Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [17]
The man who had just spoken had no fingers left on his right hand. Padmini and her parents would come to know and respect this prominent figure in Orya Bustee. At thirty-eight, Ganga Ram was a survivor of leprosy, a disease that still afflicts five million Indians today. Thrown out on the streets by the owner of the garage in Bombay where he used to wash cars, Ram had ended up in the communal ward of Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal. He had been treated and cured, and had a certificate given to him by a doctor to prove it. Uncertain where to go and what to do, for seven years he had remained in the wing for contagious diseases, performing small services for the nurses and patients. He had applied dressings, changed the incontinent, administered enemas and even given injections. One day, he was called upon to transport an attractive woman of about thirty with luminous green eyes. A truck had broken both her legs. Her name was Dalima, and it was love at first sight. During her stay in the communal ward, Dalima had adopted a ten-year-old orphan who had been found half dead on a sidewalk. He had been taken to the hospital in a police van. His name was Dilip. Lively and alert, this skinny urchin with short-cropped hair was the darling of the occupants of the communal ward. A few weeks later, the former leper, Dalima and young Dilip left the hospital to settle in Orya Bustee. There, with the tip of his walking stick, Belram Mukkadam had assigned them a place on which to build a hut. Some of the neighbors provided bamboo canes, planks and a piece of canvas; others brought cooking utensils, a charpoy and a little linen. “All we had by way of luggage were Dalima’s crutches,” Ganga Ram recalled.
For months they survived on Dilip’s resourcefulness alone. He was the one who inveigled the neighborhood children into pinching bits of coal fallen from the locomotives. One morning, he persuaded Padmini to go with him.
“You have to hurry up, little sister. The railway police are on the lookout.”
“Are they nasty?” The little girl was worried.
“Nasty!” The boy burst out laughing. “If they catch you, be prepared to give them a fat baksheesh.* Otherwise they’ll take you away in a van and there …” Dilip made a gesture that the little peasant girl did not understand.
When they got back from their expedition, the slum midwife, the elderly Prema Bai, who lived in the hut opposite the Nadars, gave her young neighbor a little straw and some nanny-goat droppings.
“Crumble the coal with the straw and the droppings and knead the whole lot together for a good while,” she instructed. “Then make little balls out of it and put them to dry.”
An hour later Padmini took the fruits of her harvest triumphantly to her mother.
“Here you are, Mother: ladhus. Now you’ll be able to cook Father’s food.”
For peasants used to the sovereign silence of the countryside, the din of the trains passing in front of their huts was a painful trial. Their lives revolved around the rhythm of the incessant coming and going of dozens of trains. “I got to know their timetable, to know whether they were on time or late,” Padmini recalled. “Some of them, like the Mangala Express, made our huts shake as they roared past in the middle of the night. That was the worst one. The Shatabdi Express to Delhi went by in the early afternoon and the Jammu Mail just before sunset. The drivers must have had fun, terrifying us with the roar of their whistles.”
There were some advantages to being so close to the railway tracks. When a red light brought a train to a halt outside the huts, the engineers would throw a few coins for the children to run and buy them some pan, a betel leaf filled with spices that is chewed. There was always some small change left over.
“Watch where you put your feet when you’re walking between the rails,” Dilip advised Padmini. “That’s where people go to take a crap.”
Fortunately, the tracks were also strewn with a multitude of small treasures that people on the trains