Last night, a smart young TV channel technician from Bangalore watched Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. “You don’t need to ask me anything about my life. It is all there on the movie screen,” 22-year-old Manju beams proudly from the front seat of his friend’s Jeep, the latest Bollywood blockbuster blaring tinnily from a brand new Motorola mobile. “I am also Slumdog – but much worse. To me slum means you are lucky; it means shelter and no rain coming inside. I was sleeping on the street or in a drainpipe, depending on the weather,” he recalls, as the neon-lit oases of McDonald’s Drive Thru, Baskin-Robbins and Coffee Day flash past on the route to Mysore Highway.

Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is the rags-to-riches tale of orphan Jamal Malik, and his perilous ascent from a Mumbai slum to winner of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. His rise from the gutter, and his brother Salim’s journey into gangsterism, is told alongside India’s transformation into the hyper-capitalism of its new mega cities. The film has garnered four Golden Globes, six Baftas and is favourite to win Best Film at tomorrow’s Oscars. But in India, it has touched a nerve. Some praise its verisimilitude, last month slum dwellers of Patna threatened to burn effigies of Boyle, in protest at what they saw as the film’s derogatory use of the term “Slumdog”.

For Manju however – and the 450 million or so others who have experienced the sharp end of hunger beneath India’s $2 per day poverty line – this film is like peering at his life through a beautifully distorted kaleidoscope. “My brother and I were exactly like Jamal and Salim – except we didn’t win any game show. Our story was real life,” boasts Manju. Now clean and immaculately dressed, the 22-year-old former street urchin, chai wallah, vegetable seller, petty thief, balloon seller, busboy and sometime gangster has come a long way since he clawed his way out of the sewers of Mysore.

He may not have a 20-million-rupee cheque in his pocket, but Manju’s escape from the drainpipe has all the drama of a screenplay – and is just as unlikely. Today the self-proclaimed “middle-class type” rents a room in one of the most affluent areas of Bangalore and is climbing the ranks of the Zee TV Kannada news network, while devoting his evenings to completing a university degree. The orphaned street boy, who once waited outside for scraps, can now hold his head up at any restaurant. In India, this is not just a rarity, but a miracle. “Most of the children we grew up with are drunks, gangsters or pimps – and the rest are in jail.” Most still live on the streets, and only ten per cent will ever leave.

“I had to climb out of the shit too, just like Jamal!” Manju chuckles, relishing the opportunity to relive his past through the safety of the cinema screen. He is comparing the film’s slum toilet scene to an episode in his childhood, where he fell into an open sewer “right up to my neck”, and nearly died. “I was fighting and shouting, but no one came to help,” he says. “I thought at that moment I would die. But I struggled until I managed to drag myself out.”

Today, Manju is retracing his steps for the first time in ten years, from the bright lights of Bangalore, India’s first “Silicon City”, to the teeming Mysore marketplace of his childhood. “I will show you things about my life you won’t believe,” he warns, “worse than any film.”

As the Jeep hurtles down the dusty 160km highway from Bangalore to Mysore, Manju recalls – as much as he can – how he came to be on the streets in the first place. “My earliest memory is lying on the pavement next to my mother outside the market. A cyclist rode up to us and drove the bike pedal into the top of my head. It went half an inch inside – you can still see the scar,” he says, parting the hair to reveal a raised silvery patch on his skull.

The fragmented prelude to his family’s arrival on the pavement is all too familiar. It begins with two childhood sweethearts from poor families (“just two meals per day poor”) who run away to marry in secret. They have three children: Manju, Srinivasa and Shruti. Six months after the birth of their third child, the husband turns to drink and leaves her for another woman. His young wife is left to fend for herself and look after the children on her own. “That is why she started drinking,” says Manju, “to stop her feeling any pain. She would tell me, ‘After drinking, mind is free.’”

He doesn’t like to say what she did for money. “Selling something, vegetables maybe… I don’t know,” he mutters. “I didn’t see.” Manju does, however, drop hints that the most common currency for the women abandoned on the street was their bodies. Even children as young as eight would regularly disappear, kidnapped by sex traffickers and brothel owners. “On the street 90 per cent of the women and girls are working in prostitution, in brothels and outside places, but what else can they do? They are helpless,” he says.

Fighting dirty

As his mother drowned her sorrows in Rs.6 (9p) bottles of booze, Manju and his younger brother Srinivasa were set loose to fund her alcohol habit. “She gave us a target of Rs.50 (around 72p) each per day, and if we didn’t give her the money she would beat us. Her cruelty was the only reason we used to beg – otherwise money had no meaning for us.”

It was mostly within the walls of the vegetable market that Manju and his brother earned their living. As we pull up at the gates, 19-year-old Srinivasa is anxiously waiting for us. He hasn’t been back here in three years and has taken time off from his job, as team captain at an international hotel chain in Chennai. He admits, “It feels strange coming back here. Our lives are so different now.” Strange indeed, to imagine these city professionals dodging barefoot through the cabbage leaves and cow dung, scavenging for damaged fruit to resell at the market for a couple of rupees. At night, the boys tell me, they would make their bed in hessian sacks – or in one of the large disused drainage pipes.

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