When we climbed up the stairs and they unlocked the gates, I was nervous. I didn't know if the women in the mental shelter would like my presence. Renuka Puri, our photographer, had been there before. She knew them. They had become used to her. But I was a stranger. They looked at me from behind the iron grill and they smiled. So, I knew I had nothing to fear. I wish I had spent more time with the women.
An edited version of the story was published in the Indian Express newspaper's Real Page 3 section on March 21, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 12, 2010
In the land of the forgotten, upstairs in an old government building, beyond three iron gates, 18 women have been resurrected, reclaimed, and renamed.
Because they didn’t remember their names. Names didn’t matter in the streets, in the dumps where they lived, their bodies full of maggots, their lips muttering incoherent tales of their lives.
In the corridors of their memory, no windows opened. They just couldn’t tell. Only their scars screamed about their damned lives.
So, in Sudinalaya, a shelter home for women who are abandoned and are mentally disabled, they started calling the woman with short cropped hair, but with large lucid eyes, the one who covered her face always, and who had mood swings “Imli”.
Imli never talks. She just raises her eyes, the sorts that are deep, and dark, and calm. But then when she is upset, the watery eyes flood, and the anger spills out. Then, she screams and shouts and cries.
“Imli is the soul of Sudinalaya. She is sweet and sour. She laughs and she cries,” Sreerupa Mitra Choudhary, founder and chairperson of the NGO, said. “All their names signify their behaviors.”
The large hall, bare except for a television mounted on the wall, and 25 iron beds, is full of stories, fantasies, outbursts of rage, longing, and love.
Anju insists that they call her “Janu”. That’s what her husband, her lover called her. She is old now. Her hair is peppered with gray and white. And wrinkles on her face are like little rivulets, each containing within its folds the many mysteries of her life.
She was found at a petrol pump near Okhla.
Anju never recovered fully. The shelter isn’t a destination but more like a passage where once the inmates are able to recall their addresses and other details about their lives, the staff tries to rehabilitate them.
“Where will I go from here,” Anju says. “Pankaj will come to pick me up. I know I will find him one day. One day I will meet him.”
So, she is waiting. Waiting for her lost lover – real or imaginary. He makes her blush. Anju is in love. She has always been in love. In her reborn state, where age doesn’t matter, this love and longing is her only bridge to the past.
Bano is longing, too. She wants to go home to her husband in Sitapur in Bihar. Her little children are waiting, she says.
Bano was rescued almost two and a half years ago from the streets. She was crawling, the staff recalled.
For months, she was on a wheelchair. And then, she held the walls of the large room, and learned to walk slowly. Her burns have healed, too.
She had a husband who worked in Delhi and she left her village to come here to see him. Now, she wants to see him again.
Then, almost in the same breath, she says he beat her up, and sold her.
But it is her children that call her home. And she pleads and begs the staff to send her home.
“Only when we find your house. We are trying to get reservations,” Inderjit, who looks after them, tells her.
“I am not mad,” she says. “I can walk now. Take me home.”
It’s not easy being here.
It a tough place, a place where memory is fragile, brittle. It requires patience, and lots of it. It also demands that you learn to believe, even though the stories transform overnight, and it demands that you remain unfazed even when they come at you, eyes full of rage, their teeth clattering.
Vimla ran away once. That night, Indira got wild. She beat up everyone, and she screamed. Vimla, one of the staff, locked herself in a room.
“At these times, you don’t know what to do,” she says.
But Asha, who stays overnight at the shelter, has over the years learned that the women, old, delicate, vulnerable, are like children.
“You don’t fear them,” she says.
So, when Asha cooks, she calls the women inside the kitchen and they cook together.
Where they live, somewhere in between memory and loss of it, the inmates have all learned to lean on each other.
Munni, who they named so because she is like a child, and laughs all the time, cries when someone is hurt. She will come to them, hold them by the hand, and cry and point to the person.
Sometimes, Munni sings, too. An old Bollywood song. She has been in the shelter for years. The shelter was established in 1989 by Choudhury who now runs 11 such shelters across the country. Three are in Delhi. One caters to about 50 men who are mentally disabled and two others to women. Choudhary who worked the crime beat in a city newspaper says she wanted to help the women she saw on the streets – abandoned, and vulnerable because they were mentally disabled.
It has been a tough road for her, too. It’s difficult to find committed volunteers. Her organization has sustained only on the basis of donations, and goodwill of others.
The women are referred to them by AIIMS, Safdarjung Hospital, Delhi police and citizens.
“There was an urge to support victims,” she says. “Then I started this initiative. These women were easy preys for organ dealers.”
In one of the corners, an elderly woman is muttering in English. Shikha was rescued from the INA market by Choudhury several years ago. When she saw Choudhaury, she asked her to sit and in an agitated state called out to “Pappu” to bring in sweets and fish curry, Choudhury recalls.
“She talked about mosaic and servants,” she says. “She is from an affluent family.”
But there is no way to tell. Because the shards of memory are not enough to fill in the gaps. So, they go back and forth, shuttling between memory and forgetfulness.
In yet another corner, Dhapu, named so because she said “Dhap, Dhap” all the time, is calling out for Rani, her daughter.
“Rani has gone to school. They should bring her here,” she says.
When they found her, she had a young child who she held close to her. Even at the shelter, she would not leave the child. Then, they took Rani away and put her in a school and a childcare center.
But the mother only remembers her lost child. And amid laughter, and songs, her wailing is hard to miss.
They have clung on to the past or whatever remains of it with a ferocity. After all, the new names are not all that they stand for.
