[Reader-list] Multiple spaces and access routes at Vijayawada Railway Station

[Meera Pillai]

"Before I've stepped into the station": 
Multiple spaces and access routes at Vijayawada Railway Station
 
Even as they get a glimpse of us from the corner of their eyes, the boys start and flee.  When Joseph calls out, "Hey, it's us!  Where are you off to?", they pause, two or three with a leg over the railings, in the middle of clambering over and running to safely.  Their faces split in grins then, and they wait for us to catch up with them.  "Did you think we were the police?  Was that why you ran away?" asks Joseph, his cheerful voice booming.  "We were playing bomma," they say matter-of-factly.  A simple game of chance, tossing a coin and calling out heads or tails, and keeping the coin if you call correctly, bomma is one of the pastimes of the younger boys at Vijayawada railway station.  Apart from the fact that the boys are generally seen as a nuisance, bomma would be perceived as gambling, and therefore even more objectionable to the keepers of the law and likely to attract their attention.
 
Passersby stop and look curiously.  One man in the middle of getting astride his motorbike, pauses, completes the action, and then sits, making no move to ride off.  a couple of people decide to give the steps the go-by and take a detour along the ramp instead, slowing down deliberately and then stopping to watch us talk to the children.  Living on the fringes of more mainstream folks who use the railway station to get to and back from other places, street children don't often attract much attention from them.  Middle-classish-foks talking to street children, though - that attracts attention.
 
There are seven boys, between the ages of eight and twelve, in this group that is hanging out at the end of the handicapped-accessible ramp beside the broad steps of the side entrance of the Vijayawada railway station.  The sight of Joseph and Basha, familiar figures who trawl the railway platforms every day on behalf of a local NGO working with children in need of care and protection, and particularly with street children, has restored the children's confidence.  Their daily presence gives me credibility, as perhaps does my body language as I stand and chat with the children.  They're used to the staff of the NGO, which runs a 24-hour drop in shelter, two night shelters and an infirmary, which the children are free to use when they like, even when they choose to remain on the street and not avail of the residential educational and vocational training services that the NGO also provides.  The fact that I am with them makes me "safe" in their perception.
 
I sit on the lower of the railings along the ramp, angling my short torso so my head emerges against the upper railing.  Joseph quickly fills in the boys.  "Does anyone speak Hindi?  She can speak Hindi."  In my minimal Telugu, and with hand gestures, I explain, "Telugu raadu.  I can't maatlaadu, but if you speak to me,  artham cheysukontaanu."  The children are amused at my incompetence, but generous about the effort.  Three of the group start talking to me in Hindi, and a fourth, we discover, speaks Tamil, so he and I have that language in common.  Most important is the question, "Tumhara gaon kahaan?"  One of them has travelled to Bangalore, and asks me where the street children's shelters are.  "I looked for them, but I couldn't find them."  I give him a quick tip on how to locate the shelters there.
 
A man comes by with a flask of team and tiny plastic "glasses" that can hold about two tablespoons of tea.  The boys are in the mood for tea.  Basha pays.  We sip our tea.  "I tell them they should also sell tea," the man is in a chatty mood too.  "I can help one or two of them.  They can sell tea and make 50 to 100 rupees a day.  But they don't listen."  I smile.  The boys ignore him.
 
"Do you hang out here often?" I ask.  Casual nods, yesses.  "And no one disturbs you?"  "No."  "Or if they come, we go there.  Or there."  They point to the roof of the part of the railway station that abuts the ramp where we are now, and to the space under the metal stairs that lead down from one of the footbridges to the road outside the railway station.  "When we want to sleep, we sleep under those stairs.  Or up there."  They point to the roof of the wide porch.  "How do you get up there?"  They point at a cast iron drainpipe along the side of the building.  "We climb up that."  "Is that difficult?"  They laugh at my question.  One of them leaps onto the railings along the ramp, and launches himself at the drainpipe.  In a couple of seconds, he has shimmied up to the roof and back.  "There are three ways of getting up on the porch.  We can climb up that neem tree.  Or use that pipe [pointing to one corner of the porch.]  Or those pipes [pointing to another corner]."  A richness
 of access routes.  "We hang out here.  But if we want to rest or sleep, we go up to the porch roof.  Or if it's hot, we sleep under those stairs."
 
"I'll come back tomorrow," I say, "and bring a camera.  Will you take some pictures of where you hang out?  Do you mind?"  They look at me scornfully.  They also take the suggestion that they take the pictures completely in their stride.  Nothing special.  Business as usual.  I put off telling them about the research, explaining teh lay summary, getting informed consent to the morrow.  I've not even entered the railway station yet, and already I've seen three non-standard living spaces that the Vijayawada railway station provides to its young residents.  Spaces that I, as a middle-class traveller, have never noticed before in the station.


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