Sharmila Joshi

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When
Ainul sat in the early morning Kashi Vishwanath Express to come from Amroha to
Delhi, she was full of apprehensions. “I was afraid. I kept thinking I am going
to Bambai. I am going so far away. How will they behave with me? How will I
manage?” Her anxiety kept the 17-year-old awake all night in the general ladies
compartment. 

Her
father-in-law Alim was travelling on the same train. After taking another train
from Delhi, they got off at Bandra Terminus. He then took Ainul to her new home
in the Nayi Basti slum colony in Mahim, before resuming his work as a beggar outside
the Makhdoom Ali Mahimi Dargah.

Ainul
Shaikh too would do this work for a while three years later. It would help pay for her 18-month-old son’s stay at Kasturba Hospital in central Mumbai for many weeks – with what
illness, Ainul does not know. “I could not get a loan from anyone [for the
medical bills] because who would repay it?” she asks.

Her
anxieties on that train to Mumbai had not been misplaced.

That day on the Express, with
Ainul was only a cloth bag containing a few clothes. The utensils she had
bought piece by piece to take to her marital home had all been sold. She had
worked hard as a young girl for years – washing other people’s utensils, cleaning
houses, labouring in the fields. “I’d be given food or a few rupees. I’d put
the money in boxes and, karte karte, I saved for my marriage. I must have
saved 5,000 rupees. I’d take small sums to a local shop and buy brass watis, thalis,
ladles, even a copper dekchi.”

When
she got married and moved to her husband Jameel’s house in the same mohalla in Amroha, he steadily
sold them off to feed his alcohol habit. And for more than 10 years after she
alighted at Bandra Terminus, he often beat her till she bled. The violence
started soon after she came to Mumbai, she does not recall when exactly. “I phoned
my mother,” Ainul says. “She said you have to live there, see it through…”  

Besides the sold utensils,
Ainul was leaving behind her family in Batwal mohalla, on the (then) rural outskirts of Amroha town in Jyotiba Phule Nagar district of Uttar
Pradesh – her mother, two sisters and three brothers. Ainul’s father, a barber,
had died a few years ago. “We are from the Salmani jaat,”
she says, sitting on the floor in her mezzanine single-room home of tin and
asbestos at the edge of Dharavi. “The men in our community are traditionally
barbers. Abba would sit under a chappar and shave and cut hair, and earn a few rupees at
a time. We were very poor. Ammi would sometimes give us six children warm water
to fill our stomachs, or a piece of jaggery to quell our hunger. We didn’t even
have proper clothes, and wore mismatched chappals – if one was blue, the other was
black – held together by safety pins.”

Ainul,
the youngest of the six, didn’t go to school at all. As soon as they could, all
the siblings started working – one brother as a helper in a garage,
two as rickshaw-pullers. Her mother rolled beedis at home along with Ainul’s eldest
sister (both later developed tuberculosis), and earned Rs. 50 from an agent for
1,000 beedis.
Ainul, along with her older sister, started going to the fields in nearby Joya village to work as a
labourer, usually earning in foodgrains that would add to the family's sparse
monthly rations. “But in those days,” she
says, “I would just work and not worry, I was able to relax and laugh.” 

Over
time, the Shaikh family managed to build a fairly spacious house, extending
from her father’s workshed. Her mother trained, under a local organisation’s
scheme, to be midwife, and started earning a bit. But
when she was around 13 (Ainul, now in her 30s, has a sharp memory for details,
but on age and years she is hazy), her often-ailing father became ill with
paralysis for more than two years. The illness plunged the family deep into
poverty again. “We tried hard, the people from our mohalla helped too. But we could
not save him.” When Ainul was around 15, her father died. By the time she was
16, her brothers had arranged her marriage.

For
a while, Ainul stayed at her father-in-law Alim’s house. He would
spend some months in Mumbai making money from begging, she says, then a few months
in Amroha living off those savings. Her husband Jameel’s mother had died a
while ago, his brother was also a barber in Batwal mohalla. About a year after her
marriage, Alim brought Ainul to Mumbai.

Jameel
did odd jobs – as a porter in the recycling sector in Dharavi, earning Rs.
150-200 a day, travelling as a helper on trucks carrying rice and wheat to Uttar
Pradesh. Alim would help them with some money every now and then. Although he
was dissolute and liked to gamble, Ainul says, he was a buffer for her. 

For some years after coming
to Mumbai, Ainul didn’t work for an income. “I’d ask my husband to let me go to
the dargah
to beg,” she says, “I asked him if I could do domestic work, but he wouldn’t
let me go anywhere. He would give me Rs. 30 every day and I had to manage
everything in that. Our neighbours were kind and sometimes gave us leftovers.” When
her first-born became sick, defying Jameel’s strictures, Ainul stared going to
the dargah to work.

When
Alim died around eight years ago, “a very bad time started.” Jameel, always a
violent man, became even more brutal. “I’ve been beaten a lot,” Ainul says. “I’ve
heard a lot of dirty abuses from him. He shoved me on to the railway track in Mahim
once and asked me to die.” She shows me the old injury – when her knee split
open – from that fall. “He would beat me by hand, with sticks, with a chimta,
whatever he could find. What could I do?
I had to bear it.” 

Through
all this, Ainul had three children – two sons, Mohammad, now 15, Junaid, 9,
and a daughter, Mehjabeen, 11. “Sometimes, people asked me to leave my husband,”
she says, “but what would happen to my children? In our biradari
they would not then agree to their marriages.” 

After
a while, Ainul met a woman at the dargah who employed her as a house help for Rs. 600 a month. Since then, Ainul has
done a series of jobs –  in the ‘wadi
line' or catering work where contractors take labourers to wedding sites to clean
dishes, as a nurse in a home in suburban Jogeshwari. 

Over
the years, she has stayed – with her children, her husband often sleeping
on nearby pavements – in tiny rented rooms in Mahim-Dharavi, and a few times
out on the streets. Renting a room in Dharavi usually requires a deposit of at
least Rs. 5,000. Ainul often didn’t have that small capital. “But slowly I got
to know people, and would get a room without a deposit. I’ve had to leave many
rooms [for want of rent], come to the street, stay there, find another room,
leave…”

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In
January 2012, a fire started in her basti. “It was around 3 a.m., everyone was
sleeping,” Ainul recalls. “We climbed onto the roofs and ran.” After the fire,
she and her children stayed on the pavement at the Mahim-Sion bridge for eight
months; her husband was there too. “The monsoon was a very difficult time,” she
says. “When it poured, I’d take my kids and sit under the shelter of a nearby bhangar shop.” 

Local
organisations and leaders helped the people affected by the fire, Ainul says.
She too got grains, utensils, buckets, a stove, mats. Slowly, as Ainul’s circle of friends and
acquaintances grew, through them, around two years ago, she found the room the
family now stays in on the bridge. Unlike similar airless rooms, it has a large window and some breeze.
“It’s like a terrace there,” she tells me with some pride. 

Since
March 2015, Ainul has got a job as a waste paper sorter at a local non-profit
organisation that works on recycling and other issues. It gives her a steady monthly
salary of Rs. 6,000 – and it’s given her a sense of self-worth. From her salary, she pays Rs. 3,500 as room rent, and around Rs. 1,000 is spent on grains,
flour, some vegetables every month – the family’s ration card was lost in the
fire, and Ainul has not got another since. The rest of her income covers
electricity and other expenses. “I feel good now when my children eat till
their stomachs are full,” she says. 

The
family uses the public toilet block nearby. Water from a community tap costs
Rs. 200 a month (to be given to a local strongwoman); Ainul fills it every
evening between 7-8 p.m. – in buckets, dabbas, bottles. "My son Mohammad helps fill and
carry these,” she says. Her daughter Mehjabeen, sharp and busy with her schoolbooks
when I visit, is in Class 6; her younger son Junaid, shy and smiling, is in
Class 2, both in a nearby municipal school.

Mohammad
dropped out of school after Class 5, and occasionally works as a welder’s
helper for Rs. 100 a day, or sometimes earns a bit delivering books for a
neighbour. His ambitions are small – to have his own pavement bookstall like
their neighbour, or become a mechanic, like his uncle. Or, he says, “I really want
to be a barber, like others in my biradari, but I have to learn the trade… So I’ll
do any work, it’s okay, and will earn and give my mother some money.” 

Mohammed
now tries to stop his father when he wants to hit Ainul. So Jameel just shouts and shouts
at her. The beatings, hard work, and hunger of years have taken a toll on
Ainul’s health — she is pale, has blood pressure problems, frequent headaches.  

A
few times, Ainul has gone back to Batwal mohalla. There, she stayed with her
mother until she, long ailing from the effects of tuberculosis, passed away. “She
would send me some money, she tried to help… my Ammi,” Ainul says, softly. She still
visits her hometown every few years, and is even now preparing to take the train
back to Amroha for her niece’s wedding.

“In my heart I have this
desire that I should be able to build a small house for myself in my hometown.
That when I die, it should be on my own soil. My heart is not in Bambai … this
city suffocates me… In my gaon, even if we were hungry, we managed. My memories
are there, my childhood was spent there. I could laugh easily there.”

'In my village, I could laugh easily'

'ਆਪਣੇ ਪਿੰਡ ਵਿਖੇ ਮੈਂ ਸੌਖ਼ਿਆਂ ਹੀ ਹੱਸ ਸਕਦੀ ਸਾਂ'

‘మా గ్రామంలో నేను మనస్ఫూర్తిగా నవ్వగలిగేదాన్ని’

'எனது கிராமத்தில் நான் எளிதாக சிரித்துவிடுவேன்'

'ನನ್ನ ಹಳ್ಳಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ನಾನು ಮನಬಿಚ್ಚಿ ನಗಬಹುದಿತ್ತು'

‘আমার গ্রামে, আমি মনপ্রাণ খুলে হাসতে পারতাম’

‘ମୋ ଗାଁରେ ମୁଁ ସହଜରେ ହସିପାରେ’

‘मैं अपने गांव में, खुल कर हंस सकती थी’

‘माझ्या गावी किती मोकळ्याने हसायची मी’

’میں اپنے گاؤں میں، کھل کر ہنس سکتی تھی‘

Mumbai

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'In my village, I could laugh easily'

The story of Ainul Shaikh, who came to Mumbai from Amroha in UP, is that of a resilient spirit, a tenacious survivor. She has braved poverty, abuse and life on the streets to bring up her children with dignity

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