“SAVE THE GIRL-CHILD AND EDUCATE HER”. This stood bold and prominent against the crumbling brickwork of a school in suburban New Delhi.
The words had been painted passionately and aggressively, alongside anti-girl-abortion posters. It was here I first felt the solemnness and the reality of differences between Indian women and myself. This became an omniscient force and a shudder in my psyche whilst I traveled through India.
My trip to Rajasthan, northern India, was supposed to be an ignorant sightseeing trip. Instead, it moulded and reshaped itself into a silted, foggy mirror. One that reflected a distant culture and poverty that I knew existed, but one I didn’t think I was going to face.
Out of sight, out of mind, right?
I first glimpsed India’s street children pitched at the side of a cramped and littered roadside, begging and laughing. Some girls wore rags and others in saris. New Delhi’s streets do not care who dresses in threadbare or gold, because livestock shares their homes on the roadside. These children sleep on their concrete beds and the dust of the streets tucked them in at night.
It was apparent the ‘girl-child’ sprayed onto that school was present here.
A rickshaw met us with Manny, our ‘Warrior caste’ tour guide. We waited, desperate for air conditioning and water. Manny led us up through a concrete stairwell and to a small, cramped threshold where we huddled, thankful for being finally out of the throb of Delhi’s mean heat.
Through his puffed breath and the pooling sweat that trickled down his forehead, Manny introduced the charity that occupied this space.
The Saalam Baalak Trust (SBT). The charity was founded in Delhi to ‘provide a sensitive and caring environment’ for street children in India’s capital. Manny told us about Rhui Khan.
Khan, 18, was forced to adopt the New Delhi streets as her home when her family could not afford to keep her. The SBT took her in at aged five.
The anti-girl-abortion posters we saw were testament to the amount of abandoned baby girls at birth. Manny explained that traditionally, Indian daughters are an expensive burden on a poor family. Daughters do not provide money, when they find a husband the daughter’s family must pay their son-in-law’s family for maintenance and rent.
To save the girl-child means to dismantle a rhetoric that prevents women succeeding, education is the success if you survive. Rhui Khan represents the ‘girl-child’ narrative I saw on Delhi’s streets. She made it out and is now completing her education.
It appeared to me that India was ferociously trying to dismantle this narrative that had fossilised itself into tradition. However, a change in society takes time, and my three-week couldn't possibly be enough to write and tell these women's stories, nor should I take that glory from them.
Delhi’s ‘girl-child’ demonstrated to me the catastrophic contrast in terms of my womanhood and theirs.
Manny led us back into the swell of mid-day heat. I spotted the street children. I saw the girl-child, and I understood, just a little, more than I had done an hour before.
India and their girl children do not need my sympathy, but instead unity. Mutual respect. Understanding. This is education, and Delhi’s girl-child educated me.