A fat cockroach wobbles in through the gap under the last door at the damp, congested chawl in Pandit Chowk, in the Capital’s Mandavali area. On the floor inside the 6x6ft space a hot case lies open with a stale puri from the previous night. There’s a bed piled with unwashed clothes, a gas stove, a wall shelf with aluminium containers and a few shrivelled-up vegetables, an out-of-order television on the wall and a small prayer unit with images of Hindu gods. A saucer with the morning’s chai is swarming with flies. Five-year-old Payal raises it to her lips and polishes off every last drop. She and her siblings Sunny and Keerti are hungry, having had only tea since the morning. They are waiting for the hot food that will soon arrive at the anganwadi located past their tenement’s common toilet, in the vicinity of foul smelling drains.

“Being poor is a curse. Life tells us each day that we have no right to live,” says their mother, Kavita, dressed in a pink salwar-kameez. Beads of sweat line her lips, which are coloured with bright red lipstick. She’s just returned after doing domestic work in three nearby houses.

She will return for another shift in the evening. Her husband, Vir Pal, is a vegetable vendor who remains drunk most of the time and gambles away the little he earns, neighbours say. Kavita makes it a point to dress up every morning to lift her spirits, especially after the nightly fights and beatings inflicted by her drunken husband.

Last week, Kavita’s landlord had rung her up suddenly, asking her to check in on the room diagonally opposite hers. It was mid-morning, hours before the news was all over the media. Three little girls — Mansi (8), Shikha (4), and Paro (2) — had been found dead in that room. The sight of the dead children haunts Kavita incessantly.

While the autopsy reports are still awaited and some authorities suspected poisoning as the cause of death, the tragedy is literally too close to home for Kavita — three children of a migrant family, a drunk and missing husband, abject poverty, and the constant battle with hunger.

Everybody at the chawl knows that the dead children’s absconding father, Mangal, used to be a rickshaw puller who was constantly drunk. His rickshaw was recently stolen and he couldn’t find another job. On July 21, they moved to a friend’s room at the chawl in Pandit Chowk, possibly in order to save on rent. Barely three days later, the children were found dead.

There was hardly any time for Kavita or her other neighbours to get to know the new family and, yet, their desperate condition is an all-too-familiar tale within the chawl, where everybody is teetering on the edge.

“The girls may not have died only of starvation. But it is undeniable that hunger was very much a part of their lives. The family seems to have been through several recurrent economic shocks, unemployment, a stolen rickshaw, ill-health and food insecurity. At some point, it all tipped over. Having a ration card might have eased them to the extent of having one less shock to bear,” says rights activist Harsh Mander, director of the Centre for Equity Studies. Mander argues for the portability of the rights of migrant workers, whereby the right to food can be secured across borders.

Migrant shocks

Kavita and her husband moved to Delhi from Uttar Pradesh. Two of their children, Sunny and Payal, were born in a city hospital and the third, Keerti, was born at home. Kavita says rats ate up the birth certificate of Payal, so she and the home-born Keerti have no Aadhaar card and cannot get admission to school. “The authorities ask me for ₹200 to get each card done,” Kavita says. She doesn’t have the card either, but her husband has one.

Sunny, the eldest child, alone attends the neighbouring government school, where he is given free midday meals. Since not all the family members have an ID, they have been unable to apply for a ration card.

Many of the 28 families in the chawl say they have paid bribes, but a ration card continues to elude them.

Kavita says there are days her children watch as she searches frantically inside the house for fallen coins, if any, to buy food. She asks her employers for a loan to buy some grains, dal and vegetables for the day. She also owes her landlord rent for two months (₹2,500 a month).

The previous night’s kali masoor dal smells stale, so they will squeeze in a lemon and bite a chilli to make do with it until the next meal.

“A ration card would free us from relying on the mercies of others to stay alive,” she says, adding the card would entitle her five-member family to 25 kg of free rice and wheat.

“I have tried to die,” she confesses, in a whisper. “Each time, I am compelled to live for the sake of my kids.”

Shriya Mohan