Beggars Can Be Choosers

The Telegraph recently had an interesting article on beggars who are also money lenders to small traders. Apparently, the average beggar (without special deformities etc.) earns between 8 and 10 K per month.

Of course, since they can’t be seen to have any conspicuous consumption, they save most of their earnings and are tremendously cash rich. A beggar who drowned in the Hoogly recently left behind a “potli” on the banks. This bundle of cloth had Rs 75000 tied in it!

This kind of access to cash that they cannot be seen to have and that they cannot bank makes the beggars happily lend to the grocers and the fish-wallahs and the train-line candy-sellers at 6% interest, which suits both the lender and the borrower.

Begging, of course, is a time-honoured Indian tradition. Our Brahmins were only supposed to eat what they received in alms every day. Of course, in true Brahmin style, they made it a sin to turn a Brahmin away from your door (leading, eventually to the Ram-Ravan debacle) and made you feed them only the best. You had to feed a Brahmin at births and weddings and deaths and at all the other in-between festivals and occasions. But I digress.



Back to beggars, then. We grew up with some bizaare Urban Legends of begging. The big ones, of course, are the organized gangs that maim and blind (Slumdog Millionaire ishtyle). These are the real Gabbar stories our moms scared us with night when we couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to listen to them!

Not your mom? Well, mine has a strong sense of the macabre that has been honed to perfection after years of addiction to those lurid Hindi magazines that have been exposing the truth behind great supernatural and heinous crimes long before the television news channels. Her latest accumulation of the Urban Begging Legend is the story where the nanny “loans” out her “happy, healthy, milk-white” charge to professional beggars for an hourly fee. So when the parents are at work in their call-centres and BPOs the kids are at work in beggars’ arms. Talk about going to work young!

It’s true though, that when we were kids, the beggars with infants in their arms were more authentic looking. They looked more miserable, their babies looked more emaciated and undernourished and lethargic. There’s this woman on Camac Street now who has a beautiful, alert, kohl-eyed baby who’s obviously so well-fed he won’t even cry or look sad. He chuckles back at you when you smile. This woman carries a clean, brand new but empty feeding bottle in her free hand and begs for money to buy milk for the child.

The first time she came to me when I was driving to work, I opened the passenger door and asked her to sit. I said I’d take her to the mithai-store around the corner and buy her some milk. I said I’d do it every day if she fed the kid in front of me.

She disappeared. She’s still on Camac Street most days but she now keeps a wary eye out for my car and makes sure she doesn’t approach me.