The children on Jama Masjid steps

Reshma came to us unabashed and first asked for a “dollar”, then quickly realized we were not firangis and then would not go away until we gave her Rs. 1. She wanted to buy a chocolate. In the mornings she goes to a government school for girls in Ballimaran and evenings she is near the Jama Masjid gate begging. But before dark, she quietly slips away to where her mother is. Even at this young age, she knows it isn’t safe for her.
“They do dirty things in the field over there. I often hear women rather girls cry,” she said. “Often there are four or five men.”
And of course the knowledge didn’t come so easy. While on her way to the municipality toilets in Matiya Mahal, a man followed her. She is probably six or seven years old but she knew something was wrong and she ran to her mother. Since then she has been careful, she said.
Next to her, Saeeda played with a kite some foreigner bought her. I mistook her for a boy but then she insisted she wasn’t. For the five-year-old, life changed when her father died with drug overdose.
His face had swollen and he died one night. Then her mother remarried and the new father wasn’t a good man at all, Saeeda said.
While her mother is in the hospital after she gave birth to a baby, Saeeda has been lining up at the little hotel at the steps of the Jama Masjid, gathering the leftovers so she eat a full meal. For her, life begins and ends at the Jama Masjid steps. She has to give Rs. 20 to her step father at the end of the day. Else, there is the beating, kicking and shouting and the five-year-old could do without it.
Most times, Saeeda and Reshma are together and while the younger one fiddles with the kite, Reshma does most of the talking. The family is from Kolkata and there’s uncles, aunts and grandfather and they have their spots near the grand masjid.
She tells me how she can figure out we are Hindus. She points at my Rudraksh. But Saeeda said it is all the same thing. Or maybe nothing at all.
Even if faith sustains them, I still would doubt it.
Then Reshma tells us she is not one of those street children who do drugs and whose faces are blackened with soot. But Saeeda used to eat the “Tiranga”, she says.
Saeeda nods. But of course now is over it.
I ask them about home. It is at the steps of the Masjid. I glance and there they are ... the mattresses rolled up. Saeeda has no shoes. And she walks barefoot on the cold stone slabs. She has no sweater on too. But for these children, those are luxuries that is out of reach for them.
In between begging and surviving, the childhood is gone. And it is sad. It is sad to see how we have failed them, how the state has failed them.
The government talks about universal education. But of course the promises are too many and too few are kept.
Resham and Saeeda are the products of those many failed promises.