Hutment razed not the will to do well

Sharmila Ganesan Ram | TNN

When Arif Shaikh got his SSC marksheet, he could sense its power to bring a smile on his parents’ faces. Arif, who had scored 71.69%, wished he could call them immediately. But that wasn’t possible as neither do they have cellphones, nor does his plastic home opposite the Mahalaxmi station have a landline.

Shaikh lives on the street, in a home that’s made of plastic and bamboo, in anticipation of the familiar municipality bulldozer. Almost every six months, his illegal house, which encroaches on railway property, is reduced to rubble, leaving the family of four roofless.

It happened last December just before Shaikh’s preliminary examinations. His mother, a housewife, was away tending to his ailing grandfather in their village while his father, a housekeeper, and brother, a small steel company employee, were at work. Along with his house, a table fan and his brother’s watch also disappeared, probably stolen by a neighbour. So this student of Marvadi Vidyalaya in Mahalaxmi had to bunk lectures at his Lower Parel coaching class where he had been enrolled by Akanksha, an NGO for street kids. Since the family couldn’t pay electricity bills, that too was cut off. A kerosene lamp at his house would light up only a quarter of the shanty. So at night, the 15-year-old would go to his cousin’s home near Race Course, to study. He stopped eating before exams, “as I was tensed.’’

The forced starvation paid off and an ecstatic Arif, who scored 80 in English, wants to study commercial art. Something he decided, perhaps, while helping his brother build a new makeshift shanty with bamboos.