Scene From Delhi - 3

A small child, maybe three years old, chases after me as I come out of a restaurant at Connaught Place. He tugs at my jeans as I reach for my cell phone. I stop and look down at him. He puts his open hand out, touches his mouth, touches his stomach: the holy trinity of Indian beggardom. His feet are bare and filthy, and one toenail looks mightily infected. His shorts are shoddily cut off at the thigh, revealing legs not nearly as thick as my lower arm. He has a button down shirt that used to belong to someone maybe ten times his size: only two buttons exist on this abbreviated piece of cloth. The bottom of the shirt is more cleanly cut than the shorts, but still obviously an ad-hoc construction. The pattern is alternating light blue and white. He stares at me intently, making his holy pattern. His eyes are huge and dark with a kind of sad depth. I am uncharacteristically swayed towards giving him some money or something, when I see that his "father" is intently watching our paused interaction from the parking lot. His father looks like he's nearly salivating at the thought of the ten rupees I might give this kid. I'm disgusted by this economic whoring of children, and I move on, the boy still clutching the seams of my jeans. I round a corner and look back, the "father" still staring, optimistic that I'll cave and hand his kid some pittance to get rid of him. A block later, despite my repeated Hindi admonitions for him to go and ask someone else, the boy is still hanging on, as if for dear life. I stop again and he looks up at me, still pleading, wordlessly, in his holy beggar sign language. I tell him, firmly, "Nahi." No. I'm not going to give him 5 rupees just so he can give it to his "father," who, more likely than not, will just go off and booze with it. "Nahi." He tugs my jeans in something like the motion of a wide punch, turns and runs back. As he runs away, he turns back over his shoulder, stops for a second, looks at me, looks back in the direction he came, then runs back to find some other sucker for his father. I just wonder what he was thinking about in that one second pause as he looked at me. "How heartless?" "Can I run away?" "What a waste of time," perhaps? Or, maybe, "You'll just never understand."