Radhakrishna: Death of a Newspaper Boy
Published by TEHELKA
[Author: Shivani Chaudhry | Date Published: 22 October 2005 ]
"Quick… children kiss us… we are growing… through dream." ~ Audre Lorde
Radhakrishna, 13. An ever-smiling boy. Dies on October 4, 2005 in a hospital in Ajmer. Why?
Because Delhi didn’t protect his right to live. Didn’t give him housing. Forced him to live on the streets. Compelled him to eat substandard food. Subjected him to the harshest of elements. Deprived him of his human rights. Snatched away his childhood. And when he was sick, failed to provide him basic healthcare.
“No one cares about poor children. We are left to fend for ourselves,” blurts out Lali, recounting the tragedy. After running from one hospital to another in distress, after receiving no assistance, and after discovering that they could not afford the prescribed treatment, Radhakrishna’s relatives took him back to Ajmer with the hope that he might survive. The family got into a debt trap. Despite a surgery costing Rs 50,000 and five bottles of blood, the boy succumbed. Nobody in his family knows what went wrong. Nobody knows what ailment he had. Nobody was told why the child died. He was after all, just a street urchin. They die all the time. Why fret?
But shouldn’t we? For a mother still weeps incessant tears. A father is mourning. A sister is devastated. A brother is traumatized. A childhood has been twice butchered. A light of the future has been extinguished.
Would Radhakrishna have lived had he been born into a rich family?
Uncomfortably, the answer is probably yes.
I met him almost everyday at the Moti Bagh flyover crossing in south Delhi. I used to buy a trashy afternoon paper from him almost everyday — only because he was selling it. When I didn’t see him for a few days, I missed him. I ask Sita, ‘‘Where is he?’’ In a broken, barely audible voice, she tells me that he is no more. Her words stun me. Words that hit and sting but refuse to sink. I look into the girl’s pained eyes and tears stream down both our faces. How do I console her? Can I? Do I apologize for our individual and collective apathy? For the government’s indifference? For the city’s hostility? I can’t utter a word.
No matter how many efforts are made to politically invisibilize the city’s homeless children, they can’t be socially or tangibly invisibilized. They are there. On pavements, at railway stations, street corners, traffic lights. Dodging cars and darting between bikes. Getting hit by vehicle vultures. Knocking on our car windows and the doors to our hearts. Selling flowers, newspapers, flags. Bathing once a week, if at all. Eating once a day, once in two days. Taking care of younger siblings when they need looking after themselves.
The children of the megamaniacal city’s uncultured streets. The fatalities of reckless urbanization, neo-liberalism’s graveyard. Surviving on the fringes of development. Haunting the vacuumed corridors of our conscience. The children we wish we didn’t see. The faces that remind us of our failures and excesses. The children of sun-streaked hair and sun-baked dreams.
Homeless, jobless, childhood-less. But not dreamless, not faceless, not hopeless. Not identity-less.
I still see the gleaming glint in Radhakrishna’s eyes. I hear his endearing voice: “Didi, paper le lo. Sita ko paise de doonga…” (Please buy the newspaper, I'll give the money to Sita). He never asked for money for himself. Always for Sita, his sister’s daughter, two years younger than him, his favourite. He used to run from wherever he was when he saw me. We had our two-minute traffic light conversations on his family, on Delhi, on street life, on newspaper sales. We always exchanged broad smiles. His smile was infectious; it originated in his eyes.
A son, a brother, a friend, a cousin, a nephew, a child. A light in the lives of many (including mine), who went out too early.
And do we just say, “This was his destiny,” as we fatalistic Indians are so good at doing, and move on with our lives? Or can we hold someone responsible for the fact that a child died when he should have been painting rainbows? Isn’t this a State-induced national disaster that unfolds hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly? Who gives compensation for State-triggered disasters that are so ritualistically invisible? Who identifies the victims? Who assesses their losses? Who holds the State accountable? Who holds us accountable?
Along with the daily afternoon paper, Radhakrishna also sold the weekly newspaper Tehelka at the traffic light. That’s why I want his picture printed in Tehelka. To visibilize him in the annals of our collective memory. That’s why I want to write about him in Tehelka. To give him a little space in a paper he helped sell. To pay him a small tribute of sorts.
I ask Sita if I should, if she’d like it, if he would have liked it. And she nods her head. It’s the only thing that makes her break into a half-smile. Without Radhakrishna, she looks lost, forlorn, and distant. She has retreated into a strange silence. She doesn’t say a word. But she is still selling newspapers at the traffic light. From 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The eleven-year-old cannot afford to grieve. The little one cannot be consoled. Sita is trying to fathom death. Struggling to come to terms with this life without her best buddy.
It seems too late now. We can’t give her back her brother and best friend Radhakrishna. But we can give Sita her childhood back, can’t we?
~~~
[Note: Radhakrishna's untimely death moved me deeply and led me to start a biweekly free school for the children (including Sita and Radhakrishna's other family members) at the Moti Bagh traffic light in Delhi. I was able to raise some funds, use a primary school space when it was vacant, and hire a primary school teacher. I named the school 'Muskaan', which means 'smile'. With the support of a neighbour, we picked up the children from the traffic light, brought them to school, spent three hours with them, fed them, and dropped them back. Unfortunately, the school only lasted for 11 months due to the constant travel of their families to their village, economic pressures from the family, and tragic accidents. I wrote another piece titled 'Traffic Light Children' when Pradhan, a boy from my school, tragically died in a road accident in 2009. I share my experiences about the school too in that piece, which is uploaded on this blog at: https://imagink.blogspot.com/2009/06/traffic-light-children.html]
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