All roads lead to their home

CHENNAI: This Christmas, nine-year-old U Geetha did not complain of Santa not keeping presents in her stockings. For she neither knows about Santa nor has stockings. Sleeping in the open, by the road in Parrys, with her 14-member joint family, Geetha has forgotten to complain-- even about the bitter cold that pricks the city this time of the year.
A recent study supported by the Centre had found that Tamil Nadu has the highest number (7.3%) of urban homeless in the country.Extreme poverty topped the list of reasons for people coming to the streets, with the highest being in Chennai (73.75%)
For Selvi Mani (25), Geetha's aunt, these statistics are just cold numbers that make little sense. A rectangular strip of pavement outside the Madras Medical College hostel has remained her family home for the last three generations. Living here with her husband, three children, her three sisters (and their families that are just as big) and their mother, the group stack up their few belongings a few clothes, some papers, a couple of steel vessels and two plastic drums -- in cartons.
While a few other families further down the road have managed to create temporary shelters from plastic boards and sheets, Selvi's family has a weather-beaten plastic sheet, wide enough to shelter two small children, that droops over four weak poles on the sidewalk. "What we do to beat the cold? We spread out newspapers and lie down on the road to sleep at night. We cover the children with one of our sarees to try and keep them warm," says Selvi, who studied till class III, was married when she was 15 and whose oldest son is now 12-years-old. Her husband is an auto driver.
As daylight fades, her sisters Mekala and Selvanayagi -- married to a fisherman and a worker in a food stall respectively -- are busy rummaging through the boxes for a bed sheet. Both women keep an occasional eye out for their five children in a group of eight who are running around in circles one minute and piling on top of each other the next.
Jersia, the youngest of the four sisters, is 17 years old. She dropped out of school in class VII. Their mother Alamelu (50) had six daughters in all with the eldest living further away. Her second daughter passed away.
As a wood fire, used to cook meal of rice for the children, continues to burn on the pavement, the family matriarch is busy piling up all the garbage that has been swept around them stray pieces of paper and plastic to set up a fire. "The smoke keeps the mosquitoes away," says Geetha, playing on a cycle rickshaw parked nearby.
They have not faced any problem from police or criminals, Selvi says, but they live in perpetual fear of being run over by errant vehicles. What happens when it rains? She points at the row of small CD stalls running perpendicular to the street. "When it rains, we wait for the shops to close around 11 pm and then go sleep there. We don't move anywhere when seasons change. We've been here for years and will continue to stay here. For us, winter is just as hard as summer or the rains."