A few days ago, I saw a huge hoarding on the road outside the suburban railway station that I use most often. It bore the faces of a couple of local worthies, who are known to control a couple of local unions. The hoarding was split in two parts. One part expressed a noble sentiment: ‘It’s My City. It’s Our City.’ The other half expressed a less noble sentiment: ‘Keep Station Clean. Please Do Not Purchase From Hawkers.’
Of course, nobody paid it the least bit of attention. There continues a steady trade of fruit on that road, as it does outside every railway station in and around Mumbai. Which is, I believe, exactly as it should be.
Most commuters in this city are quite harried. Many travel under an hour, but there are lakhs of people who travel two hours each way. This translates into sleep deprivation, exhaustion, irritable parenting and a tendency to eat too many unhealthy preservative-laden snacks. The availability of food — fruits, vegetables, and cheap, reasonably healthy meals that can be packed up and taken home — just outside a railway station is a lifesaver. If the hawkers weren’t there, people would have to travel another couple of kilometres to buy food. It would mean the expense of energy, time, and money, in case one hired an auto-rickshaw or taxi to go grocery shopping.
What was especially troublesome about that hoarding was its use of the cleanliness ethic against hawkers, shifting blame onto those who are least responsible for spreading garbage around. A lot of the rubbish tossed around stations is actually plastic packaging, water or juice bottles and cartons of drinks that are bought not from hawkers who stand outside, but either from the official stalls on the platforms or elsewhere. Some of the muck is just rubble: stones, broken tiles, mud and cement left over from constructions jobs, for which the construction contractors ought to be held responsible.
Hawkers outside stations are a key ingredient of the glue that holds a big city together. If there wasn’t such a huge demand for easy access to food and other cheap goods right next to the railway stations, the hawkers wouldn’t survive very long. Everyone recognises this — those of us who purchase things, the cops, and the municipal authorities too. Yet, instead of simply creating cheap, legally rentable hawking spots, so the poor can also do business without being punished for it, the municipalities of Mumbai and surrounding areas continue to press for their removal.
A few months ago, I noticed few stalls around the station and those few were unlit. No bulbs, no lamps, only hushed tones. I asked what was up and was informed that the municipality was cracking down on hawkers. But they thought, as the municipality ought to have known too, that things would return to normal in a few days. It was inevitable. The only thing accomplished by such a crackdown was that a few young men lost their goods and their savings, and some others were chased out of the business by the better-off ones who could afford to sit it out for a few days.
I, for one, am an unapologetic patron of the stalls outside the station. Even if I return home at night, long after all other shops in the market have packed up and left, I can still pick up fruit or an emergency snack.
Ultimately, they made for a more secure, more pleasant environment. Their absence translates into a silent, dark and zero personality zone around the station. It is thanks to them and their one-bulb stalls that I can stand around at midnight, waiting for an auto-rickshaw, without a shred of fear. You could even say that it is thanks to the hawkers that I can look around me as I wait, reading hoardings planted on the road that ask me not to buy things from hawkers.
The author is a writer of essays, stories, poems and scripts for stage and screen
