While in India, investigating child labour, I walked down the famed Street of Cages in Mumbai. This is one of the central areas for the estimated half-million child prostitutes in the country, described by campaigners as “21st-century slaves”. Before leaving the street I saw a 15-year-old girl leaning against a bright blue steel gate. She wore a pink sari with a rainbow trim; she was writing in a blue notebook. Having worked in numerous underserved areas, the mantra “education is the answer” is invariably touted as pivotal to any solutions. That being so, I could not reconcile the image of a child prostitute who wrote.
The image of the girl in the pink sari haunted me so that I was compelled to write The Blue Notebook, a work of fiction based on fieldworkers’ reports and observation of the conditions that such children survive. I named the girl Batuk. With The Blue Notebook published, I repeatedly returned to India to examine how positive action could be deployed in Batuk’s name. It was not until a week ago that I discovered how.
A barrow, stacked with rolls of carpet, stops. The man pulling it, 5ft 10in and thin, rolls his shoulders and stretches his back. The bus behind him has now stopped, too. The driver honks and an argument follows — the words can just be heard over the car horns, traffic and general throng of Mumbai. The carpet man and the bus eventually move. As the bus inches forward, I see the entrance to an alleyway.
Fifty yards down the alleyway I walk into an unnumbered building. I step over a sleeping dog, on to a floor carpeted with compacted moist rubbish. I duck under a wooden lintel. The stench stops me in my tracks. My feet are wet. I step forward, turn left and face a long corridor barely lit by a single bulb; there are two dead rats next to a small pile of rubbish. Equally spaced down the corridor are pale-blue steel doors with numbers — they remind me of storage closets. The door to No 4c is open and I step inside the 10ft x 16ft cell.
There are five wooden beds in the room: two against each wall and one at the back of the room. Each bed is raised 3ft off the ground using either old car batteries or concrete blocks. It is a feat of engineering that the beds are all horizontal. A wire bisects the room and on it hangs clothing; pink, yellow and brown cloth. A well-nourished woman wearing a yellow sari sits on the bed to my immediate right; she looks up. The sari is not clean but not filthy either, just the grime from a day’s work.
Beneath her bed are two children: a girl, no older than 12, and a boy who is about 5. The girl is not afraid but the boy sneaks back into his “apartment”. The spaces under the beds are where families live: that is the purpose of the car batteries and cement blocks, to make an affordable family dwelling.
On the bed to my left lies a scrawny woman under a grey blanket. Her skin has patches of white mapped across her face, neck, chest and arms. She implores me with skeletal outstretched arms and a smile that is more black than white. There are five other people in 4c: a teenage boy who sits on the far right bed beside a young woman in blue. A half-dressed man lies on the bed opposite. On the bed against the back wall a man sits beside a girl. Except that they share a bed, the couple is disconnected.
The woman in the yellow sari jumps from her bed and pushes past me to Raheen, who stands to the left, behind me. The woman confronts Raheen, shouting in Hindi, “When will places open up?” Raheen smiles into the rant. Her eye make-up is carefully applied and her words in Hindi assertive: “As soon as possible. I call them each day.”
As we wind back through the building, Raheen explains to me that the woman in yellow has asked for her two children to be placed in sheltered care but spots have not yet opened up. Stepping out of the brothel, I realise that the dog at the entrance has not moved because it is dead.
That afternoon I get a glimpse of the care Raheen is talking about. In an unused municipal school, the headquarters of the Apne Aap Women’s Collective, I play chess with a nine-year-old girl. She is joined by three girls of a similar age who together play a style of chess that precipitated Bobby Fischer to describe the game as “a blood sport”.
The children repeatedly distract me with giggling and random questions — all speak English. They intermittently seek the council of another girl, aged 12. To say I lost to five children is unfair; I lost to a single entity with a combined age of 47 and five brains. Separately they are Sparrows; together they represented a brood in a shared nest.
“Sparrows” are the children of Mumbai prostitutes who come, without charge, to the Apne Aap Women’s Collective to eat, take vitamins, get medical care and sleep, but most of all to learn. Once the chess is cleared away I follow the girls down for dinner. Eighteen Sparrows are already sitting on the floor in a cleared storage room eating in groups of six; they are aged 12 to 17. After eating, they brush their teeth and are given iron, vitamins and calcium tablets.
I ask Manju Vyas, the director of the Sparrows Programme, to explain the success of the Nest: some 230 Sparrows cared for over eight years — none has entered prostitution. Slim, dark-haired, with eyes that soften brick, she laughs. “That’s not success,” she explains. “This is success: we have Sparrows in business, teaching, hotel management and at college. We have Sparrows married with families, with their own children.” Sudarshan Loyalka, a University of Washington graduate, former politician and founder of the collective, adds: “We also have Sparrows who rescue their own mothers from prostitution.”
Talking to Sparrows during dinner I discover that three want to become doctors, one wants to join the army, another to enter hotel management, two want to join the police and one to be a head nurse. “We teach them to fly,” Vyas says.
As these Sparrows flock upstairs they are immediately replaced by 23 more children, chattering, hungry for dinner. A boy enters, aged about 5, in brown trousers and a white and blue T-shirt. I recognise him as the son of the woman in the yellow sari. I look for his sister; she is sitting on the opposite wall as though the expansion in space has polarised them. Raheen, the programme’s clinical psychologist and lead teacher, says that it took a year for her team to persuade the mother to bring the children to the Nest.
The kindergarten mistress, called simply “Teacher”, is a tiny woman of 4ft 10in, aged about 20; she has dark eyes that pour joy. She sits beside me at the entrance to the storage room and looks over her chirping flock. The five-year-old boy’s sister is already talking to a girl with a swollen arm. But the boy is silent and has not moved.
Teacher goes to him, kneels and says: “Eat now.” Teacher shows him the food on another little girl’s plate. “It’s good,” she says. He does not respond. She suddenly grabs his hand and walks him to where the steel plates are kept. He clutches his plate, which is then filled with a vegetable rice dish called upma, a boiled egg and a banana. He sits back where he was. Teacher, dressed in a perfectly pressed yellow sari with brown trim and wearing a small wooden crucifix, kneels in front of him and as if her smile is hypnotic, he eats. Then she hands me a dish of upma, points to a place on the floor and says, “Eat”. I join her Sparrows.
I ask Teacher to explain the essence of educating these children never exposed to learning and ignorant of affection. She smiles and explains that the emphasis of the education environment is to make the learning “pleasure”. Children, she says, love to learn; they love to draw, sing, listen and make up stories. She explains how she uses colour to help them to express themselves. Teacher smiles and concludes that “children love learning; it is how they are”.
Upstairs, the older children have tripled in number; a third learn English, a third draw and a third are doing homework — all the Sparrows attend municipal schools, too. The girl with the swollen arm comes upstairs and shows me her computer graphic art. “She wants to enter the Art Academy,” Raheen says.
I return to the kindergarten in the basement. The boy in brown trousers is standing beside a younger girl, head shaven and dressed in bright red; the two of them are belting out Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. The boy today learnt to write the letter “A” — he shows me the 18 repeats, grinning. Teacher points to pictures and the boy chants “lion” and “monkey”. He has forgotten “elephant”. Teacher smiles at him, her pride palpable.
At 8pm all the children meet in the upstairs classroom, where they form two circles, the older children on the outside and the kindergarteners inside. Together all the Sparrows chant the times tables, pledge allegiance to India and then close their eyes and sing in prayer. The moment prayer-song ends the older children charge at Raheen, reaching out to hug and kiss her as though she exudes the life force itself.
The kindergarteners run to Teacher; each one for a hug and a kiss but most of all a smile — to protect them overnight. The boy in the brown trousers starts to run down the corridor with the girl in red chasing him, laughing. His sister is still hugging Raheen. I watch the Sparrows gain invincibility cloaked in their teachers’ love.
The Sparrows then leave their Nest and return to live beneath the beds of their mothers, who work for 20-100 rupees per client (20p to £1). Teacher is about to leave, too; she will go and clean four homes, “mainly floors”, she tells me, smiling as if it is another song she is about to sing.
I ask Teacher: “Do your Sparrows always come back?” “Always,” she says. Teacher knows; she was once a Sparrow.
James A. Levine is a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic. Half of UK author proceeds will be donated to the Sparrows’ Nest The Blue Notebook is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £12.99. To buy it for £11.69 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
