Geetanjali Krishna: Through the looking glass

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I've always thought there's something comforting about night...the cool darkness envelops and embraces the world as it settles into slumber. Last week, however, Jamghat, an organisation of children from the street, helped me experience night from a very different point of view, that of a person who sleeps on the streets of Old Delhi.

Old Delhi is a crazy maze of lanes and alleys, parks and pavements. During daytime, these bustle with traffic. But as night falls, Delhi's shadowy homeless population, people one hears about occasionally but never sees, takes over. As we walked through the Urdu Park, the large parkland beneath Jama Masjid, Jamghat members Amit and Kaivalya helped us understand the magnitude of the problem of homelessness.

According to official statistics, Delhi has about 1.4 lakhs homeless people. Jamghat and other NGOs believe that for every person the census counted, one's slipped through. "Anyway," Kaivalya said, "the government's definition of a homeless person doesn't include someone who sleeps on a cart or rickshaw or under a flimsy plastic-sheet roof."

The obvious question, of course, and a naïve one, was why so many people were homeless in the first place. "There's no one reason for it," said Amit, whose founded Jamghat, "penniless people arrive from Bihar, UP and Rajasthan, have no place to stay and end up on the streets. Children run away from home "" escaping abuse, neglect, grinding poverty and worse, and land up here. Women get thrown out by their husbands, and have no other place to go...it's all bad circumstances." However, NGOs such as Jamghat believe, at times, it's also bad governance "" in Delhi, whenever a slum is demolished, a vast majority of its denizens are rendered homeless. According to estimates, in the much-debated demolition of the slums in Yamuna-Pushta, around 50,000 people became homeless, of which barely half were rehabilitated.

We then walked across to Fountain Chowk to see a government shelter. Surprisingly clean, it had dhurries on the floor and a television above and cost Rs 6 a night. "This one's for men," I asked, "are there similar shelters for women?" Kaivalya shook his head ruefully: "they have no place to go..." Appallingly, the only government-run shelter for women at Yamuna Pushta near Vijay Ghat, was closed down by the MCD in June 2007. It's made way for a warehouse, no doubt more profitable, with no alternate arrangements for the women who'd sought refuge under its roof.

We walked past Kauriya Pul, the covered overbridge overrun by the homeless at night. "People like us can't understand how much difference even the slightest covering overhead makes to someone sleeping on the streets," said Kaivalya, explaining why it was so popular. Beyond lay the Yamuna Bazaar, a hazy, dark tract of land which hundreds of homeless people called home. "Early this year, we came here on a bitterly cold January morning ...we saw over a hundred people frozen to death," said Kaivalya. We strained our eyes in the dark, but saw little. Maybe the denizens of Yamuna Bazaar, who had no I-cards, ration cards or other means of identification, were as invisible to the government as they were to us. But they were there all right.

Walking back to Jama Masjid, we desperately tried to take stock of what we'd seen. A towering man dressed in black, a strange hat upon his head, suddenly appeared on the steps. His beard, long and bushy, was neatly parted in two and twisted. He began twirling round and round till even I felt dizzy. But then, I'd imagine, that's how one would feel anyway, looking into a strange, looking glass world which you never knew existed right under your nose.