Walking with Salaam Balaak

A guided morning walk through the back lanes near the Old Delhi Train Station. The walk is hosted by the Salaam Baalak (salute/honour children) Trust, www.salaambaalaktrust.com, an organization supporting street children, especially children for whom the train station has become home. 

Two ex-homeless children lead our walk: Tabrez and Ajay, both now in their late teens. Tabrez separated from his parents at six, has had a childhood of pick pocketing and glue sniffing, and is now starting university. The Trust began by using theatre in the stations to attract children, to build trust, and to introduce alternatives to the homeless street life. We are told that glue sniffling and drug use is common, as is physical abuse. The heads of many of the boys we meet (the Trust also works with girls), shaven to kill lice, reveal extensive scarring, and infections around their eyes. Some have been beaten by family members, some by older boys, many by the police – many by all three. The Trust provides medical and emotional support, accommodation and some basic literacy training, and eventually tries to place children in family homes. 

At one of the Trust’s centres, participants in our walking group play hand games with individual boys. Some quickly become animated and smile, others remaining withdrawn, faces blank, eyes open but never connecting with us. 

I make a rough sketch of Rahu, maybe six years old, then asked him to do one of me, which he does – somewhat mechanically or mistrustfully or obediently, perhaps guardedly calculating this attention from a stranger. He draws a circle first, then a curly head of hair, a nose, a smiling mouth, then a long rectangular body with stick toes and fingers. I point to my ears, which he obligingly adds, then eyes, again added. None of this is done with visible enthusiasm until I hold up our sketches between us and smile into his eyes. Then he too smiles, but so momentarily that I might have missed it. A glimmer of pleasure or another expectation he calculates must be met? 

It feels good to be with these children, to hear their life stories, to see their brightly painted pictures on the wall, to feel signs of the beginning of trust … all the more so after stealing ourselves against the appeals of other begging children who have approached us on the street and in the Delhi station itself.