Bum-Life Foodchain

This place has redefined what I expect in a beggar. Those guys who sleep in parks, with stolen shopping carts full of clothes and blankets, who live on clean benches and eat at homeless shelters and rant about the satellites controlling their minds…posers. I still feel bad for those who got a raw deal, like the veterans who were shunned by society and wound up holding signs on the highway, but to earn my quarter now you've really got to up your game.

It started with a husband and wife-judging by their simple, misshapen wedding bands-who could not have been more than fourteen years old. The husband wore a tattered, dusty suit, and stood behind his wife with his arm around her. She wore a filthy dress, not the kind of brightly colored sari with shimmering jewels you hope to see in India, and rubbed one hand over her belly while holding the other one out. Pregnant? That's a voluntary plight. Hungry? Nowhere near as hungry as the real hard-luck cases. It might tug at the heartstrings of someone who's never seen such a thing, and would certainly get to me back on the streets of America, but in this place they're the top of the bum-life foodchain.

Beggars here can't make it on sympathy alone; they've really gotta earn the empathy for an unimaginable plight I've never felt and would rather die than suffer.

Next up: a pants-less child covered in dirt, his shirt two years past fitting his malnourished body. Close.

The line of toothless beggar women sitting on the fetid dirt street outside the Hare Krishna temple, arms outstretched for alms? They could be my grandmother, but for the grace of God. Closer, but still no cigar.

The slightly-dusty children I saw playing in the street a moment ago, now hanging their heads with too-well-practiced woe-is-me eyes, holding their hands to their mouths and gasping "chapatti…chapatti…" while gesturing towards a hawker stand? Yeah right-they're the owner's kids trying to drum up business. They hit me up every couple days.

But there's a one-legged old woman with a broken prosthesis and a tiny baby trying with hunger-slowed movements to claw her shirt open and get at her wrinkled, dried up breasts. She has three rotten teeth on one side and a scar on the other from whatever horrible fate left barren the rest of her mouth. Her eyes are frosty with cataracts, but not too dull to spot a westerner when one comes near; it's like she can smell the rupees in my pocket, sure as I can smell her from down the street. She has nothing to do but while her days flaunting various infirmities for empathy, babysitting her grandchild and using him as a prop in a desperate bid for worthless paper notes.

And fifty yards away is an all-marble temple built with stone imported from Italy, housing deities which a sign says cost just over one million rupees per year to dress and "feed" and "serve."

Journalism I report on sports, travel, and local news. I'll cover anything, anytime, anywhere. Let me know how I can serve your publication.

Photography My fine art photography is on permenant display at Cuban Pete's in Montclair, NJ, and is represented in numerous private collections. I do commercial, documentary, fine art, and other photography by commission.

Creative Writing I write commissioned biographies and other works of any length (from short narratives to full length books), and have several book-length manuscripts currently under consideration.