Cattle spurn them; goats nibble at them when there’s nothing better. But Nazia’s family of four lives on the weeds that sprout wild alongside train tracks. It’s their staple.

‘I can’t afford to buy fish or meat… I can’t even afford vegetables. So it’s mostly potatoes, and when I can’t buy those either, it’s these weeds,’ says Nazia, her eyes down-cast. Nazia is an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh, ‘squatting’ in a shack beside the train track in Gobra, off Park Circus, east Kolkata. There are hundreds of such shacks alongside hers.

When we go to visit her, the frail door to her shack has a lock on it. Would anyone want to rob a shack as mean-looking as Nazia’s, we wonder? Though most of her neighbours seem just as poor as Nazia’s family, a local NGO’s field worker tells us she hasn’t seen anyone eating weeds in her 10 years of working among these squatters. Nazia is in her early twenties, already has two kids, and looks anaemic. Yet, it is not food she worries about, at least not food for herself…

… Nargis will soon become ineligible for support at Snehaneer, when she turns two. And the government-run Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) takes in children only after they turn three. Which is a little odd, because most vulnerable babies would either be malnourished beyond hope or dead by then.

The signs of recovery that Nargis has only just begun to show will soon disappear if she is taken off the diet. The NGO has therefore decided to let her keep visiting Snehaneer till she turns three and becomes eligible for ICDS. ‘If not for the NGO, my daughter would have died long ago,’ says Nazia. She should know: hunger is a daily battle; she fights it with weeds.

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