Runaway Train

This chapter explores children's engagement with and presence in railway space, a theme depicted, though not thoroughly unpacked, in Lion, Slumdog Millionaire, and beyond. Children use the railway to leave home behind and get to the city, and often stay in railway space for their whole sojourn in the city, or indeed for their whole lives; it is the thread yoking village and city. The railway constitutes perhaps a more powerful metaphor, rendered brick-and-mortar, than any other for child runaways' intimacy with history's forces—empire, capitalism, and rural transformation among them. It is also a space for a very vigorous control imposed upon children's bodies and movements through the vehicle of the state, of informal economies in global capital, and of other mechanisms of power, just as it is a space that the children in question occupy in a type of evasive practice that is irksome to society and government.

Of Crisis, Calamity, and Village Fabrics

This chapter considers the historical dimensions of the forms and forces associated with child precarity and departure. It argues that there is indeed something going on in the villages that children run away from, the most that counts as “crisis” on some level, and particularly on the level of the disruption of kinship practice and structure. The confluence of all these things over time and space—slavery and child sale, indigo exploitation, rebellion, Naxal-Maoism, debt-driven coolie labor, agricultural crisis—points to the reality of the notion of “vortices of misery,” and perhaps even nested or cascading vortices, wherein each response provides its own context for new misery. Even the postulate that the villages manifest a cultural tendency, a shared norm that decrees leaving home alone acceptable and available, is likely a formation that represents culture responding to historical conditions, a structure of practice and discourse that has developed in dialogue with a catastrophic scale and pace of change.

Remand to Rehabilitation

This chapter focuses on institutional space, a domain with which nearly all runaways come into contact at some point. It examines the thin boundary between the charitable and the carceral embodied in the institutions that both aid and confine runaway children. It unpacks this thin boundary both synchronically, by instantiating contemporary nongovernmental organizations' constructions of “reform” and “rehabilitation” and considering their complicity with campaigns of urban cleansing and with structures of policing and confinement; and historically, by excavating with archival research continuities between extant and antecedent charities for “vagabond children” and the colonial reformatory itself, particularly as it was applied to the children of societies that were constructed as criminal-by-birth.

Nabil’s Predicament

This chapter begins with the author's account of the life of child runaway Muhammad Nabil. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine not only what makes a child leave home, but what makes children in certain situations likely to leave home; and further, what are those situations and configurations that tend to produce this likely departure, and why and how widely are they shared. It seeks to make sense of whether it is culture, tradition, or rite, on the one hand, that generates child departure or, alternatively, the political-economic forces embedded in history, debt, and rule—or both. If running away is to be taken as an existing cultural form that children may mobilize or manifest, a blueprint that they follow, then a secondary question becomes how is information—instructions, methods, practices, itineraries—transmitted peer to peer or through public texts and images.

Concluding Thoughts, Final Words, and Big Pictures

This concluding chapter raises three foundational questions to explore what is at stake, intellectually and fundamentally, in the patterns that can be discerned in children's departures across India. The first deals reflexively with the book's project itself, asking: what are the ethnographic ethics of researching, depicting, and describing runaways' suffering for academic or artistic ends, and what are the entailments of speaking for someone else, particularly a vulnerable, nearly powerless subject? The second question asks whether running away might represent a form of resistance, and if so how, and to what power. The third question situates running away in the context of world history, world history theory, and architectures of global capital and labor. These questions help frame, define, synthesize, and sediment the book's wider relevance at its end, at the point where the reader can properly take stock of the story from a rich range of angles.

Death and the Urchin

This chapter considers the social life of child death on Delhi's streets. In particular, it attempts to make sense of the public circulation, iteration, and visibility of knowledge, narratives, and images of street children's deaths, or the invisibility, silence, and unknowability such passings may invoke. What is the valency of the death of a noncitizen barely visible to and barely recognized by the authors of space and the guarantors of rights, and yet highly visible to their violators? What is death, socially speaking, without traceable kin, name, place of origin, or legal existence? What does such a person's death reveal about the value they are assigned by society. It proposes that the death of solo children in Delhi, and their interaction with death, reveals much about the calculus of self and citizenship in postcolonial India, and that the reality of life in postcolonial India, in turn, is inscribed into street children's encounters with dying.

Home and the World

This chapter describes the quotidian and local conditions and features of the homes and villages that the children leave, and, through a few individuals' stories traced in depth, introduces readers to the idiosyncratic diversity within and structural connections between children's departures and trajectories. It suggests that runaways are fleeing not so much the misery of poverty directly, but something a little more oblique and indirect: a stress placed by historical poverty on families and translated into abuse and emotional strain. The chapter concludes with an exploration of what happens to “home” in the longer range, over time and when children return or do not.