| An Article by TAVLEEN SINGH about Mumbai's street children
It's called the Pavement Club because its only members are Mumbai's street children. It is attached to a small church in a grubby back lane and this past week I had the privilege to witness what happens every Friday when the club meets. It was one of the more moving experiences of my life to see the most dispossessed, most forsaken of India's children being allowed for atleast one afternoon into the warmth and comfort of a room with a roof on it. And to be provided their only chance in the whole week to get a glimpse of what childhood is meant to be. They sang, they danced, they played with toys and left after being given the only square meal they get in seven days. Some of the children were so small they could barely toddle. But already they had been put on the streets to earn their living by parents too poor, too illiterate and too hardened by the misery of their own lives to do anything else. The church in which the Pavement Club meets is so much the only home they have ever known that when in a drawing class they were asked to draw a house, the children drew the church. "We felt so foolish," a volunteer told me, "to have asked them to draw a house. We hadn't realised that they didn't know what a house was." Just as they don't know what it is to have a proper family, two square meals a day, a school to go to or even the right to dream, as many do, that they will "grow up and become Amitabh Bachchan". The only love, and I repeat this deliberately, the only caring, the only brief glimpse of childhood these children have ever known is what they get every Friday afternoon in the stained-glass filtered sunlight of this small church. |
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