeds and even hire our babies to elicit sympathy.

We are familiar with the scams and our attitude is to ignore them and just walk on. But they get points for persistance with many following or holding onto your arm for several blocks. Ian just starts moaning in some unintelligible voice and rolls his eyes like some demononic moron, which frankly scares the hell out of me but sometimes works on the beggars.

However, for every beggar there are literally thousands of poor living as best they can in the nooks and crannies of the backstreets. How they do it I don't know.

Yesterday I had to visit my tailor who made up some shirts for me. His shop is on the first floor of an old decrepit building, reached by a narrow alleyway and up 20 rickety stairs. It does my hip no good but he does good work so it's worth the climb. In the courtyard are several open doors, obviously people live here and yesterday there was a young mother sitting on the stone bench nursing her baby. She wasn't begging and in fact when I greeted her in passing there was no hand thrust out but a polite smile instead. I realised this woman lived here in one of these dingy rooms.

I stopped and asked about her baby and in her broken English she said she was just 1 month old. She was a typical proud mother with her new baby and I asked if I could take a photo and she eagerly agreed.



I showed her the result on the camera and she was so thrilled. Then I heard a garbled voice behind me and in the dark shadows of a room which was obviously where someone lived, I could make out the deformed figure of a smiling man. "She my baby. Me looking." He said. I entered the semi-darkness of the room and showed him the photo. The grin was what you'd expect from any proud father. I don't even want to think about how this baby was conceived but I realised, this was a family just like any other around the world. They might not have the material things in life, they might live simply in a dank, dark room off an alleyway in an Indian town in the middle of nowhere, but they had the same feelings and emotions as anyone else.

I fully expected some request for money but none came... they were just grateful that someone had taken a photo of their daughter. I thought of the price of my shirt which was pennies to us in the West and discreetly handed her a wad of rupees ... "Here, this for your new baby. You buying good food." No photo I took would have captured the look of gratitude on their faces.