Smash hit

Trucks rumble through the courtyard, while gangs of raggedy children dodge between legs, picking expertly through the waste. Manju points to an eight-year-old girl chewing on a rotting aubergine, flies buzzing around her hair: “That girl, she is just like me and my brother used to be. Can you believe?” For these children, survival is a full-time job: “Our only thought was: how to fill our stomachs.”

Outside in the street, Srinivasa points to American tourists, and tells me that 15 years ago he would have been falling at their Nike trainers. “Please give me one rupee, one pen, one chocolate!” Other tricks included stealing coconuts from Hindu shrines or scavenging through the rubbish outside marriage halls.

Later, the brothers guide me through the dark alleyways of the meat market. Walking through puddles of blood, the two young men show me the place where they would collect discarded chicken heads and feet, make a fire and roast them. “We used to search for dead sparrows and eat them too,” says Manju. “And cigarettes,” reminds Srinivasa. “Every street child is smoking – drinking alcohol and sometimes sniffing glue too,” Manju informs me gravely. He was drunk most days. “My mother used to give it to me, saying it would make me stronger. When somebody would beat me in the street, she would make me drink alcohol so I wouldn’t feel the pain.”

The brutality of Slumdog is no exaggeration, says Manju. On the street, beatings were regular. Known as “the challenger”, he would fight most days, defending himself with broken bottles from angry merchants, gangsters, drunks – and anyone else who felt like picking on him. Once, he confides, he even stabbed his mother’s friend in the face. “She was fighting my mother, so I used a knife and sliced down her cheek. I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing,” he mutters, head down.

Later, he points the woman out. She is sitting behind a pyramid of oranges, her face concealed by tattered sari silk. When he waves, she smiles to reveal a row of blackened teeth, a jagged scar slicing her right cheek from eye to mouth. “You see, she forgave me,” he explains. “But it was difficult,” a phrase that is repeated throughout the afternoon.

For Manju and Srinivasa, everyday life was dangerous and squalid – and the vivid fantasy land of Bollywood provided a much-needed escape. “We used to pay 50 paisa at the end of each day to sneak inside the movie theatre during the interval,” says Srinivasa. “To us, all the actors were real people, and all the action was going on behind the big screen.

We understood it as reality, so why shouldn’t we become like one of the heroes or villains, driving around in a big car and living in a big bungalow with bodyguards?” he muses.

And why shouldn’t Bollywood dreams come true? While Manju and Srinivasa picked through bins, all around them New India was booming. During the Nineties, while they slept in a drain, India’s economic growth rocketed – lifting a significant chunk of the population out of poverty and spawning high-rises, shopping malls and a 50-million-strong new middle class. According to the 2007 McKinsey Report, the ranks of the deprived have fallen from 93 per cent to 54 per cent since 1985. Bangalore is now reckoned to be home to 10,000 dollar millionaires. Today, the country’s ruthless mantra of progress is impossible to ignore.

So, has India’s “economic miracle” trickled down and saved children like Manju from the streets? Not exactly. In reality, the gap between India’s richest and poorest has only deepened and widened, according to the State of the World’s Cities Report 2008-2009. It calculates that in 2002 the income gain of the richest 10 per cent of the population was about 4 times higher than that of the poorest 10 per cent.

The door to a new world

It certainly wasn’t the economic miracle that finally dragged Manju and his family from the gutter – but a local grassroots NGO, Odanadi Seva Trust. The charity specialises in rehabilitating the children of sex workers and admitted Srinivasa and Shruti to their hostel around 1994, while Manju stayed on the streets to look after his mother. Three years later, when Manju was nine, their mother died (of an unspecified sexually transmitted illness) and he was finally able to come and join them.

“Her death was a turning point,” he says. “Before that I never had any good dreams. No role models, no education – no nothing. When I came to the hostel and saw the other children learning their ABCs, I wanted that too. If it hadn’t been for Odanadi’s intervention, we would probably be dead or in jail now. There is still little chance for street children in India to come out of the clutches of poverty and become a different person altogether.”

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