The People Who Live in the Street

I’ve wanted to write about this for a long time, but I could never seem to find the words. Maybe it’s because there really are no words to describe these people, their lives. The word itself, ‘people’. Person. Human. What does that entail? Food, shelter, safety, the ability to bathe? Because the people who live on the street here in India lack these most basic of human needs. Thin bodies, some almost skeletal, wrapped in dirty rags. No shoes. No pillows or mattress to soften the hard ground that they sleep on every night. The most heartbreaking are the children. Dirty and barefoot, clothes caked in filth, eyes rheumy with infection, hair stiff with lice. They look up at me with big, challenging eyes and mime putting invisible food to their mouth, pleading. It’s overwhelming because there are just so many of them. And then there are those people who suffer gross deformities. A man with unseeing eyes, milky with cataracts. A woman with deformed stumps where hands should be, victim of leprosy. People missing fingers, feet, limbs. Men with legs withered and shrunken to twigs by polio, who drag themselves across the ground with their arms to tug on your pant legs and touch your shoes, asking for money. What do you do? What on earth are you supposed to do? I have given money, biscuits, food, clothes; but there is no end to their need. There is no end to them. For the 100 or so beggars I see here every day in Bodhgaya, there are millions upon millions throughout this country, living in slums and tent cities. Anything you give is but a drop in the ocean.

So every day I have to walk by them, and my shoes feel too comfortable, my body and clothes too clean, my stomach too full. They hold up their bandaged hands and their glassy-eyed, malnourished babies and beg me for food and money. And a little part of me dies inside every time I swallow my pity and revulsion and smile at them, placing my palms together in traditional greeting, and say, “Namaste.” Because ultimately that is the best I can do for them; to treat them like people, and greet them in kind.

The weight and scope of India’s poverty is staggering. It is a systemic problem throughout the country that is fueled by a deeply ingrained caste system, corrupt political leadership, and a complete lack of social services. But this large, abstract problem has very real and tragic faces. I don’t have an answer, I am at a loss. But I feel that if nothing else, the first responsibility of any government should be to ensure the health and safety of its people. And in this, India has a very long way to come.