One of the one percent in 13 million.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

This time the Delhi winter passed in a jiffy. Jaisul is relieved about the season’s premature passing. He’s a rickshaw puller, he explains, and his business always plummets during the winter. Even so, he made a good use of the cold weeks, he says. He did so by boarding the Seemanchal Express for his Bihar village in janpad Araria. He came back a week ago.

“I hadn’t visited my family for almost a year,” he says after dropping off a customer one late night in a central Delhi colony. “Two months ago, when my eldest son called me on mobile, saying, ‘Papa, ab aa jao,’ I went back home the next day.”

Jaisul is in his sixties and has been a rickshaw puller in Delhi for 35 years. Not even once has any member of his family visited him in the city. “They have not seen how I live in Dilli… where I sleep… where I eat…” Jaisul has five children, and two of his sons work, like him, in cities far from their village–Surat and Ghaziabad. He organised the wedding of the youngest of his two daughters a year ago, and spent three lakh rupees for it. He had to borrow a part of the amount from a moneylender. “I’m still paying off the karza (debt)…. That’s why I didn’t go to the village for a long time. I would be working, working, working all the time in Dilli, earning money to settle the karza.”

Back when Jaisul was a young man, he didn’t follow the trend common with the village youth. Most of the men on coming of age would find work in nearby cities. Some would cross the international border to seek employment in next-door Nepal. Jaisul did not. Talking of the long-ago time, he says: “One evening, I was in the district headquarters for an errand, and in a chai stall I overheard a man remarking that a labourer could earn much more by doing the same kind of work in Dilli than in Bihar or Nepal.” The remark stayed with him.

At night, after parking his rickshaw, Jaisul dines in an eatery, and spends the night in a shuttered market shop. The kind shop owner lets him sleep within the premises for free. Every night before closing his eyes, Jaisul says, his thoughts drift to his eldest child. “My son is in his 20s, and he’s one hundred percent viklang, disabled from birth, completely dependent on his mother… we have to carry him in our arms to move him from here to there.”

While posing for a portrait, the mild-mannered gent says: ““But I don’t worry excessively… I focus on earning for the day.”

[This is the 607th portrait of Mission Delhi project]

Citizen Jaisul