Last year I had gone to Old Delhi at midnight to see how the cityscape changes after dark. As shadows lengthened, touts, shopkeepers and tourists left the stage open for the shadowy world of the homeless. They took over the maidans beneath Jama Masjid, and we realised each bench, step and bush was unofficially “owned” by someone. Among these scores of homeless people, nearly half were children. After the walk, conducted by Amit Sinha, the founder of Jamghat – an NGO that works with homeless children in the area – I visited their residential facility in Lado Sarai, which was only for boys. “Don’t you think girls on the street need a home like this even more than boys?” I’d argued with Sinha after meeting little Saddam, who was well cared for and going to a plush South Delhi School, while his two sisters and mentally-ill mother remained on the streets of Jama Masjid. Sinha agreed, but he told me there were just too many issues to grapple with running a home for girls. “We want to get at least one home up and running smoothly,” said he. Long after I’d returned, images of all those girls on the street haunted my dreams.
That’s why I was pleased when Sinha called me last month with the news that Jamghat had finally started Aanchal — a home for girls. A residential programme for 10 girls aged between eight and 18 who don’t have a safe home or family, Aanchal is housed in an airy flat near Qutab Minar. Since it is very new, there were only five girls staying there when I visited, including Saddam’s two sisters. “I love it here,” said one of them, Iram, “it’s clean and everyone is nice to us. Soon we’ll also go to school!” The girls told me proudly that their “classroom” – a pretty balcony with a colourful dhurry, toys, books and lots of colouring equipment – was their responsibility. “We keep it clean and see that the young ones don’t eat up the chalk!” laughed one of the older girls. “We have a full-time caretaker, a counsellor and volunteers to teach and entertain them,” said Charu Jishnu, programme head of Aanchal, “we want to give them a sense of living in a family, that they’re not homeless, but belong to a home!”
Good as this sounded, what emerged from my chat with Jishnu was that not all children actually enjoyed this transition. “On the street, they were free agents. Here, they chafe under our rules — cleanliness, respect, regular hours and so on,” said Jishnu. Days before I’d visited, four girls had returned to the streets from Aanchal, unable to handle these restrictions. “There’s little we can do except to educate them about their rights, show them that they can access a better life if they choose,” said Jishnu.
For Jishnu, Sinha and the Jamghat team, Aanchal requires a lot of time, effort and money, of course. “Keeping Aanchal afloat costs us nearly Rs 1 lakh every month,” said Jishnu, “and we’re entirely dependent upon donations.” Just then, the youngest inmate began wailing, upset over an imagined insult. Mayhem ensued. All this effort for only ten children, I thought, looking at the crayon marks with which a disturbed inmate had vandalised the walls. But then, I saw three of the younger ones chatting. They’d decided to keep alternate names for themselves. “We didn’t choose our names when we were born,” said Iram, “but now that we’re here, we’ve decided to choose names by which we’d like to be known…” Suddenly, I began look at Aanchal differently. Even if it gave three little girls the confidence to change their names, and maybe their destinies too, theirs was a job worth doing…
