Rounding the corner at the end of Nehru Street, my destination was a store that maintained a set of phones.  Next to this phone store was a food counter.  Standing near the food counter was a woman in a dirty blue sari.   She was watching me approach.  I steeled myself to resist her begging.  I had to walk right up to her to get in the door.  I did so, took my sandals off and reached to open the door, as I did she just looked at me and smiled. I talked to Amy on the phone for about 15 minutes and then headed for the hotel.  The time was about 11:30, later than I had stayed out and probably not the safest thing to be doing, but I am more comfortable being out late in Pondy than I am in the US.   Putting my sandals on, I started across the street, the hotel being on the outside of the road forming the ring around Pondy.   Crossing streets in India is tricky, even late at night.   I got stranded in the middle of the street as a bunch of cars raced around a corner.   As I was waiting for an opportunity to cross the second half I noticed that I was now heading directly for a group of women holding babies, including the woman I had noticed earlier.   As I crossed the street the women surrounded me with hands outstretched.   My focus landed on the infants sleeping undisturbed in the woman’s arms as they swarmed around me.   I had accumulated a bunch of 1 or 2 rupee coins throughout the day.    Further deviating from my no money to beggars promise, I dropped one coin in each woman’s hand.   I noticed at this point that the woman I had seen earlier was not among the beggars.  She had sat down in the street next to a sleeping girl, another baby in her arms.   I walked on to the hotel.

Back in my room, I opened the bag of sweets I had been carrying.   I didn’t feel much like eating them anymore.   I closed the bag, tried to wash some of the grit of the day and went to bed.    I couldn’t stop thinking about the women on the street.   Where they from a scheduled-caste of beggars, where they from successful middle-class families but had fallen on misfortune?   My thoughts were evenly divided between curiosity and empathy.

I just couldn’t sleep.    Getting dressed again, I grabbed the bag of sweets and left the hotel.  As I walked out onto the street my watch indicated the time was 12:00 midnight.

I walked up the street.  The women were sitting on the sidewalk.   My purposeful stride and the late hour must have caught them by surprise.  They remained sitting as I walked right into the middle of the group and handed the bag of sweets to the woman whom I had first noticed, the one who hadn’t asked anything of me.

Then I sat down in the dirt.  The sidewalk was covered in black sooty grime, the same color as the slimy sewage that seeped by in the ditch a few feet away.

As soon as I sat down the women sprang to action, placing a baby in my arms.   My own daughter Abby would have been fussing and screaming with all this commotion.  The first baby just kept sleeping.  I had the feeling that this was more a factor of health or nutrition than a peaceful demeanor.   After a few minutes I handed the first child back.  The woman who I had given the sweets to now handed me her younger child, a boy.   Her daughter slept between the two of us.   She was lying on a multi-colored sheet but her head had moved off and was on the raw dirt.   The woman started to shake her awake but I stopped her.  

As I held her baby I asked her a single word question: “Why?”

She understood.  With the help of another woman she explained that she had married at 17 and when she was 20 her husband left her.   She was 23 now.  She had no idea where he was.  She showed me a leather strand, about the thickness of a shoelace, around her neck, an evident symbol of her status as a married woman.  

I asked if she had lived in a home, she had.   Husband gone, she lost the home.

Were the other women in this group her family?  No.  But they helped each other out.   They would watch each others kids while taking a shift begging.  They would get about 25 rupees per day.  60 cents.

The hopelessness of their situation was apparent to me.  It pulled on my shoulders like a heavy weight.   My work and educational training is essentially centered on solving problems.   I could see no solution to this problem.   For the 10 minutes that I sat there taking turns holding babies I lost the impulse to find a solution to their problem.  But I decided that I could no longer withhold money from a woman asking for help to feed her family.  I would continue to refuse to give money to children, my part of an attempt to break the cycle.  Otherwise I would take each supplicant on a case-by-case basis, with a goal of giving as much as I could.

I don’t know why the woman in the blue sari had never asked anything of me.   Maybe it was the icy indifference of my face, initially steeled to oppose her request.  Maybe the dignity of an earlier time had resurfaced.  I don’t know, but her resolve and poise marked a change in my attitudes.   Being part of the group in India that have the money, the jobs and the future provides a certain filtered perspective on the problem of the hopelessly poor that probably appears aloof and distant to the poor.

Sitting in the dirt in the middle of the night, with rats and cockroaches scurrying around the sleeping children gives you an entirely different perspective.   I felt connected to them in a “there but for misfortune go I” type of sentiment.   What if it was Sarah sleeping in the dirt, with Abby too malnourished to cry in my arms?

I tried to summon the guts to hand them my hotel room key, explain which hotel, explain how to get to room 305, instruct them to return tomorrow, I would be here, taking their place sleeping in the dirt.  Couldn’t do it.

Instead I returned to my room.  It was too much for me to comprehend how so many people could get in this situation and have no possible way out.