yet another Slumdog

"Don't let the movie mislead you: there are no fairy-tale endings for most of India's street kids. I was one of them myself."

Sudip Mazumdar

NEWSWEEK
(From the magazine issue dated Mar 2, 2009)

On the way to see "Slumdog Millionaire" in Kolkata, I had my
cabdriver pass through the slum district of Tangra. I lived there more
than 35 years ago, when I was in my late teens, but the place has
barely changed. The cab threaded a maze of narrow lanes between shacks
built from black plastic and corrugated metal. Scrawny men sat outside,
chewing tobacco and spitting into the dirt. Naked children defecated in
the open, and women lined up at the public taps to fetch water in
battered plastic jerry cans. Everything smelled of garbage and human
waste. I noticed only one difference from the 1960s: a few huts had
color TVs.

I still ask myself how I finally broke out. Jamal, the slumdog in
Danny Boyle's award-winning movie, did it the traditional cinematic
way, via true love, guts and good luck. People keep praising the film's
"realistic" depiction of slum life in India. But it's no such thing.
Slum life is a cage. It robs you of confidence in the face of the rich
and the advantaged. It steals your pride, deadens your ambition, limits
your imagination and psychologically cripples you whenever you step
outside the comfort zone of your own neighborhood.
Most people in the slums never achieve a fairy-tale ending.

I was luckier than Jamal in this way: I was no orphan. My parents
came from relatively prosperous families in East Bengal (now
Bangladesh), but the newlywed couple lost practically everything in the
sectarian riots that led up to India's independence. They fled to
Patna, the capital of northeastern India's Bihar state, where I was
born a few years later. The first of my five sisters was born there in
a rat-infested hut one rainy night when I was 3. My father was out of
town, working as a construction laborer 100 miles away. My mother sent
me with my 6-year-old brother to fetch the midwife, an opium-smoking
illiterate.
The baby was born before we got back, so the midwife just cut the
umbilical cord with a razor blade and left. My mother spent the rest of
the night trying to find a spot where the roof wouldn't leak on the
newborn.

My parents got us out of the slums three years later. My father
landed a job as a petty clerk with a construction firm that was
building a dam, and we found a home. It was only a single rented room,
but it was better than anything we had in Patna. I went to school
nearby. Sometimes a teacher dozed off in class, and a few of us would
sneak out the window to steal ripe guavas from a nearby orchard. If we
got caught we could count on being caned in front of our classmates.
Sometimes it would peel the skin off our backs.
By my early teens I was running with a local gang. Membership was my
source of confidence, security and excitement. We stole from
shopkeepers and farmers, extorted money from truckers and fought
against rivals for turf. Many of my pals came from broken families with
drunken fathers or abusive stepmothers. Their big dream was to get a
job—any job—with the dam-building firm.

Those days ended abruptly when we challenged a rival gang whose
members had teased some girls on our turf. Both sides suffered serious
injuries before police arrived to break it up. My parents didn't try to
stop me from fleeing town. I made my way to Ranchi, a small city then
in southern Bihar. I took on a new name and holed up in a squalid
neighborhood. A local tough guy befriended me. He and his partners
liked to waylay travelers at night. He always kept me away from his
holdups, but he fed me when I had no other food.
I also fell in with a group of radical leftists. I didn't care much
about ideology, but they offered the sense of belonging I used to get
from my old street gang. I spent the next five years moving from one
slum to another, always a step ahead of the police. For money I took
odd jobs like peddling newspapers and washing cars.

I might have spent the rest of my life in the slums or in prison if
not for books. By the time I was 6, my parents had taught me to read
and write Bengali. Literature gave me a special refuge. With Jack
London (in translation) I could be a brave adventurer, and with Jules
Verne I could tour the world. I worked my way up to Balzac, Hemingway
and Dostoevsky. I finally began teaching myself English with the help
of borrowed children's books and a stolen Oxford dictionary. For
pronunciation I listened to Voice of America broadcasts and the BBC
World Service on a stolen transistor radio. I would get so frustrated I
sometimes broke into sobs.

I started hanging around the offices of an English weekly newspaper
in Ranchi. Its publisher and editor, an idealistic
lawyer-cum-journalist named N. N. Sengupta, hired me as a copy boy and
proofreader for the equivalent of about $4 a month.
It was there that I met Dilip Ganguly, a dogged and ambitious reporter
who was visiting from New Delhi. He came to know that I was living in a
slum, suffering from duodenal ulcers. One night he dropped by the
office after work and found me visibly ill. He invited me to New Delhi.
I said goodbye to my slum friends the next day and headed for the city
with him.

In New Delhi I practiced my English on anyone who would listen. I
eventually landed an unpaid internship at a small English-language
daily. I was delirious with joy. I spent all my waking hours at the
paper, and after six months I got a paying job. I moved up from there
to bigger newspapers and better assignments.
While touring America on a fellowship, I dropped in at NEWSWEEK and soon was hired. That was 25 years ago.

My home now is a modest rented apartment in a gated community in
New Delhi. I try to keep in touch with friends from the past. Some are
dead; others are alcoholics, and a few have even made good lives for
themselves. I've met former slum dwellers who broke out of the cage
against odds that were far worse than I faced. Still, most slum
dwellers never escape. Neither do their kids. No one wants to watch a
movie about that. "Slumdog" was a hit because it throbs with
excitement, hope and positive energy. But remember an ugly fact: slums
exist, in large part, because they're allowed to exist. Slumdogs aren't
the only ones whose minds need to be opened up.