The Ragpicker King and His Lost Paradise

For a ragpicker, it is never a journey from rags to riches, it is forever from rags to remains, trash to tatter and from poverty to paucity, writes Pradipta Mohapatra

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"WISH I had never gone for work," said Mitthu, carrying the guilt of his son’s death on his shoulders.

He was away picking rags from the ravages and ruins when a fierce fire with awesome flames engulfed the entire slum and gutted around 800 jhuggis. Mitthu stayed in a jhuggi, his home for over two decades in Rohini slum of Delhi. He lost his two and half year old baby Bittu, his lifelong savings of little over a lakh of rupees, and all his belongings to the blazing fires including the train tickets to their village in Jharkhand for his youngest sister's marriage. The ragpicker king’s paradise of dreams was lost leaving him with just nothing, and a day later he was sorting through the wreckage hoping to retrieve something dear to his heart, the burnt tender bones of his baby boy.

Now he doesn't even have a tent to call it a roof over his head. His wife is bemoaning the death of their child, unless she stops that she won't survive. His sister's marriage is to be shifted to some time in future. The whole family now inherits the irreparable loss; the four minor children go picking rags with their parents from morning to late night without a day break making some money fast and steady so that the postponed marriage in their village can take place sometime sooner.