Clay and Creativity

Nag Panchami special - They might come from 10x10 one room homes, but all they need is a little mud to show how creative they are. And they will also give you homemade Puran Poli if you go to their homes today :)

First picture with the school kids

Almost been a year, and finally my first picture WITH the kids. This was after I was dragged into the class for pre-Gudi Padwa celebrations and force-fed bhel that they made and a pretty expensive cookie that they just had to share with me.

This lot helped me realize how much I love to teach kids. Sohail - the one on whose head my hand is - was one of my favourites who knew Honey Singh's Blue Eyes by heart but went Moo for the goat in Old MacDonald's farm.

Happy Meal conversations

Exchanging diwali tales of riding escalators at the stations, buying hairclips on the train, eating homemade shakarpara, getting gifts of fairies and dolls, and deciding that the AC in the metro is too cold - all this over bowls of daal chawal and personal stashes of jaljeera during the midday meal at the municipal school in a Bombay slum.

Highs and Lows of the Slum Immersion program

With everything that I am learning in this new field of work, a lot of my opinions and perspectives have changed. When I went into the slum, my parents said two things - be safe. And don't come back a Communist.

Two weeks into the slum immersion, after I had observed some ways in which the people felt a sense of entitlement, I told my parents that I was scared I might come out a capitalist. That, coming from someone who has always hovered on the left side of the center, was quite something. But more about that later.

Some of the funniest, sweetest, and scariest moments of that one month are worth recollecting.

NOT Lalbaug cha Raja.

Going out to see Lalbaug cha Raja during Ganpati festival. Not realizing that we had seen the wrong Ganpati till the picture was put up on Facebook and pointed out as Mumbai cha Raja by a friend. The family still does not know of the mix-up. And it doesn't matter, because they believe they saw Lalbaug cha Raja. And faith is ultimately what matters.

Rekha and the kids riding the metro for the first time on our way to the Ganpati. They were ecstatic! At the same time , I was petrified because Rekha was a week away from her due date and walked over 2 kms on the way over and back. Every time she took a step, I panicked that she might deliver right there. 

This was Rekha a week before she gave birth. Obviously one can't tell that she was this far into the pregnancy. The baby girl born to her a week later was severely underweight.

“Mee kothimbir kaapte”- the only grammatically correct Marathi sentence I fully learnt in my one month in the slum, despite Neelam’s best efforts. This kothimbir went into an experimental daal we made with jaljeera, which turned out to be very tasty. It was the second best thing I tasted after the sev-bhaji which I also learnt to make.

Getting the salt-filled modak that Rekha made, which as per tradition, is supposed to be lucky. I bit into it and didn't know exactly how to point out that it had salt instead of the sweet coconut filling. When I finally did frame it into a diplomatic sentence, everyone burst out laughing.

The innumerable attempts made to get Neelam to address my body lotion (that she loved and stuck out her palm for every day) as "cream" and not "kim"!

Lecturing Rekha on how unfair it was that 14-year old  Poonam was made to do all the chores while 12-year old Rohit spent all his time playing - because he was a boy and she was a girl. And seeing Rekha change that by the end of the month.

The scariest moment had to be when a rat jumped on me in the middle of the night. I used to sleep with my sheet covering me from head to toe, to make sure there was no contact with rats. That night, I nudged at what I thought was Neelam's hand on me. And found more movement instead of the usual withdrawal. I opened my eyes to a huge rat sitting ON me, near the waist. Irrational as my fear might be, that was the lowest low of the whole month. Had it not been for a policy to not cry in life unless I am watching a Shah Rukh Khan or Disney animal movie, I would have burst into tears that night. The thought of it still makes me shudder.

My fondest memory though, would have to be that of Rekha helping Neelam sing the national anthem. Rekha failed 5 times in class 2 and dropped out of school. There was not much that happened in school that she could 'teach' her kids. I could hear the pride in her voice when she was teaching the anthem to Neelam. That she too could teach something to her children. 

I didn't have the heart to tell her that many of the words were wrong.

Junk Food in the Slums

Affluent kids go to McDonald's and KFC for their share of junk food. 

In the slums, where the availability of Rs 10 decides whether dinner will be just daal-chawal or daal-chawal-papad, such luxuries cannot be afforded. 

That's not to say that the kids in the slums don't have options. I discovered some of these while teaching English to the kids, and some while living in the slum.

There is malai, which is an expensive habit to sustain. Four to five tiny pieces of this sweet wrapped in a leaf cost almost Rs 8. My students were more than eager to share it with me. 

Then there is puri-bhaji - 8 tiny pieces of puri and some potato bhaji for Rs 10. This had become an-almost regular part of my breakfast towards the end of the slum stay. And it was delicious!

There is the coloured chooran - 4 sticks for Rs 2. My students would get them for me everyday. Saying 'no thank you' resulted  in disheartened sighs and long faces. I soon learned to say yes to one student per day, and anyone else who came up to me with it was asked to save it and give it to me the next day. Then the race would begin the next day, and I would be reminded of promises I had made to take the chooran from X or Y. At the end  of every class, they would ask me to stick  out my tongue to see if it had turned blue or pink from the chooran. I had never quite interacted with kids in this manner, and much to my amusement, I saw that I enjoyed it.

The most well loved and abundant item however, is this strange concoction called "Chinese Bhel". It is a  mixture of shredded cabbage, fried and crunchy 'sev' and the slum version of the Schezwan sauce. It is often mixed with manchurian balls. Given Bombay's reputation for forging strange food combinations (like misal-pav!) I was not surprised, but was definitely revolted by the idea and resisted eating it for the longest time. Then Poonam bought a bowl for Rs 5 one day, and I realized that I cannot go through the slum experience without giving it a shot. So I dug in. And wrote it off. But I found myself going in for a second spoonful just minutes later. And even after leaving the slum, I have to admit, I have bought it on two occasions of my own accord. 

Chinese Bhel

The most touching gesture was that all these kids who bought these items out of their daily pocket money of Rs 5 were dying to share it with me. 

Food and Fund (Mis)management

Truth be told, the food was one of the best parts of the slum experience. I learnt to cook new items, ate what the not so privileged eat and enjoyed it!

You can actually tell the time of the month by looking at the menu in a slum house.

The irony is that when the month starts and they are cash-rich from the wages they have received, copious amounts of food is prepared. On my first day at Rekha's house, she had made almost 90 puris, which she then distributed to her neighbours. This was followed by ''modaks", of which she made almost 35-40 pieces. Her logic was simple - her neighbours  help her out or feed her children when there is no food or money in the house. So she returns the favour when she can. It's a vicious cycle - because if she spends judiciously, this end-of-the-month crisis is avoidable.

Other people who lived in the slums reported that certain communities, especially the migrant communities, manage their money more judiciously. The standard fare is daal-chawal. Vegetables are rare - if they do make it to the table, it is when someone has had the opportunity to earn extra cash over and above their regular monthly income.

At the house of the locals - and Rekha was no exception - the month starts with puri and chai for breakfast. Or poha, upma or sabudana khichdi.
This slowly gives way to roti and chai. I quite enjoyed both the puri-chai and roti-chai combos. By the end of the month, breakfast stands at rusk biscuits and chai without milk.

Sugar is the only constant in the breakfast. I had once heard that poor people take in a lot of sugar and that is what keeps them going through the day.I saw evidence of that in Rekha's house. Their family of four would go through 250 grams of sugar in two days. The tea tasted like sherbet.


Lunch for the kids means 'khichdi' in school. ''Khichdi" is the generic term used for all food that is distributed as part of the midday meal. And rightly so, because most of the times it is just khichdi. At least that is what it is in Bombay. My  maid from Calcutta said her son gets an egg and vegetables too. But the only vegetables I have seen in the midday meal are those little pieces in the khichdi.
Most of my lunches during that month comprised midday meals in the schools. It was a way of knowing what the kids go through. I found myself checking the time ever so often during those days, waiting for the bell to ring and announce the arrival of the midday meal.
On my first day in school, I had met a girl of class 5 who was standing at the door, wistfully looking outside. It was 4 pm, one hour past the midday meal time for the afternoon session.  She told me that the khichdi had not arrived. Hungry students make inattentive learners. Something I realized for myself that month, every time my eyes darted towards  the clock in the middle of a meeting while waiting for lunch.

The humble khichdi

In the more disciplined schools, children are made to sit in line and eat their lunch. They get their lunchboxes from home - standardized coloured boxes given to all students of the Bombay Municipal Corporation schools as part of the '27 items' list (more about the list later). The catch is that most parents use the tiffin boxes to store food at home. So despite the item being given to a student for free every single year, many students still come to take khichdi in the lid of a friend's tiffin box. If a  child does bring the tiffin box, one can see a lot of instances where the last day's meal has formed dry cakes because it hasn't been cleaned. It gives a glimpse of the interest most parents take while sending their children to school.

Class 1 students during lunch - they are the disciplined lot

One drastic change I noted in myself was with respect to simple food. I eat almost everything vegetarian under the sun. But I had somehow never enjoyed yellow daal and chawal. It was the sole combination of food that I told Mom never to make for me. 

Once I started going to the municipality schools and discussing the midday meals, I got unanimous response from all 6 of my schools that daal-chawal was the hottest lunch item. Children would lie in wait for the day of the week when daal-chawal was supposed to be on the menu. Many contractors  often give it a miss because it means carrying more food to the schools and getting paid the standard rates. Children run for second helpings and those are the only days no food is returned to the contractor. In fact, often they fall short and only a lucky few get second helpings. 

For the first two months, this perplexed me. Then the slum immersion began and I started eating regularly at the schools. And every day I would visit a different school and hope that they would have daal chawal on the menu that day. It's a relative liking, I realized. The khichdi gets dry and cold. The daal-rice stays warm and moist. Hungry kids eat everything, but even they have preferences.

Daal chawal - everyone's favourite day of the week

So that's Monday to Saturday. Sunday is a challenging day. At Rekha's house, there are four mouths to feed on a Sunday afternoon. Where ration is bought in Rupees and not in Kilos, that's a challenging situation.
In my first week there, the children mentioned they went to church on Sundays. I found that odd, because 12 year olds following a different religion as compared to their families is unusual. I soon found out the allure of the church. The church in the area gives out biscuits and other dry food items to all visitors. So the children would flock to the church on Sundays. They would then go to a school run by a social worker, who gave elaborate meals to poor children on Sundays - kheer, puri et all. Neelam and Rohit would go eat there. Poonam felt too conscious to go, so she would stay at home with Rekha.
Which often meant just plain rice for lunch. I once came home from work and noticed a bowl of dal. The bowl did not belong to Rekha, so I asked whose it was. She said that she had been eating plain rice in the afternoon because that's all there was in the house, so her neighbour gave her some daal. This was after Rekha had given birth and was breastfeeding her child. It is no wonder that children under the age of five die from malnutrition in India.

Little Ibrahim, busy having his midday meal. He is underweight. And he comes to school barefoot. 

A teacher in one of my schools in Andheri said that the parents spend like there is no tomorrow at the start of the month, and by the end of the month, the kids of that area often go and beg for food in the busy shopping area of Irla. Because there is none at home.

It made me rethink my stand on giving food and money to children who beg. Not everyone is part of a cartel, like in Slumdog Millionaire. Some are just hungry.