'The Other Railway Children' - Chapter 1 'The Girl in Bombay'

It all began because of a small girl in Bombay.

I had been a railway manager for nigh on thirty years. After four years as the Chief Operating Manager of British Rail’s largest Region, the London Midland, which stretched from London to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and the Scottish border, I’d been appointed BR’s first overall ‘Reliability & Quality Manager’. And then, after the Clapham Junction train accident at the end of 1988, I’d been asked by the Board Member to whom I reported to chair the small team pulling together the evidence for the subsequent judicial inquiry which took place at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster during the Spring and Summer of 1989. I’d written a number of papers on quality management and after the Inquiry had finished and before the inquiry report was published, I was asked to undertake a three week project for the BR consultancy company, Transmark, to advise the Western Railway of Australia in Perth.

When the assignment was finished, I flew home with Singapore Airlines and spent a couple of days sightseeing in the airline’s home city, and had arranged a second stop-over in the Indian city then still called Bombay, since renamed Mumbai, although many of the locals still refer to it by its former name. My reason for this, apart from the opportunity of seeing fresh places, was to visit a family in Bombay with whom my family had corresponded for a number of years. We’d been sponsoring the education of a girl through a scheme run at that time by ‘Save the Children’ and I’d asked - as my flight was calling at Bombay anyway - if it would be possible to meet her and her family. Arrangements had been made and my plane touched down at midnight on a hot and sultry night in September 1989.

I was not feeling well. I was virtually last off the Jumbo Jet and found myself near the back of the huge queue progressing slowly through the immigration procedures in the arrival hall which at that time was not air conditioned. I was nervous at the prospect of my meeting with the girl’s family wondering how I’d be received, whether we would be able to cope with the languages and make ourselves understood. And not only that, I’d made the mistake the night previously of taking the weekly part of my anti-malaria medication on top of an empty stomach and was now feeling decidedly queasy.

When finally I emerged after passing through customs into the main arrival hall, I found myself caught up in the melee of jostling porters all wanting to drag me to their taxi. I was rescued by someone who kindly pointed me in the direction of the pre-paid taxi queue, and sometime after 2 o’clock in the morning I huddled in the back of the bumping vehicle as it rushed through the deserted streets from the airport into the city centre. As I looked out of the taxi window I realised the streets were not deserted as I‘d first thought. There were bundles of white rolled up alongside the roadway and it dawned on me that these were people, huddled together and sleeping on the pavements. The swaying of the taxi, the heat, the smell of the city’s garbage and my nervousness increased my feeling of nausea and I was relieved to reach my destination hotel on Marine Drive on the shores of the Arabian Sea just after three in the morning.

Despite undressing and dropping straight into bed, my mind was still in a whirl and the discomfort in my system prevented me falling asleep as I lay there and I worried what I had let myself in for. I tossed and turned in the stifling heat for four hours and at seven o’clock, as dawn broke, I could stick it no longer and I got up, dressed and went out onto the promenade to take a few deep breaths of sea air and try to calm myself. I certainly was in no mood to face breakfast and I wondered how to fill in the time before my appointment with the agency used by ‘Save the Children’ for running the sponsorship scheme, which was not until ten o’clock.

I consulted my street map and located the area of the city called Colaba where the meeting with my family was to take place. It didn’t look too far on the map and I decided in that moment that I’d use the time to walk across the city rather than wait and take a taxi, as everyone had advised me. I went back to my hotel, changed into fresh clothes, unpacked the gifts my family had assembled for the girl and her two younger brothers, put them into a carrier bag with the map and set off into the now humming city, taking a few more deep breaths of fresh air to steady my nerves.

For a while I made my way southwards along the sea wall and then decided it was time to cut into the city centre as Colaba appeared to be on the other coast of the peninsular on which the city had been built. Immediately I started getting lost as I encountered junctions of roads and lost track of them on my map which clearly did not mark the myriad of small alleyways and criss-crossing back streets I now encountered. After half an hour or so, I stumbled across a large building which turned out, on exploration, to be the terminus of a suburban railway system. As a good railwayman, I thought that I’d at least be able to establish exactly where I was and put my carrier bag down in the crowded concourse of the station and drew out my map to see if I could find it.

I looked up and found myself confronted by a small girl - she couldn’t have been more than six or seven years of age. She was filthy dirty and was bare legged and chested and she looked at me and held out her hand, obviously begging. Now I’d been warned by a number of people not to give money to the many beggars that I’d encounter, otherwise I’d get swamped by the numbers, and in any case I’d no small change - only a wadge of high denomination paper money, still stapled together in packs of a hundred 100 rupee notes - so I waved her away and intended to make a swift departure.

As I hesitated the small girl suddenly produced in her other hand a plaited whip she’d been holding behind her back and began solemnly to lash herself across her bare back and shoulders. I stood rooted to the spot, stunned and shaken. The girl stopped, held out her hand and looked me in the face. Her eyes were dead, her mouth drooped, her hair was a tangled mess. She began to whip herself again and I couldn’t take it. I could just not cope emotionally with this girl’s actions, I was feeling fragile anyway, and her predicament finished me off. I picked up my bag and fled.

I stopped in the first shop doorway outside the station and tried to pull myself together. I realised I was shaking and when, finally, I’d stopped trembling and was breathing more easily, I thought, I can’t leave her like that and went back. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do about it, but the girl had disappeared into the rush hour throng. Every minute and a half another twelve coach train disgorged its mass of nearly 6,000 passengers into this five platform terminus and in those few minutes she’d disappeared. I went back to where I thought she’d been, nearly being swept off my feet by the urgent flow of humanity pouring out of the station, but there was no sign of her. It was as if I’d imagined her. But I know I didn’t. If I shut my eyes, I can still, twenty years later, see the eyes of that girl, staring hopelessly at me.

I gave up but as I trudged on past the Flora Fountain and found the teeming Bhagat Singh Marg, walking with increasing urgency down past the entrance to Sassoon Dockyard, my mind was trying to come to terms with what I’d seen. Small children of six years of age do not behave in the way I’d just encountered. Of course, I soon realised that the girl was under instruction from some unscrupulous or desperate adult who was telling her what to do, in order to elicit a generous donation from a gullible tourist like me.

She might have been a child whose father or stepfather had hit upon a profitable ruse, more likely that she was a street living child forced to beg by a criminal adult who was exploiting her. If I had given her one of my hundred rupee notes, all it would have done would have been to demonstrate that such manipulation of a young child works; the girl would have got nothing other than a crust at the end of the day and possibly a beating if she had not extracted enough money from her naïve victims.

As this realisation dawned on me, anger took over. I began to notice other children. At each road junction young children dashed out between the hooting cars and red buses to sell trinkets or soiled Indian flags, young women, scarcely more than girls themselves, with a baby at the hip, putting their hands to their mouths miming hunger while tapping on the taxi windows. Later on someone told me that there are an estimated 100,000 street children in the city and environs of Bombay alone - perhaps 90% are from the slums, spending the day on the street scavenging, begging, selling whatever they can find, then returning to one of the sprawling slums that infest the city at Daravi or by the stagnant water and concrete pipes of the Mahim Creek.

As I toiled onwards worrying that I would lose myself again or get caught by another scam, the time ran on and when I eventually got pointed in the right direction by some kind soul, I found my destination was a thirty storey concrete block of flats and my appointment was on the 22nd floor, reached by an ancient tiny lift which took an age to reach the appointed level. The flat door was open and I found the family I was to meet assembled there.

The sponsorship programme was administered by an elderly couple, Rusi and Freny Toddywalla, both members of the Theosophical Order of Service on behalf of Save the Children, who at that time had over 700 children on their books receiving a small annual donation towards school fees and medical supplies. My worries and nerves were soon transformed by the engaging activities of the girl's two year old cousin who broke the ice and the stiff formality of my greeting was soon dissipated. After introductions, tea and biscuits and the inevitable garlanding, I found myself taken under the wing of my ‘adopted’ family and the aunt pressed some notes into the hand of 'Clara' and she and her two brothers were given the task over the next two days of taking me sightseeing around the city. I tried to protest that I should pay, but I was their guest and the rules of hospitality required that I should accept their generosity with grace.

I saw, of course, their city. We saw the marble monuments, the grand buildings, the Gateway of India where the city had received King George V in 1911, the Taj Hotel where two year old Tuzar insisted on going to the toilet amid the gold-plated taps and marble washbasins. We also saw the slums, the dirt, we travelled on an ancient red double-decker bus, we ate - to my trepidation - at a roadside kiosk, they took me to the Hanging Gardens and drank coconut juice and I saw the children, dirty bright-eyed urchins looking longingly at what I was eating and I wasn’t hungry. My young guides were cross with me when I gave half of my nan bread sandwich away.

With hindsight I now question many aspects of that visit - the way I was allowed to be taken around the city for two days by those three children is now taboo under all the rules of child protection; Save the Children terminated the sponsorship scheme, concerned less the selection of some children in a city of the destitute should cause jealousy and rifts between those who received and those who did not. But the result of that visit was that I and my family formed a lifelong friendship with Roshan and her family. Some seven years later she was a visitor to my home when she was my eldest daughter’s bridesmaid and we still meet up when I’m a visitor to the city for a different reason.

But the anger of that encounter on Churchgate station remained. I saw reminders of that incident everywhere as we roamed around the city. We were constantly followed by young children begging when they saw a white face entering some parts of the city where tourists do not usually go. We saw haphazard cruelty, anger displayed when children were too demanding, children rejected and neglected, children alone in the gutter. This stayed in my memory. But above all, I could not erase the sight of that child on the station whipping herself, an image now engraved in my brain.

And when I got home, laden with gifts from my enlarged family that I’d felt embarrassed to accept, the little girl on Churchgate station wouldn’t go away and my anger grew, it didn’t diminish with time. I tried to tell people what I’d seen, but that bit choked me up. After five weeks, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I knew I had to do something, but what?