Amand’s Less Than Triumphant Return

Amand, my shoe-shining friend who I bought the box for, reappeared in my life today. I was supposed to meet him last week, but I was sick, and I never had the ambition to make it over to Linking Rd., and then I went to Goa. It’s a pretty big hassle for me to get to Linking Rd. after work because after work I have to come home and work on writing my blog and writing for Jurist. Plus, I usually stay at work for 10 or 11 hours. I wasn’t sure if Amand would still be at Linking Rd. He’s supposed to start shining shoes at a train station. But I went there today, and there he was at McDonalds. He saw me, and he was real excited to see me.

He wasn’t doing very well. He said he hadn’t been making much money since the rains have started so heavily. He said no one wants their shoes shined on Linking Rd. in the rain, but they would want their shoes shined in a train station. He said he got his license from the railway company, but now he needed the blue shirt. Blue pants and blue shirts are the uniform of railway station shoe shiners. I knew he needed the shirt, but a few weeks ago he said he’d save his money to buy it. Today he didn’t have it, and he said he’s been ashamed because he hasn’t had enough money to feed his family, and his sister is sick. He took her to the hospital, and she needs medicine, but he can’t afford it. He could be manipulating me to get more handouts, but I bought him the shirt.

We went into one of the boutiques on Linking Rd., and I could just feel the mean eyes on me and Amand. A salesclerk told Amand he couldn’t come in. Amand said the salesclerk recognized him as a Linking Rd. shoeshine boy. There is a system in India where the street people are kept out of shops. It’s not that hard to recognize who is and who isn’t a street person. They know they’re not supposed to go in, and shopkeepers apparently have no problem telling them to leave. But I said I wanted to buy a blue shirt for Amand. I actually felt embarrassed. The service we got was not friendly, and the salesclerks were giving us stinky eyes and not speaking to us. I felt like they were thinking I was a stupid white sucker, that I was just another foreigner being taken advantage of, or that I was stupid, idealistic foreigner putting one insignificant drop into the bucket of helping India and its intractable problems. While we were waiting for the shirts, Amand was showing me in what bad shape his flip-flop sandals were. Amand talked to the shopkeepers in a very shy and deferential way. I could tell he wasn’t used to being in stores. He was probably embarrassed too because they’d already told him to get out. Anyway, we found the right shirt. I bought it. It was less than $10. We left.

Amand asked me if I wanted chai, and I hate to be rude, plus I wanted to talk some more, so I gave a passing thought about Delhi Belly, and I said sure, let’s get some chai. I made a big deal about the chai being Rs.1 in my prior posts, but the chai is actually Rs.2.50. When you buy chai you can also take a swig out of a water bottle. I didn’t swig, but I did drink some chai. We’ll see if it makes me sick. This is just me performing an experiment on my body to see if it really is the chai that makes me sick – or maybe this is how I’ll build up resistance to Indian bugs. I don’t think I will get sick, but I will avoid street chai more from now on.

Amand was happy, but he seemed kind of under the weather. I think it’s just cause he hasn’t been eating, plus his sister’s sickness probably bums him. But his family did get a rental house. It’s one of those one room concrete walled apartments down an alley in Khar East. I’m supposed to go there tomorrow with Amand. I asked what he did with his plastic walled shack. He said he tore it down and took the pieces with him. Maybe because he may still need them again if he can’t pay his rent. John, the New Zealand man who Amand’s brother Vicky had met, put the security deposit down on the apartment. Rent is Rs. 1200 a month (my rent is Rs. 12,000), and Amand’s worried he won’t be able to pay this. But he should be good to go now with his box, shirt, and license. He said tomorrow he would go around to stations with a railway official and pick out which place at the station to set up shop.

I said he must be so happy to be out of the slum now that the heavy rains have started. Those slums with the plastic walled houses are almost always built on dirt, which of course turns to mud during the monsoon. There’s a slum by my office that I drive through a lot, coming back from the gym or court or in a rickshaw. This slum is built in the mud, and the ground is covered in trash, and there are goats that eat from this trash. I think it’s a majority Muslim slum, and I always see little girls and boys having diarrhea in the street. The place smells awful. If I was saying slum life wasn’t so bad in Dharavi, it’s because I only saw the older, more established, more successful parts. There are a lot of disgusting slums like this one by my office.

These plastic-walled slums are nasty. I can hardly deal with them anymore. They’re so disgusting to my delicate senses; I just want to forget they exist. Seeing so much poverty and filth, I feel jaded. What can we really do? I bought one kid a box. This is just one kid, while literally millions are living in squalor in Mumbai, and my boy, Amand, isn’t even in the bottom rung. His legs aren’t crippled from polio. He speaks English, and now he has an apartment. His life will be a little better at least for a while, but what about everyone else? It’s just so easy to drive by and not think about those in the slums as even real people. I ask Amand if it makes him mad that there are so many rich people in Mumbai spending so much money even while there are so many poor people suffering. He didn’t have much to say. He just kind of shrugged it off like this is just the way it is. Similarly, the lawyers jet in their cars right through the disgusting slums and don’t think twice. This is just the way it is. I was born rich. You were not. You’re used to being poor. I am not. I live my life. You live yours.

Amand said that now that the rains have started, “There are many sadness in Bombay.” And like I said, he just seemed under the weather and had trouble being as overjoyed as he was in prior weeks. I know you’re not supposed to do this, and I think Amand is embarrassed to be taking charity, and he may have been manipulating me with the sick sister story, but I gave him Rs.100. This is $2.5, but in India this seems like more money than that. It’s practically a fortune for Amand who makes Rs.50 on a good day.

And then I went into the department store Shopper’s Stop to meet Mritunjay. I spent Rs.430 on new underwear, and then I went and ate dinner for about Rs.150. I just dole this money out of my wallet, and it just doesn’t seem fair that it’s so easy for me to do this, but this is the way it is, and there are too many people too help, and no one’s – not even the Bill and Melinda Gates’ – wallet is big enough to help.

But I’m going to stay a member of CRY, and tomorrow, the Fourth, I’m taking an overnight train into rural Maharashtra to a cotton farming region where indebted farmers are killing themselves. This kind of countryside misery is why legions of country folk are pouring into Bombay for the chance at less misery. CRY works in the countryside to try to fix the problem at the root. Maybe it’s helping a little. Maybe not. But I figure, this is interesting, I might as well try to help people while I indulge my own curiosity.

And I’m going to go back to the U.S. and feel guilty for all the easy luxury I was born into. And I’ll probably get bummed out about such stupid things. While Amand is ashamed that he couldn’t buy food for his family, I’ll mope around Pittsburgh and think that I’m bored with school, or I’ll get stressed about school, or I’ll think that so many people are so much more talented than me. But I’ll eat. In fact, I’ll probably overeat, and I’ll be bummed about that. And I’ll waste money on stupid pleasures. I’ll buy a cheap bottle of wine that could have fed Amand’s family for a few days. But the wine will make me happy, and if I sent the money to Amand instead of spending it on myself, there are still millions in Bombay in worse straights than Amand. What to do? What to do?