Matiyaburj

In the January cold of Eastern UP, on blackened bare feet, eight year old Santosh Kumar Prajapati is squatting, moving on the sticky blue plastic covered floor of the rocking rushing Kalka Mail’s sleeper compartment, with a yellow miniature broomstick brushing the easy smooth plastic and gathering the sitting passengers’ litter—peanut peelings, plastic tea cups, soiled tea bags and simply dirt—from below the long blue seats, between scurrying legs and empty shoes and empty sandals (some overturned; some lifted with hands: after one passenger remarks that these people or ’sweepers’ are cunning and brush away with the shoes.)

Santosh is good to look at. He is cleaner. He is clear about the world and his family. Santosh lives near Kanpur, in a thatched hut, a “jhopri”. His father paints clay idols, but only during the festival season when idols are made and worshiped and forgotten till the next season. His mother cooks daal and chawal. (Looking at Santosh’s condition, we feel she should work.) He also has a younger brother who also does not do anything. He has never been to school but he can read. The boy takes out a popular Hindi film magazine from a pocket of his long nicker and points to the story titles on the thin cover. Reading is a thing he seems to like. He is taught to read in the evening, with other children, by some people of the village. (A formal school is untenable for him: this is clear to Santosh. It will hit his livelihood, his responsibilities, his share in the fragile household.)

Every morning, at 11 am, with other boys, bare-feet Santosh climbs the Jodhpur Express with his broomstick, squats and begins to clean the compartments of their litter (that is always there) in a physical posture that sons of rich men take while wicket keeping in 20 over public school cricket matches under the bright sun and mimic the international players with their shouts. The “superfast” train moves west; with the sway, Santosh also drags himself west, pushing forward himself and the litter he is gathering (halting only to gesture for remunerations from the sitting passengers who and whose predecessors had created the litter and will continue to create since there will be boys like Santosh to clean it up. He does not speak; he only gestures; his presence, that degrading posture, changes the environment; there is shame in the air, a pity for deprivation but the reserved seats help overcome it; many even deny the remuneration (like the feeling, ‘I didn’t ask him to clean the litter!’)

From 10 to 12 passengers (with second-class tickets), he will get back five to six rupees, or maybe just one rupee: the compensation always has to be unequal to the amount of labour applied. Otherwise, what will be the difference between them and Santosh? The status quo remains; it’s chauvinism. The “second-class” rich among the poor want to remain “second-class” rich among the poor. Oppression in classes not much different is felt as victory. (That’s why Santosh is not allowed to clean up the air-conditioned compartments: the classes are too separated).

Some hours later, after cleaning several sleeper compartments (since all are interconnected and the general compartments are separated: “second-class” from “third class”), after picking out from the litter things still usable and after pushing the unusable off the train, he climbs down and switches direction, taking a train rushing east, towards his home, and repeats the arduous work.

Santosh makes 50 to 100 rupees for six to seven hours of pure, degrading physical labour. The boy has no employer; no risks are covered; he is answerable to no one while he works. But Santosh must earn. And this way only.

(The journalist still hangs on to the Indian government law that bans child labour in the nation. All these years it was there; more gruesome, more exploitative. The journalist never saw it. It was not a story that time. Now the government has given him or her a prism to see the oppression in all its colours. Now he likes it. It feels good; feels just like…a story?

The government has given the journalist an understanding of what it means when a child has to earn his livelihood when his or her own kids are going to school. The understanding is a hit, a critical hit: for journalists are journalists.

But stop. Think like a journalist. Consider Santosh’s case carefully. He comes under the ban’s purview. That means his employer can be punished for hiring him. That means Santosh has to be liberated, one of the passengers said. But stop. From whom? It may be recalled that he has no employer. A loophole! A story. The government should go into the intricacies of the act, if required amend it according to the ground realities, a legal expert said. Maybe fine the parents for allowing a child under 14 to work.

In India, like many other countries subservient to their own creations, like first imagining gods and demons and then spending a lifetime bowing to and fearing them, the government has been given the job of reshaping the society. Think of a sub set reshaping a set. The set exists not because there is a sub set.

The government exists because there is a society. In reality, a society reshapes a government. That is the truth. The rest is like the gods and the demons. (When a government turns on its head, the society doesn’t. But when a society turns on its head, the government also turns on its head.)