Sunday 11 March 2012

The mark of Cain

On a December afternoon in Delhi, with the sky a sullen grey and the cold gnawing at your bones, there is nothing better than a warm place indoors. The Sunday morning worship doing no wonders to lift my spirits up, I rushed home from church, grabbed a quick bite of lunch and hit the bed. But my siesta was interrupted by a commotion outside. Groggy-eyed, I turned to the balcony to watch. Many others too were craning their necks to watch the spectacle in the common space between two rows of apartments in our LIG colony. (Low-income-group flats, each of which has one bedroom, a living space and kitchen.)
There was a motley crowd below, some of them beating a boy, others whispering his ‘crime’ to late-comers, and some others watching the scene, perhaps like Saul who watched Stephen being stoned to death but did not want blood on his hands. The sole voice of reason from a scrawny lad to call the police and not to take the law into one’s own hands was outshouted with a “Chup raho...”.
I could not see the boy’s eyes (I would not have dared to look into those), but I gathered that he must have been nine or 10. He was clothed in no more than a shirt and a sweater that was barely enough to keep the cold away, and I don’t remember if he had a pair of shoes on. His hair was dishevelled and his hands and feet bore telltale signs of winter, his dry skin looking like cracked porcelain. The boy could hardly take the blows anymore, and once he turned like a top before falling to the ground.
His crime? The little boy had wandered into the corridors of the flats, and seeing a neatly made bed in the front room of my neighbour’s flat, slipped between the warm ‘rajai’ (blanket).
Perhaps all he wanted to do was to sleep in a warm bed, which he otherwise never did.  But the little girls of the house who came in after playing outside saw a stranger sleeping in their bed and started screaming (only fairy tales have friendly dwarfs who let a Snow White stay). The ‘thief’ was immediately captured, a few questions asked and then blows rained on him.
Winter is the cruellest time for the homeless poor in north India (monsoon in other places). Media reports say more than 350 people died of the cold in the region this winter. Thousands of people in India have only the sky as their roof. 
Homelessness not just robs people of an address, but it robs them of their dignity too. Here are some chilling statistics. Action Aid in 2003 found out that there were 78 million homeless people in India. CRY (Child Relief and You) in 2006 estimated that 11 million homeless children live on the street.
What the streets can do to children is anyone’s guess. I dread to think of what happened to the child I saw years ago in Delhi. The gates of prisons are forever open to children like him.
Jacob Riis, a photojournalist, documented the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s in his book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. The book portrayed the Dickensian setting in which children lived or worked for a living. He blamed the apathy of the middle class and the rich for turning their tenement into dens of vices and crime. Public reaction soon followed, which led to improvements in their living conditions.
“The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the waiting was deciphered,” is the first line of Riis’ book. The ‘mark’ that God set upon Cain has come to be referred to as a person's sinful nature. But this article is not about the sinful nature of people who are pushed into a world of crime and violence by circumstances beyond them, like the ones whom Riis speaks of or whose lives he documents, but about people like us who do not know how the other half lives.
“Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat,” Riis wrote in the Introduction to his book.
Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Osthathios, in his Theology of a Classless Society, says “hardly anybody is non-violent in our exploiting structure of injustice in which we are all voluntarily or involuntarily involved. The alternative is not between violence and non-violence but between greater and lesser violence, between structural and special violence and between hidden and manifest violence. If we are silent about the endemic violence of the unjust economic, cultural and social structure of our society and raise a hue and cry about the bloody revolution which is a result of the former, we are justifying the evil tree and condemning only the evil fruit.”
That means we are as guilty as anyone else in perpetuating structures that kill and maim. How will we escape having blood on our hands? Like Cain, who has killed his own brother, are we seeking a mark on our head lest others might harm us when we ourselves are guilty?
The question still burns, "Where is your brother?”