Shoe Santa gives free footwear to the barefoot

Sharmila Ganesan-Ram | TNN

Mumbai: The man sleeping outside a shop near at Kandivli station is drunk. His shirt is smelly, his hair muddy, and a hand shields his face as if to say do not disturb. Yet, there is something about this drunk that makes 21-year-old Nandan Pandya shake him awake. “Do you have slippers?’’ asks Pandya. The man’s brow furrows. Pandya ferrets out a pair of new black plastic slippers from a polythene bag and asks him to try them on. He takes the pair, fidgets with one, then holds the slippers close to his chest and salutes the ground. It’s Pandya’s cue to leave.

For the last eight, Pandya, now a final-year engineering student, has greeted many owners of unhappy feet in this way. Most are “too overwhelmed to emote’’.Every week,Pandya buys at least six or seven pairs of slippers and scans the streets for cracked heels, swollen ankles, raw soles—any evidence of prolonged barefootedness. His target audience includes garland sellers, hawkers, beggars, pavement dwellers—people who can’t afford to throw shoes at politicians no matter how much they want to.

Pandya spends Rs 200 to 300 on his goody bag, and buys only plastic slippers. “Many people want rainy shoes as they suffer from various foot diseases when they unknowingly step into puddles,’’ he says. Beggars outside Kandivli station automatically refrain from extending their palms before him. He has already paid them for life.

Pandya’s sole-searching began when he donated clothes to the son of a garland seller. Though thankful, she asked him to give her son a pair of slippers instead. “She said her son wouldn’t step out because he did not find slippers his size,’’ says Pandya, who got him a size ten pair. Soon distributing shoes became a daily ritual.

Pandya is careful to approach women only when they are in a group otherwise “people start suspecting my intentions’’. Once, he was distributing chappals to kids when a mob gathered, “some thought I was going to abduct them.’’ But this sort of hostility is something he is now immune to. Onlookers mostly stare out of curiosity, but hardly offer to help, says Pandya, whose parents were unaware of his charitable work until he recently told his mother “as I had to borrow money from her for this purpose’’.

There are times when he runs out of shoes and takes the beggar or labourer to the nearest roadside shop to buy them a pair. While travelling by train, he mostly stumbles upon middle-aged beggars, so Pandya carries “size seven or eight’’. His goody bag contain only chappals though, (older people prefer chappals). Sometimes, however, there are demands. Like the woman who asked for squeaky shoes for her one-year-old child.

As someone who has volunteered with NGOs working with underprivileged kids, Pandya is well aware that poverty might impel some of his recipients to sell his gift. Though he is careful to add warnings like “Please don’t sell these’’, it doesn’t really bother him if they do. “I don’t give because they will use the shoes, I give because they need it.’’

The foot service has changed Pandya in some ways. “I don’t shout now when the rickshawallah refuses to hand me Rs 5 balance,’’ he says. Once, when he was a student, his shoes fell into a drain and Pandya had to walk barefoot to hail an auto. “It was embarrassing,’’ recalls the young boy, who finds it hard to digest the idea of today’s protesters who willingly part with their expensive trainers.