My Night On The Street

In Harper Lee’s masterpiece “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the seminal character, Atticus Finch imparts the following advice to his daughter Scout, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” To me, it’s always meant that to understand someone’s behaviour and actions, you need to understand something about their life. This has become even more relevant to me over the past few years.

As teachers, we spend time in our communities to get a more detailed, nuanced perspective on what the lives of our students are like, in the hope that our deeper understanding can illuminate aspects of their behaviour in class, solve challenges, and ultimately result in a transformational education.

In that spirit, I recently did something different than anything I have ever experienced in terms of community immersion. I was awarded a research fellowship with Teach for All, and the second project was to present on “a day in the life of your student.”

The student I picked to profile was Sakshi, one of our most challenging, but also one who has grown more than most over the past seven months. I decided to spend around 19 hours with her. This meant being in school, and staying with her family overnight.

To add some context to this, Sakshi doesn't have a home. She lives on the street, and sleeps on the sidewalk at  Metro Cinema, near the southernmost tip of Bombay. Seema (one of my co-teachers) and I went to visit her parents and discuss the possibility of me staying with them for an evening.

This is the first part that was uncomfortable for me, because while they seemed open to the idea, and even though we do have a strong relationship with them, I didn't want them to feel obliged and say yes even if they were uncomfortable. I can just hope now that they believed my intentions were, as we told them, to learn more about Sakshi’s life in the hope that it would help her in class.

So a few nights later, I left school and walked over to the Metro subway. I had spoken to her father originally, who speaks crisp, fluent English (something I’ll get to a bit later), but when I arrived, he wasn't there, so I played with Sakshi and spoke to her mother. I had brought some blocks and games from school, we practiced counting, writing, and I spoke to her mother and watched her cook.

You only get to see some things when you truly immerse yourself in an experience like this. Anyone could have a cursory understanding or expectation of what it feels like to live and sleep on the street. You can imagine hard pavement, loud noises, but there are some things that you can only know by really doing it. I still get amazed by the certain little details that you notice. Three things that stuck out to me were:

1. The way Sakshi’s mother cooked. They had taken scrap plywood from around the area, and she broke it down with a brick, threw it into a fire, and cooked using that. I have yet to see cooking without some kind of gas fuel, but they were just using wood to heat and cook their food.
2. There is always a water tanker pulled up outside their sidewalk, and it leaks out the back. That’s their running water. They wash their hands, and sometimes bathe in the leak water from that water tanker.
3. Before we went to sleep, Sakshi’s mother put small pieces of cloth into each child’s ears, and when I inquired why, she said it was to keep bugs from crawling in.

These things might seem inconsequential, but to me they really stuck out, a sign of just how different the lives of the world’s poor are from mine. Maybe to some extent you can understand what it feels like to be able to buy less, or see others with more. But having to do little things like put cloth in your child’s ears to keep insects from crawling in when they sleep, these are the little things that are a daily part of life for families like Sakshi’s, that I never really could fathom or understand.

I could write a lot of these little observations, but I’m going to move on to what I’ve learned about Sakshi. I already knew that her father was an alcoholic. He often picks her up, reeking of booze. And our team was already curious about how someone who spoke English fluently enough to get a well-paying job, ended up living on the street.

But something I won’t forget is the look her mother had, every ten minutes, as she looked in the direction she expected her husband to come from. It was a mix of despair, and hope. I know that the direction she was looking at has a country liquor bar, a place for low-income people to get drunk off cheap, dangerous liquor. So I arrived in the evening at about 7 and for two and a half hours, Sakshi’s mother glanced and looked towards that country liquor bar, waiting for her husband to come home. Throughout this time, several other drunken uncles came to visit, play with Sakshi and her sister Sonal, and naturally inquire about who I was and what I was doing there.

Finally he came, smelling of booze, with two friends, ready to eat. We talked, he asked how it had been so far, and then played with Sakshi. I had eaten with the children earlier, but had a few bites with them as well, and we started to talk a bit more about their lives. It turns out, they had lived at that spot for over 10 years, although for two they were transiting around and also staying in another place. Originally they had lived off the sidewalk in a fenced off area, but 10 years ago, the government had kicked them out of that spot and onto the street. Sakshi, all of 5 years old, had spent her entire life living in that very spot on the sidewalk. The income they earned was from the father’s job washing cars at the nearby petrol pump.

I suspect that they live on the street because of Sakshi’s father’s alcoholism. It’s a sad situation, although quite extraordinary that Sakshi now comes to school regularly. One of the highlights of the evening was when I showed her father and mother a video of Sakshi from my phone. A new student had come in that day, Anam, and when Anam entered the door, Sakshi jumped up and showed her the routines of our class. Throughout the day, she helped her, and the video I took was of Sakshi teaching Anam the ABC song. The look of pride on the parents was pretty remarkable. Sakshi’s father jumped up, woke up his friends to show them the video, and gloat about how well his daughter was doing in class.

We chatted a bit more, and then at about 10:30, it was time to sleep. Sakshi’s mother laid out a large political sign, and a blanket underneath. I had brought a mat from school, and her mother also laid out a blanket on top of the mat for me. They gave me the blanket to sleep with as well, and mentioned that in the morning the wind came and it got very cold.

Sakshi sleeping. She was in between her sister and mother, and I slept on this sidewalk on the edge, next to her father.

And there began my night sleeping on the street, or to be more accurate, the sidewalk. To some extent, I’m still processing what it felt like that night, but I can share some things. First, a quick disclaimer. By way of this post, I’m trying to share what it felt like to spend one night with a student’s family on the street. To absolutely no extent do I think this gives me an understanding of what it’s like to be Sakshi, or to understand what it’s like to spend a life living that way.

To use an analogy, sometimes people travelling to Bombay take a ride on the local trains to get the full “Bombay experience.” The truth is though, until you travel on the Bombay local trains day in and day out, until you feel that sweaty, claustrophobic grind for hours a day for years, you haven’t fully ‘experienced’ anything.

That’s how I feel about that night. I am lucky. After I woke up, I went to school, and then at the end of the day, I got to go home and eventually sleep in a comfortable, warm bed. I don’t know what it’s like to live on the street.

That said, I can illuminate some of the things that I felt. As I laid to bed under the blanket, I looked up, and saw the dark night sky. There was a street lamp almost directly above us, and falling asleep was difficult. There were physical factors that drove how difficult the experience was. Bugs crawling on you, mosquitoes around your ears. Then there’s the pain that comes from sleeping on hard pavement, sloping, with bricks coming out in different places. And the cold. Even in Bombay, at night, early in the morning, you shiver in that cold. The wind comes, and you feel it, biting you.

Then there are the psychological factors. As I was struggling to fall asleep, I looked up at the night sky, and could just hear things. We were on the ground, low, but you could hear things around you. Rats scurrying about, cars coming and going, people screaming, fighting and arguing around. At one point I looked up, and police were coming around and harassing some of the people sleeping on the street. It seemed almost random, who they chose to harass, and who they let stay. Sakshi’s father had warned me about this, that sometimes the cops come around, and usually it’s pretty random who they decide to kick off the street to another location. What’s crazier to me is that cops spend their time picking on those who are the most vulnerable, in a country and society with a LOT of vulnerable people. But that’s another blog post.

It was pretty numbing, and frightening. I can’t even imagine the psychological toll that spending 10 years sleeping like that would have. The lights, the noises. You hear people fighting, shouting, screaming, nearby, but you can’t see it. There is no privacy, no sense of safety.

I only slept when total and complete utter exhaustion set in. I woke up at one point with Sakshi’s father on my stomach and at another point with their pet street dog sleeping at my legs. I was a mess the next day, feeling sick, a cold, and my back aching. That was after just one fairly easy night. Again, I just can’t imagine what that experience would be like day in and day out, for a lifetime.

At the end, I was awake from about 4-6, chatted with her father a bit before he went off to work to wash cars at the nearby petrol pump. Then at 7 I went off to school. Sakshi woke up crying, as apparently she often does (and does after naptime), and then I met her later at school that day. She walked into school, beaming as usual, and that was it.

I’m still processing what that experience was for me. I hope that they saw it as a genuine attempt to understand Sakshi. As I see her in class, I think there’s maybe some deeper understanding of what it’s like to be her, but nothing more than a cursory experience.

I’m happy to share the experience, that maybe I’ve learned a little bit more about the life of someone near the bottom of the world’s poor. I feel very lucky to have experienced, and to have grown up and lived the life I have. I hope that Sakshi can one day feel that lucky too.