Footpath stories

Where I live, we walk along familiar routes eventually
making paths with our feet. The poorest among us live on these paths selling
clothes and trinkets they find in the dustbins [dumpsters].

Tania,
Rising Voices

Nobody
wants to leave their homes and live on the footpaths. But some lack or
deficiency pushes him/her to make the footpath a home. Debi Shau lives on the
footpath, eats and sleeps there. She is about 50-60 years old, an oldish lady.
She sells vegetables in Koley Market. Things like ginger, garlic, onion,
chillies, greens. The money she gets from selling these is her only means of
livelihood. The footpath is her home as of now.

She
doesn’t have any relatives in the world. Even if some of them exist, nobody
knows where they are. No one has looked for her whereabouts in all these years.
She had a distant uncle but even he has passed away. There is no specific place
which she occupies every day to sell her vegetables. She sits down wherever she
manages to make space. To get a specific place everyday, she would need to pay,
which she can’t afford from her meager earnings.

Everyday
she worries about her sales. If sales doesn’t happen properly, what will a
daily wage-earner like her eat? Often she cannot afford two meals a day, making
do with one. Like this, she fights for a living every day. She knows she will
have to go on facing the challenges of living out in the open in different
seasons like summer, winter and the rains.

In
the rains, the pavements are often swept away by water, causing her a lot of
problems. Apart from this, people are always walking on the footpaths. She has
to live with them walking all over her space. But she is compelled.