The undiscovered country. The pull of conscience

After the ticket collector at the gate, the first person I would engage with on arriving in Gorakhpur railway station was a rickshawallah. My boarding school allowed me to travel alone at a certain age. I would pack my bags, take a bus or taxi from Mussoorie to Dehradun, catch a train to Lucknow, switch to the small-gauge track, and catch another train to Gorakhpur. Lugging my suitcase or bedroll, or backpack, I would stagger out of the station and try to negotiate a ride home with a rickshawallah.

They were all older men, bigger than me. I thought little of it. They were selling their labour, and I was compensating them for it. Sometimes one would ask a fare that was too high even for my pathetic negotiating skills, and I would walk a little further until I found somebody else, or just gave up and agreed to the quoted sum.

As I grew older the rickshawallahs were still there, but I found it more difficult to justify being transported by their physical effort. By the time I was in college — a Hindi-medium institution in Gorakhpur — the rickshaw pullers and I were the same size, and I was better-fed. It became difficult to turn a blind eye to what was, essentially, the exploitation of the physical labour of someone with comparable — or less — physical strength than me simply because I could afford it. I took to walking long distances — five kilometres, if I had to — to avoid the discomfort of that reality.

It is the same scene even today — hundreds of poor men earning a small amount of money by the sweat of their brow, lugging around the comfortable, the weighty, the rich.

Gorakhpur was not always poor. Its history stretches back to Mauryan times, and the terai belt is incredibly fertile, heavy with water, if a little malarial. It was the first province that the East India Company carved out of the Nawab of Awadh’s land, and it was interested in one thing alone: profit.

My uncle used to tell me of a minister in one of the early governments of independent India who belonged to this region and would fly down the entire Cabinet in his private plane. There were sugar mills, and fertiliser plants.

All that is gone now and, with them, the jobs. The town is plastered with entrance examination posters, and ads for coaching centres. It is the only way that a secure job can be had, but the state cannot employ everybody, and for poor farm labourers — unskilled and barely educated — there are even fewer prospects.

While I studied at my college — ‘studied’, in a manner of speaking, as the college was going through an intense staff-management disagreement and we had 12 different principals in the first three months alone — I also helped my mother at an NGO she had set up. It trained and employed young women to teach children for free up to Std IV.

The learners were mostly the children of labourers such as rickshawallahs, who saw no good in investing even in basic education. But this was free, and it led to things like health check-ups by the district administration, so the children got an education.

But to what purpose? What jobs were there for them?

When I went to collect my third-year mark sheet, the college official remarked, “ Itni jaldi kya thi (Why the hurry)?” Most of my peers were in no hurry to graduate.

There were no jobs — at least, not good ones. Among the more ‘successful’ of these graduates were two youngsters who had allegedly assassinated a local politician by rolling a home-made bomb under his van. And these were the ones in college.

I go back to Gorakhpur and am confronted by the same sea of men, many of them old, many of them with muscles and tendons barely covered by flesh, selling their labour, their sweat, for a pittance. And it has taken me some time to realise that by not accepting that labour — in my righteousness — all I had done was rob them of a customer. I had not helped.

So now I take rickshaws. I don’t bargain. I always pay hundred for a trip they ask ₹20 for. I get off the vehicle if there is an incline, and walk where I can. It is not charity. Their sweat, their labour are worth far more than that. Nor is it a solution. Only dignified jobs would be — but that I cannot give. And this horror I live with — this is my home and my place in it.

Omair Ahmad

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; @OmairTAhmad

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