Street stories: Six rupees

Six rupees. That’s all Shehnaaz’s family of five earns in a good day–for cutting about 240 rubber slipper straps.

How do you stretch six rupees to feed five through a day?

And the puzzle is: it is not hunger and poverty that Shehnaaz, 15, wants to talk about …

… Shehnaaz is precocious; something she shares with Didi, her older sister. Her Didi is now into her second year at college. ‘Didi is very bright. She is very good at studies . . . she even finds English easy,’ Shehnaaz beams. Didi tutors schoolchildren and so earns to pay for books and college fees.

But doesn’t Didi give some money towards running the house, we ask. ‘She does, but most of it is spent on medicines for Baba (father) and rent. And then, she has to spend some money on good clothes for herself, else people will not welcome her into their homes. She is out from 10 in the morning until 11 at night. How much more can we expect her to work?’

Shehnaaz will do anything to pay her way through school, even work at the nearby Khadim shoe factory. But she’s a ‘grown-up’ girl, and her mother will not allow her to go there: many boys work there too.

Apart from the uniform, she has another problem with school, and that’s English. Try as she might, she just cannot figure it out. English was introduced this year at Class V, and Shehnaaz fears that unless someone coaches her, she might fail.

So it is out of strap-cutting that Shehnaaz will have to ‘make some money’. She doesn’t mind, she says. ‘Because, sometimes I feel very hungry and find it difficult to concentrate.’

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