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Thursday, June 16, 2005
The railway children
Aveek Sen describes them in the Telegraph:
There's a book in this somewhere.
Update: I was wondering why the title of Sen's piece sounded so familiar, and it just struck me: it's also the title of a Seamus Heaney
poem that I really like (most of the rest I don't understand). Here's "The Railway Children", from the collection, Station Island.
Their ages range from three or four (they only need to be able to walk) to eighteen, when they stop being “children” legally. The most visible are between seven and twelve, for as they grow older, the adult worlds of work, crime or vagrancy take them away. And they are usually boys. The girls get trafficked or go into domestic work. Sometimes there will be a girl or two among them, but they are resented by the boys, and have to battle — fiercely or cunningly — to survive in the margins of the group, earning much less than most of the boys.These are the railway children, a community in the margins that lives a Hobbesian life in the railway stations of India. Read Sen's piece, and also read an outstanding piece by Rohit Wadhwaney, "Raped for six feet of space", that appeared in the Times of India last year. It describes the lives of these kids in vivid detail, and tells us of how they "pay the rent [for their platform space] by letting their bodies be used and abused". When there is nothing else, your body is capital.
There's a book in this somewhere.
Update: I was wondering why the title of Sen's piece sounded so familiar, and it just struck me: it's also the title of a Seamus Heaney
poem that I really like (most of the rest I don't understand). Here's "The Railway Children", from the collection, Station Island.
