Old Delhi

There is a child carrying a baby. The child cannot be more than five years old; the baby in her arms is not yet two. She asks me for money. Then she is running after me with the baby heavy and awkward in her arms, shouting: “Mister, mister, food.” I walk on and the clamp on my chest tightens another turn.

They have deformed limbs, if they have limbs at all. Stick thin legs twisted and contorted at impossible angles, beyond broken. Some have stumps in varying degrees of decay – dressed in dirty bandages or left as open oozing sores. They push themselves around on wheeled-trolleys, along the gutters and down the streets, or hop with one leg – always towards you and you always away.

A child taps me on my arm – he wants money. I look down at his hand that is now tapping repeatedly at my arm. His hand is bandaged all the way up to his elbow. Yellow puss has dried to a dark brown stain. I am not sure he even has a hand left.

A teenager with weeping sores around his mouth and nose takes it in turns to eat free dal from a restaurant and sniff at a solvent-soaked rag. He looks like a zombie; hair on end, eyes dead, frantic.

There are destitute, disabled, disfigured, and dispossessed people all over Delhi. Dusty shadows in parks, cloth piles in gutters and doorways, dark faces huddled around a plastic fire at 4am. They are there in hell, always.