The Boy From Nowhere In Particular
EPISODE 1: WHAT BISHAL KNOWS ABOUT BORDERS
“Doesn’t ricket sound like cricket?” Bishal said the first time we talked. Bishal is eight, with a small mark on his face from falling off a chair when he was three. But this mark made him think he was Tanjiro from Demon Slayer, and he wants to help people by saving them from demons. He was born in Gorakhpur, but his mother says he is from Syangja, a district in the hills of western Nepal that Bishal has never seen, though he has seen photographs. Green hills going up very steeply, the kind of green that does not exist in Gorakhpur’s flat, diesel-coloured air, a river, a house with a tin roof that belongs to his nani, his mother’s mother, whom he knows only as a face on a phone on certain Sunday evenings.
He is, depending on who is asking, from different places.
At school, when the teacher asks where you are from, Bishal says Gorakhpur, because that is where he was born and where he lives and where he knows the streets. The children around him say UP, say Bihar, say their ancestral districts with confidence and pride. Bishal says Gorakhpur, and it is the true answer and also not quite the whole answer, and he has learned, at eight, that some questions do not have room for the whole answer.
At home, in the two rooms his mother rents on the outer edge of the city near the transport nagar, the language is Nepali. His mother Sunita speaks Hindi when she has to, with the landlord, with the vegetable seller, with the hospital, with anyone official, but at home the words come back to her like water finding its level. She sings in Nepali, she prays in Nepali, when she is tired, she thinks in Nepali, which means that on the days when she is most fully herself, Bishal’s mother exists in a language that the city outside their door does not speak.
Bishal moves between these two languages the way he moves between the two rooms, easily, without thinking about it, the way you breathe. He does not experience this as difficulty. It is simply the geography of his life. Two rooms. Two languages. Two versions of where he is from.
What he does not yet know is that this same geography, this between-ness, this not-quite-belonging to the systems on either side, is the reason that for three years, nobody checked whether his legs were straight.
Sunita came to Gorakhpur seven years ago, six months pregnant, following her husband Ramesh who had come the year before for work. Ramesh drove a goods vehicle on the UP-Bihar corridor. She found the two-room house and had Bishal. Ramesh was home on weekends sometimes, then on weekends occasionally, then not reliably, and that is a different story that Sunita does not tell in full and which Bishal knows only in outline, the way children know things their parents have decided to carry alone.
She found work cleaning in three houses in the colony behind the transport nagar. She learned the particular Hindi of domestic employment, which words to use, which not to, how to be present without being visible. She is good at her work; the families she cleans for are not unkind. They have not, however, in seven years, asked whether her son has been vaccinated, or whether he attends school, or whether there is a government health worker assigned to her area who might help her navigate the medical system of a city that is not quite hers.
Sunita does not have a ration card for Gorakhpur. She does not have an Aadhaar address updated to this city. She knows, from other Nepali women in the colony, that the government health programmes exist; she has seen the ASHA worker on the street, but she has been uncertain, for seven years, whether she belongs to them. Whether they are for her.She has been uncertain whether the systems around her are for her. This is not a small uncertainty but the kind that grows around everything, like a skin over still water, until you stop testing whether it will hold your weight.
Bishal’s legs began bowing outward when he was around two. Sunita noticed it the way you notice things that appear gradually, not as a moment of alarm but as a slow accumulation of something that keeps not being right. His ankles did not meet when he stood with his knees together. His walk had a particular arc to it, a rolling quality, that the other children in the colony did not have.
She mentioned it to the woman in the next room, another Nepali, who had been in Gorakhpur longer and knew more. The woman said: Some children’s legs go like that. She said: my own nephew was the same and straightened out by four. She said: Give it time.
Sunita gave it time. She was not a woman who gave things time carelessly; she gave it time because she had no framework for anything else. After all, the nearest government hospital was a distance away and a half-day’s wages, because she was not sure the hospital was for her, because she did not know the word rickets and so did not know what she was looking for.
The word rickets, when Bishal eventually hears it, means nothing to him. It is an English word. He turns it over, rickets, rickets, and it does not sound like something that could live in his legs. His legs feel like his legs. They have always felt like his legs. The curve in them is not pain, mostly. It is just the shape they are.
He does not know yet that the shape is a record. That his bones, in those first two years when they were being built, were building themselves without one of the materials they needed. That the sun was there; Gorakhpur is not a city short of sun, but that the diet was not, and that a body will make its bones from whatever it has, and that what it has shapes what the bones become.
EPISODE 2: WHAT THE SCHOOL NOTICED, AND WHAT IT DID WITH THE NOTICING
It was Bishal’s class teacher at the government primary school, a woman named Meena, fifteen years in the classroom, the kind of teacher who notices things without having been trained to notice them, who said something.
She said it to Sunita at the school gate one afternoon in November, when Bishal was six. She said: ” Your son’s legs, have you had them looked at? She said it quietly, without ceremony, watching Bishal walk to where his mother was standing. She said: I’m not saying anything is wrong. I’m saying have someone look.
This is the second time in this series of stories that the person who sees it is not the doctor. It was a nursery teacher for Arjun. A community health worker for Rohan. A speech therapist found through another mother at a park for Nandini. For Bishal, it is his class teacher, Meena, who has been watching him walk to and from his seat for three months and has decided that the walk requires someone with more knowledge than she has.
Sunita heard this and felt two things simultaneously: gratitude that someone had said it, and the particular anxiety of someone who has been navigating an unfamiliar system for years and knows that navigating it further will cost something, time, money, the day’s wages, the uncertainty of what she will be told and whether she will be able to understand it.
She went anyway. She took Bishal to the district hospital on a Thursday. She sat in the queue for four hours. She saw a doctor for twelve minutes.
The doctor was not unkind. He looked at Bishal’s legs, asked Sunita some questions, and wrote a referral for blood tests. He used the word rickets. He wrote a prescription. He explained, in the compressed way that Bishal needed vitamin D and calcium, that the bowing in his legs was the result of a deficiency in the years when his bones were forming, and that with treatment the progression would stop.
He did not say the legs would straighten fully. He said the progression would stop. Sunita heard this and understood about seventy per cent of it, which she considers, given the speed at which it was delivered and the fact that she was conducting the entire conversation in her second language, a reasonable percentage.
The treatment was simple. Vitamin D supplements. Calcium. Dietary changes, more milk when the budget allowed, eggs, fish when she could get it, more time outside in the morning sun, which costs nothing and which she began enforcing with the particular firmness of a woman who has been given one concrete thing she can control and intends to control it.
Bishal took the supplements without complaint, which surprised her. He is not, by temperament, a child who takes things without complaint. He has opinions about food, about which shirt he wears, about the route they take to school. He complains about these things in Nepali at home and in Hindi at school and occasionally in a mixture of both that makes Sunita laugh despite herself.
About the supplements, he said nothing. She asked him once if he knew why he was taking them. He thought about it. Then he said, in Nepali: for my legs?
And that was all. He took them every morning with his tea, this child who complains about everything, and asked no further questions, which told her something about what he had already understood: that the legs were a subject that required a certain care from both of them, a certain not-pressing-too-hard on the bruise of it.
At school, Bishal does not talk about his legs. Nobody asks. The walk is something the other children have absorbed into their understanding of him; it is part of how Bishal moves, the way some children are taller or louder or slower to answer. His best friend is a boy named Ankit who has never once, in two years of friendship, mentioned the walk, which is either because he hasn’t noticed or because he has noticed and decided it is not the point. Bishal suspects the second. He is grateful for it without knowing the word grateful in English, which is the language the grateful feeling lives in; for some reason, he cannot explain.
He knows a thing about bodies that most eight-year-olds don’t: that they carry the record of what they were given and not given, silently, in ways you cannot always see from the outside. His bones were built from what was available. The record is in the curve. He does not feel this as tragedy. He feels it as information.
He does not know yet whether the legs will straighten. His mother says they might, with time and the medicine and the sun. He looks at his shadow in the morning, when the sun is low, and shadows are long, and he cannot quite tell from the shadow what his legs look like to other people. The shadow just looks like a boy.
His bones were built from what was available. This is true of most things in Bishal’s life. He does not experience it as deprivation, he has no other life to compare it to. He experiences it as the shape of things. The shape his life has.
EPISODE 3: WHAT IT COSTS TO BE BETWEEN
There is a category of child that the social system around is not not entirely designed for.
Not because the systems are cruel but because they were built around the assumption that a child lives where their mother is registered, and their mother is registered where she was born or where she has settled long enough to acquire the documents that prove settling. They were built around legibility. Around the idea that a person can be located, on a ration card, on an Aadhaar, on an electoral roll, in a district database, and that location is how systems find them.
Sunita is not illegible. She has an Aadhaar, she has a phone and she pays rent. She has lived in the same two rooms for seven years. She exists in the city in the way that many migrants exist: fully present, partially invisible, accessing what she accesses through personal initiative and the grace of individual people, a teacher who said have someone look, a doctor who explained the prescription twice.
There are, in Gorakhpur and the districts around it, significant numbers of Nepali migrants. The border is close, Sunauli, the main crossing, is under two hours away. People move across it for work, for marriage, for the particular reasons that people have always moved across borders that sit in the middle of what was once a single geography. The movement is legal, citizens of Nepal do not require a visa to live and work in India m, but legal is not the same as visible, and visible is not the same as included.
Sunita knows other Nepali mothers in the colony. They share information the way people who are navigating an unfamiliar system share information, through conversation, through the specific knowledge of who to ask and where to go and which queue is the right one. One of them told her about the ASHA worker assigned to their area. One of them told her that the government hospital was free. One of them helped her understand the prescription the doctor wrote, because the medical Hindi was a dialect she had not yet acquired.
This network exists because it had to. There is the ordinary gap between where systems are designed to go and where people actually are.
Bishal’s vitamin D levels, six months into treatment, had improved enough that the doctor at the follow-up appointment smiled and said: good, keep going. The bowing in his legs has not reversed significantly, this is the part that the doctor was careful about, that the progression has stopped but the architecture already laid down does not simply unbuild itself. He may need further assessment as he grows, monitoring to ensure the bones continue to develop correctly, physiotherapy at some point if the curvature affects his gait significantly.
He will walk differently from the other boys for the foreseeable future. He already does. He has for his whole life. He does not walk badly, he walks in the way his body learned to walk, which is the way it had to walk with the legs it had. His body solved the problem it was given. It is still solving it.
Sunita has started going to the ASHA worker now. She was not sure, for seven years, whether she was supposed to. She is still not entirely sure, in the formal sense, whether she is technically on the register, whether Bishal technically qualifies for the services that the register unlocks. The ASHA worker, a young woman named Priya who has been doing this work for four years, has said: come anyway. She has said: bring him to the health camp. She has said, and Sunita has turned this over many times since, you are here, so you are my area.
You are here, so you are my area.
It is, in its modest way, the thing that should have happened seven years ago and did not, and is happening now because one person decided it should through the healthcare that aims to reach people.
Bishal went to the health camp last month. He was weighed and measured. His eyes were checked. His teeth were looked at. He was given a deworming tablet and a small packet of iron supplements and a card with his name on it, which he has kept in the front pocket of his school bag with the seriousness of someone who understands that cards with your name on them are a form of existence.
He knows that the supplements are for his legs. He knows his mother checks them sometimes, standing him in the better light from the window, looking.
He stands still when she does this and he lets her look.
He does not know what she sees. He knows that whatever she sees, she does not look away.
Sunita calls her mother on Sunday evenings when she can get the network. The hills in Syangja have unreliable signal. Sometimes the call connects cleanly, her mother’s voice arriving full and present across the distance. Sometimes it breaks, a sentence arriving in pieces, a laugh cut short by static, the connection dropped and redialled and dropped again.
She tells her mother that Bishal is doing well. She tells her about the medicine and the supplements and the morning sun. Her mother says: make sure he eats. Her mother says: how are his legs now. Her mother says: send me a photograph.
Sunita sends a photograph. Bishal standing in the light from the window. Smiling at something off to the side, Sunita had said something that made him smile just before she took it, something she can’t remember now. His legs are in the photograph but he is not looking at his legs. He is looking at whatever made him smile.
His nani, looking at the photograph from the hills of Syangja, is looking at his face.
His legs are in the photograph. They are not what either of them is looking at.
Vitamin D deficiency and rickets remain among the most prevalent yet preventable childhood conditions in India. Children in migrant and low-income households are at higher risk, not from lack of sunlight, which is plentiful, but from dietary deficiency and limited access to health services. Signs to look for: bowing of the legs in a toddler or young child, delayed walking or crawling, soft skull bones in infants, pain in the legs or spine, stunted growth. A blood test for vitamin D and calcium is available free at government health centres. Migrant families in India, including Nepali nationals, who are legally entitled to reside and work in India, have the right to access government health services. ASHA workers and District Early Intervention Centres can provide support regardless of registration status. If you are a migrant parent uncertain whether these services are for you: they are. You are here, so you are their area.