Station Life

I am eager to find my colleagues from the Food Program at Sealdah train station, so at lunch time I head over to the canteen. The fat and jolly proprietor beams me a smile of recognition from this plastic chair of a throne, before shooing me away with quick and rapid hand movements: They have just left so I turn and race across the brooming booming roads, and merge into the mass of pavement traffic. Within minutes I find Deepa organising the team. She is standing with her hand on her hip, and bag of food parcels in the other hand as she shouts at Mohammed and her new assistant. I smile as I drape my arm over her shoulders. Surprised she grins at me before handing me a bag as if I had never left. Although communication is difficult, through a mix of sign language and broken English, she tells me that her recently adopted baby is very well. Her husband however, has contracted leprosy. Deepa herself appears as 'full power' as always as she marches through the crowds finding the participants of the food program.

We arrive at the train station. Sealdah station is quieter and although the rush of travellers ebbs and swells with the arrival and departure of each groaning train, there are far fewer station dwellers than a few months ago. The police are stepping up their 'clean up' campaign. Deepa does a good impression of their technique. She swings her arm rising it above her shoulders and then swinging the imaginary baton down to crush the imaginary destitute around her legs. It appears that the old women are hit until they leave, while the younger men have moved to a place where it is easy to run away if they see the 'security' approaching. Pugli has been moved into a temporary rehabilitation home after being found by Hope Charity. Hopefully she is still there and receiving help for her drug addiction. Meanwhile, the 'two brothers', Raju and Niraj, have regrown their full head of dreaded hair in time for the cold winter weather. They were squatting at the end of the platform, filthy and silent and still giving a high Namaste as we approached. Laura and Sarah, the two old women, have been forcibly moved on. On to where? I have no idea. The station has been their home for years. Smiling Harry is still sitting cross-legged in his torn lungi at the North Entrance. He still seems happy, and perhaps happier still as his Angry Wife appears to have disappeared.

In the absence of the women, there are been a few new recruits. I handed a package to one middle aged man, who replied 'Thank you' in an accent eerily English. Deepa raised her concern over an old woman laying at the entrance to the station. She had to be pulled up in order to sit, her tattered clothes revealing her hip bones and protruding ribs. She was laying at the edge of the car park and only meters away from speeding taxis and their dirty exhausts and spinning racing wheels. 'Kalighat', Deepa shouts to me; as if raising her voice will convey the urgency of her concerns. I have only just returned and have no idea if the Mother Teresa Home for the Dying and Destitute even has space for one more lady lying in limbo between this world and no world. But Deepa's stare and the dislocated gaze of the old bony woman stay with me. Later I speak to some of the Mother Teresa volunteers who work at the station, and the brief conversation results in the intake of the woman the following morning. It is one case among too many, but one which reminds me that we are not without power to act.

With one package left we walk around the car park looking for someone 'suitable' to give it to. The candidates are too numerous and it is a strange feeling knowing that you have the power to relieve hunger even if only momentarily. I leave the responsibility for deciding who should eat to Deepa. She marches across the road and shakes an old man sleeping on a concrete island. She asks him if he wants food, and he slowly pushes himself into a sitting position. I quickly take out the remaining box. But I am too quick and the cardboard too flimsy and it falls apart in my hands. Rice spills onto the road, and the small packets of daal tumble towards the feet of the old hungry man. My embarrassment boils inside me, travelling up my body and filling my face and then settles to a well in my eyes. Unable to look directly at the old hungry man, I apologise to the ground.