Geetanjali Krishna: What'll happen to Chotu?

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I am warning you, this story has no happy ending. Come to think of it, it doesn't really have an ending yet. None of us who know Chotu can hope for the best, because it is difficult to say what the best case scenario really will be. Anyway, to tell you the story, I'll have to flashback to how we came to know him.

It was last year, when my friend took up offices deep inside the maze that's better known as the Okhla Industrial Area. She struck a deal with the local tea shop to supply tea to her and her employees daily. And Chotu came up with the brimming glasses. He was about eight or nine years old, scrawny but very street-smart.

The tea shop owner, he explained, was his grandfather, and his parents lived in a small village near Benares. The child was bright, curious and full of mischief. He'd come with glasses of tea balanced precariously on a tiny tray, and stay on for biscuits and the occasional glass of milk which he'd gulp down hungrily. As my friend got fonder of him, she began to worry why he looked so thin and why he didn't go to school. Whenever she asked him, he'd clam up.

One morning, this changed. She walked into office and knew at once something was amiss. "Chotu is being beaten up mercilessly by his grandfather!" her employees said. They were worried, but hadn't done anything to interfere in what they considered a 'family matter'.

Chotu ran into her office just when she was getting ready to do battle with the abusive grandfather. Crying, he said he missed his mother bitterly. Could he call her from her phone, he pleaded. After a long telephone conversation, he sat down to talk.

"This old man," he began, "isn't my real grandfather. He's my village kinsman." In return for Chotu's services, he sent a measly Rs 500 every month to his impoverished family. The old man beat him up if he ever found him playing around or neglecting any of his duties, which ranged from delivering tea to washing utensils and clothes. "Today he beat me because I dawdled over washing his clothes," Chotu said, beginning to sob, "I just want to go home to my mother...can you help me?"

Everyone listening to his story was appalled. He was too young to be going through all this. "Why were you sent with him in the first place?" my friend asked. "Two years ago, my family desperately needed the money so they sent me to work. I told them many times I was not happy here, but they said they needed the money, and I should stay..." The question nobody wanted to ask was "" what if his family forced him to return to Delhi again?

Chotu unwittingly answered the unspoken question himself: "I can't go on here," he muttered, "I've been saving the tips I get, and if my family forces me to return, I'll come back to Delhi and disappear." "Where will you stay?" asked my frightened friend. The eight-year-old replied that he could now take care of himself, and would manage like the other street children in Delhi did. "But," he said hopefully, "maybe my mother will let me stay, she was crying when we spoke today."

He's finally going home next week, facing three options. Maybe his parents will let him stay. Maybe they'll force him to return to his 'grandfather'. Or maybe, the unsuspecting child will run away hoping to be free "" only to be enslaved by the streets of Delhi. As I said at the beginning, this story really has no end...