‘Swachh Bharat, and people still clean gutters?’

In the Pul Pehlad mohalla (settlement) of Lal Kuan in outer Delhi, everybody knows ‘the boy with the pushcart’ or the ‘chilli-potato boy’. He is the youngest pushcart vendor in the area.

I spot him running through a narrow lane in the slum settlement, bordered with open sewers, to the empty space where he parks his handcart. He rolls the cart to the end of the lane, wedges stones against its wheels to keep it immobile, and disappears into a room. For 14-year-old Arjun Singh, who will soon load his cart with potato chips and momos for sale, this is a daily routine.

The shy but cheerful boy lives with his widowed mother, Laxmi Singh. Inside their small room, there is no furniture. A mirror adorns a wall, with a heart shaped out of brown tape stuck in a corner. ‘Laxmi+Arjun’, it declares. "I wrote that," says Arjun, "so whoever visits us can see our world in it."

It is an isolated and difficult world. 

On July 14, 2013, Arjun’s father Rajeshwar Singh died while cleaning the sewers at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. He had been employed there since 2011. He was one of three cleaners who inhaled toxic gases and died in the building's basement. The other two men were Ashok Kumar and Satish Singh; all of them were contractual workers at the government-run centre for the performing arts. All three belonged to the Valmiki Dalit community, and all of them lived with their families in the Valmiki basti of Trilokpuri (Laxmi later moved with Arjun to where her married daughter Minu lives, in Lal Kuan). 

Their son Arjun was barely 10 when Rajeshwar died. “My father was very handsome,” Arjun recalls. “I was so much like him. My eyebrows are just like his. I am short just like him. He loved bhindi [okra] and so do I. He loved to cook, and now I find I am cooking too, but out of necessity. He was very loving, and called me Chintu.”

What Arjun remembers most about his father is the song he would sing frequently – ‘Tum mujhe yoon, bhula na paogey’ (‘You will not be able to forget me easily’). "My biggest problem," Arjun says, "is that I cannot call anyone Papa anymore. I was not even 10 when Papa died. My mother was so distressed, she cried, and cried. Nobody helped us; all the relatives abandoned us. I feel I have to grow up as fast as possible so I can give my mother some comfort."

It is 3 p.m. as we speak, time for Arjun to get his wares ready. He grabs some potatoes from a sack and begins slicing them. After he has washed the chips, he casually adds in spices, talking about the whole process as if he were a masterchef on a television show. Then he begins to prepare the momos. Finally, everything is placed on the pushcart – gas cylinder, stove, cauldron, ladle, plates, chutney. His mother helps, arranging the corncobs. 

Arjun sells his snacks in the mohalla every afternoon after school, making a profit of Rs. 100-150 on good days, though sometimes as little as Rs. 50. Often,  people do not even pay the Rs. 10-15 he charges per plate, and buy from him on credit. Sales are generally higher on weekends and festivals.

It is a precarious livelihood, but essential to keep them going since the only other income is the Rs. 2,000 widow's pension that Laxmi gets from the government. The people nearby, she says, especially the men, are jealous of their small success, complaining that the roadside food vending dirties up the place. Mehrunnisa Khatun, a neighbour, says, "These men do not like it when a lone woman makes progress, especially when the woman is from the Valmiki caste. They are just waiting for a chance to get rid of the pushcart."