No mother, no father

The tap at the window is a sign to look away, don’t make eye contact, ignore the pleas.

That is the sum of expert survival advice on dealing with the thousands of hungry hands in New Delhi.

This trip has been for business so we are travelling with air-con and the protection that a shiny car and an elite hotel provides.  Cool, clean, separate, yet the barrier feels fragile.

I am not the first person to be put in a spin by world poverty – it is a slap in the face, possibly several short, sharp blows.  Coming from Australia, the place we are told repeatedly, is the lucky country, the dissonance is so vast it is hard to describe.

And yet the locals love their home. A young man on the plane as we flew in had a smile as wide as a slice of watermelon when he glimpsed the first twinkles of electric lighting on the horizon. 

I wondered as the power failed several times throughout the next day in our magnificent six star hotel, if the city disappears for a few minutes every now and then as the electricity fails.

But for millions there, electricity isn’t an issue –and neither are the myriad of other little things we bother about - long queues, a late bus, a cancelled TV show, chipped nail polish.

Life here is much tougher.

There are now about 11.7 million people living in New Delhi and more than eight per cent are scratching out an existence,  some on the proceeds of sympathetic travellers, others by scamming or offering to service the most basic needs – carrying a bag a few paces, guiding people a hundred metres to find the right path - in the hope that there will be a few rupee for their trouble.

It is possible that altruistic kindness is a luxury of the rich and unfortunately not one we indulge often enough.

It is also likely though that among the equally poor many little kindnesses take place every day – but here I feel this is a secret trade – all I see is hardship and the kind of desperation that makes people wily, dangerous and willing to take things to the edge.

This is a place where children dance through horrendous system-defying traffic in the hope of a few notes shoved out of wound down car windows. It is where pencil thin arms offer up mewling babies to perfect strangers as a symbol of neediness and hunger.

I am troubled by my ability to ignore the destitution when it is staring me in the face.

I have been told what will happen if I give money to one child – there will be another 50 waiting with hands outstretched.  In some places one act of kindness can cause chaos.

As we leave one monument we are followed relentlessly by a man who is obviously not right in the head. He is on our trail asking for money for train fare. He names his price. It is not much, but all around us there are more hands - map sellers, cheap postcards, tour guides, grandmothers with babies – everyone wants a piece of the action. We walk on as he grabs at us physically. The strain of saying no is awful.

Maybe it issues some telepathic message because the harder it gets to say no, the more persistent are his supplications. He is grabbing at our overfed western bodies until he is seen by another man on the street.  In an instant there is an incident.

He is beaten off with full punches by a cheery fellow who wants to protect us - probably for a price.

In the swell of all this motion, an open faced child with the smile of an angel wants to sell us a fan.

She is quick though, she sees another opportunity and talks soothingly to us.. “Follow me Madame – that man is crazy – never mind he is just crazy, this way is safest.”

She can’t be more than eight or nine.  There is a torrent of confused emotion, grief, sorrow, fear, superiority, anger, distaste and then the site of our shiny black taxi…relief.

We bustle in and leave little angel face on the footpath with no reward for her efforts.

And then there is guilt and recrimination – I want to go back and buy a fan. I want to talk to her, to find out if things could ever be better, if anything I could do could make a difference.

We swim into the tooting, swerving, throbbing traffic.  The air con lowers the temperature. We debrief to make ourselves feel better. The traffic lurches to a stop and I hear a tap tapping at the window.

Through the glass is another beautiful smile. Hand outstretched and then tapping alternately, he says…”Madam …please madam …no father …no mother”.

I want to open the door and say hop in. I want to make him spaghetti Bolognese on a cold winter night, I want to give him new Reeboks and a cricket bat and colored pencils and music lessons, but instead we drive on.