Menaka Rao
Ashu waited for me outside the hotel. He is a skinny man, and was visibly uncomfortable standing in the lobby of the hotel. He insisted on meeting me in the hotel, and not in Krishna Nagar, where he lives.
He says his father was a municipal waste worker. But he drank so much that the children could not go to school. Ashu dropped out of school in his 7th standard. He became a contractual waste picker after his father’s death.
“There is no future in this work, Madam,” he told me, shaking his head. He feels the futility of his job, while not being able to see a way out.
“I just don’t want to go to work, especially during the monsoon. The waste which I carry on my back just gets right into my clothes and trickles down my body. There is dal, curry, all kinds of food,..,” he said, trailing off and making a face full of disgust. His school-going son asked him one day why he did waste work. “I felt very bad that day,”he said.
During one monsoon, about ten years ago, his family had to leave the house, built by his grandfather, because it got dangerous. The floor of his house cracked further and further, threatening to collapse. “We kept thinking the floor would stop caving, but it kept getting worse,” he said. They now live in a rented premise, cutting into their meagre income.
So when he fractured his leg this year because of an accident at work, he had to borrow nearly Rs 20,000. He was out of work for three months.
“There is no future in this work, madam,” is his only refrain.