Like most streetkids he learnt early what men are like and what they want and how to please them with as little pain as possible. Brahmin and Dalit; warrior, trader, farmer; Sikh and Jain, Moslem and Christian, Orthodox and Reformed, Catholic and Protestant; Saivaite and Vaisnavite; married, or widowed, or single all had the same desires, all used him at their whim and paid him with a little food or occasionally a few rupees. Some paid him not at all but struck him and called him filthy whore after they had had their pleasure, after he had drunk their seed. Soon he learned which men to avoid, he learnt to smell hard liquor from a way away or to tell by the gait if the man was drunk and likely to be trouble.

It was a hard school yet he thrived, they thrived, the little group of them who shared their food and their rupees and, at night, their bodies' warmth and the affection they dare not call love, yet love it was. Perhaps they didn't know to call it love, perhaps they didn't have the words; they only had the need to huddle and cuddle together and share their lives and their pain and their sorrow and their scant food and their joy in little gains, little finds, little victories. Yes, and little thefts.

For most of them the street was all they had ever known, sleeping indoors a dream beyond compare. For most of the year they slept in the open, in a rarely used corner of a scrap dealer's yard. There was a hole in the fence nearby that led into some bushes and thence by winding path to a lane. The bushes doubled as both screen and latrine; a street tap on the lane was their bathroom. In the monsoon life was more difficult, shelter was hard to find; the adults gleaned the best stuff for their shanties leaving little for the kids, and in the rain fewer men came out to rut which hit everyone's earnings. There were few other options: rag picking for a few rupees a day or begging or thieving more, or starving.

One spring day as the year was getting hot, a few months after the end of the monsoon, the mayor decided the city needed to be cleansed. The police rounded them all up and beat them and sent them out of town to a colony for street people. Within a day they knew it wasn't for them, it was run by thugs who were more violent than any of the men in town and offered neither cash nor food for the boys' "services", just a beating if they weren't obeyed.

The second night three boys slipped away together to the railway tracks and waited. The biggest of the three said they could sneak on a train in the morning and go to the big city where there were more men and richer men and even sahibs, foreigners, who gave more generously to beggars or to bum boys. All the boys knew this was hearsay and rumour and possibly myth but they wanted to believe it so they went. Where else could they go?

He, the youngest of the three, was nervous and frightened, but more frightened of going back to the hate filled, hateful, cruel men in the colony. The three spent a cold night huddled together in the bushes by the side of the tracks. The eldest wanted to fuck the little one and he really had no choice so gave in to his protector while the other one looked on. When the older boy had finished he held the youngster down so the other one could have a go as well. Being but 13 and 12 the ten year old felt no pain, just humiliation to be so used again - he had been being fucked by grown men for years.

Just before dawn they heard a train approach slowly. The older one had planned well, it slowed down and stopped at a signal only a few hundred metres away. They ran and climbed aboard. The sleeper class compartment was just rousing from its slumbers and people were wandering about and stretching and getting organised for the day. Automatically the boys began begging up the train and doing little services and brushing the floor with a rag for a few small coins.

A ticket inspector came along checking on the carriages and saw the boys and knew them for what they were. He eyed the three and pointed to the youngest to come with him and led him to a toilet and motioned him inside. Again the boy had no choice and knew that at least it meant they might not be thrown off at the next station. The man was sweaty and unwashed but the boy had known worse. He gave the man the best service that he could, hoping that it would help them on their way. The man only wanted a blow job, he said he didn't want to touch a street boys arse, for which the boy was grateful.

He had learnt well and gave the man a lot of pleasure and had him tingling on tiptoe when he came. The taste told the boy the man was a drinker, it had that bitterness alcohol gives to semen. He didn't mind, he just noted it, he had tasted so many men one more made no difference either way.

After the ticket inspector had gone the three lads carried on their begging and cleaning and got enough coins together to buy a little snack from one of the vendors walking up and down. It wasn't enough to satisfy but it helped a bit - although for a while they thought it made them even more hungry.

As they worked their way from carriage to carriage they came across a little group of railway police lounging together. Three policemen and three boys, it seemed to the police too good an opportunity to pass up. This time the two older boys were taken first, each into a separate toilet opposite one another at the end of the bogey. The third policeman stood watch outside, keeping hold of our boy in case he tried to run away. As soon as one of the latrines emptied itself of policeman and older boy it was occupied again by the waiting couple. Once inside the policeman told the boy to strip then wash his arse. He did as he was told, he was no fool.

By the time he was clean the policeman had his trousers round his ankles. He picked up the lad, quite easy to do as he was only small and just thrust him down on to his penis. He was a rough fuck but was not very big so the boy's rectum accommodated him with ease. Two months earlier the policeman had escorted a prisoner to Madras and there, just near Egmore Station, early in the morning before he caught his train back, he had met a young lady of the night. He had fucked her in a little alley nearby, he was in uniform at the time so didn't bother paying her. He was unaware that as he fucked her she gifted him a gift she didn't know she had; she had begun to suspect it but didn't know. This gift the policeman had since passed unbeknown to his new wife and his unborn son. Now he passed it also to the boy as he rutted in a Southern Railways Sleeper Class toilet on the Lucknow to Madras Express.

--

Perhaps we'd better go back a bit. Perhaps we'd better make a few connections.

The boy had had a name once. When he was born his mother had called him Bijan. She was a poor woman in a poor village in rural central India. The village had no electricity and no phone. No television either, of course. Two houses, the wealthiest houses in the village had battery driven radios and that was the extent of their electronic contact with the outside world. An hour's walk from the village would bring you to a minor highway. There was a bus service along this highway to a small town another hour's drive away.

It was a typical village for the region, desperately poor; but within its bounds poverty was measured against one another rather than against any sort of global standard.

Although the boy's mother named him Bijan she always referred to him as "my son". Her husband was away, as were so many men, working to get money to send home to keep the family together. At the time the boy was born the father was in Bombay, he had just moved there after working for a few years in Surat with a visit home every so often. When he heard, a month or so after the birth, that he had become a father he celebrated by spending twenty rupees on a trip to a prostitute. Needless to say he did not use a condom; he wasn't offered one and would have been totally ignorant of its use had one been thrust into his hand. He too received a gift that night.

Living was tough in Bombay so it was two years before he was able to save enough to go home to the village for a holiday and meet his son. He was home for three weeks, he spoilt his son as much as he could; got drunk with his childhood friends a few times and always followed that by beating his wife then raping her. In the course of this he, quite naturally, passed on to her his own gift. It was a mercy really that his wife did not conceive during that time.

It was three years before the father came home again. By this time he was a dying man. He knew it although he tried not to; tried not to know it, I mean. He didn't want to die. Thirty was far too young to die. His wife was severely unwell by then as well, and she was only twenty three.

The mother tried to look after the father but her mother in law, a widow, said she was doing it all wrong; all daughters in law are by definition lazy and good for nothing. She forgot that she was once a daughter in law too, or perhaps she remembered the hell she had been given so passed it on as her own special gift.

Much of the care of the three of them fell on the shoulders of the little five year old. There was no money, or very little, and what there was went on what drugs they could get hold off. There was no cure, of course and once the father contracted "the cough", as those unlettered folk referred to what is otherwise known as multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, there was no hope either. It took him nine months but he died first.

The boy was a very hungry little boy and this is when he learnt that his little boy's body could earn him a little dal and rice and perhaps half a chapatti. By going with several men in a night even in a small village he was able to get enough to eat. Some of the young men, late teens and hardly more than boys themselves used him regularly; relationships with girls were denied them so a little boy with a willing mouth and tight arse was a good substitute.

The boy's grandmother died next. She said she was dying of grief and because her daughter in law was such a disappointment to her; she felt that if the girl had had any decency she'd have died before the woman's own precious son, for all that he had gifted death into the family.

Mother and son were left together to cope as best they could. She had "the cough" by now as well and was unable to work or earn any money. He son brought her what food he could earn. He never told her how he got it. She never asked. Perhaps some things are best not discussed.

She lingered for a while then passed away one evening as her son and protector sat holding her hand. He was just seven years old.

It was a long road from the village to the small town to the district centre, many months and many men.

He left the village soon after his mother died. With her gone the men lost all restraint and some of them used him unmercifully. Some of the older boys, the teens who also used him, tried to protect him but they were powerless against the members of the village council. One of his father's sisters gave him a few rupees one day so he walked to the highway and took the bus into the small town, which he had only visited once before in his life. He didn't know any of the men there but he knew how to make himself look available so he soon got some trade. He walked by a small shop and the shopkeeper invited him into the back room - and so his pattern of life was quickly re-established.

It was a few months after that that he moved on to the district centre where he met the other boys and lived for a couple of years in the corner of the scrapyard until the mayor had his cleaning spree.

--

After the policeman was finished he cuffed the boy about the head, told him he was a no good whore then left the toilet. The boy washed his bruised arse and dressed then joined his friends. They didn't speak about the incident; they didn't need to, and what could they say? They were each well aware of what had happened to the others, why bother describing it when there was food to earn for the day?

It took that day, another night and until midday the next day for the train to make its leisurely way across the expanse of India. The boys begged and swept and during the night kept close to the toilets. They knew that whilst wives and daughters and mothers were sleeping the men would get up to pee and that a fair number would want to rut as well. The new ticket inspectors didn't pay for services rendered but the other men did. As usual the young men were more generous than the older ones. None were very generous but by the morning the boy had seventy three rupees and the others had more. Between them they had nearly two hundred and fifty! They had rarely seen so much money at one time. They were all hungry and tired after their night's work so they treated themselves to some breakfast. One of the vendors was selling dosai, a strange south Indian dish that none had ever seen before. They were suspicious but tried it and found it delicious.

Three tired boys with three full stomachs led to them finding an out of the way corner where they could curl up to sleep. There was another change of ticket inspector a few hours before they got to Madras and once again the youngest was selected to earn their passage. He was taken into a western style latrine that was filthy and foul and was made to kneel on the toilet seat to give the man access to his arse. Again it was no worse than he had experienced many times before, indeed he hardly fully woke during the entire episode and was soon curled up back with his friends.

Compared to the district centre they'd come from Madras was a huge and complex place, very frightening to three youngsters. The language was different too and they found their Hindi of no use at all, indeed it made many people shun them even more, even other street folk. In the way of kids though they soon picked up enough Tamil to get by.

Except the oldest boy didn't.

The three of them soon found that bum boys here had to pay protection money to men who would "deal with them" if they went completely freelance. This meant they had to meet a daily target before they could ever hope to earn enough to eat. Still it didn't seem too bad, men were plentiful and the lusts were the same.

On their third night a rich man, well he had a motor scooter so he had to be rich, stopped and picked up the oldest of the three. The others saw him drive a few hundred yards to an alley way and saw the two of them dismount and walk into the alley. A few minutes later the man emerged and got on his scooter and drove away. They oldest boy did not appear. After a while the other two went to look for him.

When they found him he had livid bruising around his neck and staring sightless eyes, a pearl of the man's cum still glistened on his lips. Without touching him they knew he was dead and they ran far away tears streaming down their faces.

And so they got to the beach and saw the ocean.

They made themselves small and invisible as they clung to one another beside this new discovery. They wept as they clung and despaired. They slept there on the sand in an out of the way corner. They had no food but they had slept hungry before, it was hardly a new sensation.

The next morning they woke early. The beach faced into the dawn but even before the sun had begun to lighten the horizon the noise of the fishermen heading off on their trade roused them. They clung to one another again and cried some more but then the necessities of the day took over - and there was this amazing and exciting phenomenon in front of them.

Two of the fishermen, going out later than the others, spotted the boys. These were younger men and unmarried. After a good day's fishing the day before they had a few rupees in their pockets a little of which changed hands a few minutes later for services rendered. It wasn't much but it was enough to get the boys a little breakfast then a stroke of luck as they passed a shop when the bread was being delivered, whilst backs were turned a loaf of milk and sugar bread was purloined to add to the feast.

The little victory with the bread did not cloud them to the reality they had seen the day before, they still grieved for their friend but the demands of their own living took over.

They returned to the beach and watched the dawn as they ate then plodded their weary way back towards town where they might have a better chance of begging a few rupees or meeting the eye then the needs of a man or two; they needed money to keep ahead of the game.

Their life settled into a pattern for a few days or weeks of begging in the day, rendering services occasionally then but more in the late afternoon and early evening before walking to the beach together in the late evening to sleep by their new and amazing friend, the sea! They played, as boys will, in the edge of the water but they had never learnt to swim and did not have time to learn now. They were roused early each morning by the fishermen and sometimes earned a few rupees from them as well, a few blow jobs in the dark to make enough for breakfast.

Neither of them ever went with men on motor scooters, neither did they spot the previous scooter rider again.

One day they managed well and made more than usual so they went to the beach early, buying themselves a cheap supper on the way. At this time the beach was still full of people, something they hadn't realised before. There were some strange white skinned folk amongst them that they decided must be the foreigners their dead friend had talked of long before when they ran off from the street people's colony. Some of the white folk, men walking alone, were talking to boys as they passed. Our boys decided that the next day they would try to work the beach in the evening as it seemed to have more potential than the town.

They soon found that the protection racket operated at the beach just like in town, but it was an occupational hazard and they accepted it as how life is. They fell in with some other beach boys and made friends. The other boys laughed at the newcomers attempts at Tamil but were friendly and taught them more. These boys slept a distance away, up towards Fort St George but our two continued for a while to sleep near the fishermen's boats and perform their early morning duties for them. But after a few days they moved up the beach to sleep near their friends and were assimilated into the little group.

It was here they heard more of the foreigners and how sometimes one of them would take a boy into his house to live and work and do sex things to earn his keep. This seemed an idyllic life, to have security and somewhere permanent to sleep with no fear of being moved on and to have a certainty of food - it was something they all dreamt of.

Thus it was that when the boy had such a chance a few weeks later he took it. The man spoke a little Tamil but mostly English. The boy spoke little enough of either but understood what the man wanted and followed when invited to do so. He was led to a small house in Mylapore. He was shown an outside bathroom in an enclosed yard, more a latrine and tap with bucket and jug, sparse to any other eyes but luxurious to one who had never seen such an arrangement. The man showed by signs that the boy should strip and wash. He did so unabashed before the watching man. The man showed him into the house still naked, stripped off himself and took the boy on his bed, the first real bed the boy had ever seen, even in his village the rich only had charpoys, frames with rope slung across; the poor slept on the floor.

Afterwards the man fed the boy and showed him a corner of the walled yard, gave him a mat and indicated he should sleep there.

The boy slept well, sleeping naked in the heat was not a problem. In the morning when he woke he used the latrine, his experiences on the train had taught him how to use it. He looked about for his few clothes but they were gone. He sat and waited for the man. He knew he could probably climb out of the yard if he wanted but he thought if he stayed he might get fed again. The thought of being naked in the street didn't worry him, what kept him was the bait of food.

Sure enough an hour or so later the man appeared and invited him inside. He had him in the bedroom again, his demands were not great, nothing beyond the boy's previous experience although something about it felt distinctly odd - why did the man put a funny little bag over his thing before they did it? He accepted that foreigners were just strange.

Afterwards he was fed again so was well content with the arrangement. After eating the two of them had a sort of conversation, as much as they could with so few common words. The man, who said his name was Barry, told the boy he could stay and sleep in the yard, he would be fed but not clothed; he must remain naked and be ready to service the man at any time; he must help to clean the house and must keep his body spotless and prepared. He was also told the man had friends who visited and the boy would be expected to look after their needs, too. If he was to be fed regularly the boy had no problem with any of this.

After this the boy's life settled into a not unpleasant pattern for a year. His duties were not onerous; his major enemy was boredom, he missed his friends. Once the pattern was established he learnt to bend the rules a little. The man sometimes went out alone in the evening and didn't return until the morning. The boy learnt to tell by little signs when this was occurring so would then absent himself over the yard wall - although he wasn't worried by his nakedness he soon stole a few rags he could wear and secreted them in the latrine roof where he could get them on the way out and hide them again on the way back. Thus he managed to meet up with his friends again, although the little band was always changing. His remaining partner from the train journey disappeared after a few months but it was not spoken of; who knows, he might have found a foreigner of his own.

On these nights out he always made sure to be back long before dawn, he didn't want to risk his new security.

The situation had negatives for him. Some of his Australian patron's friends were not gentle with him. He had a couple of cigarette burns on his back from one of them and another liked to see how close he could get to getting his hand inside the boy's rectum. It was uncomfortable but he put up with it.

Some of these friends had boys of their own. He met them when Barry took him to a party at another's house - for these outings he was provided with clothes to wear in the taxi or rickshaw there and back. Sometimes the party was at Barry's house.

The boy of one of Barry's friends had been emasculated. Not totally but his scrotum and testicles were missing. He told our boy that the man who kept him had had them removed by a doctor, also a member of the group, soon after they met. He said the man preferred his boys like that. At one party the men, including Barry, discussed our boy having the same thing done. The boy was terrified when Barry wondered aloud about having everything removed, penis and all. He was scared going to bed that night, sore from all the sex he had endured, but knew he would accept it if Barry insisted even if he did not really want it to happen.

What worried him more as he lay awake awhile was the scraps he had caught of the conversation between Barry and the eunuch boy's man. The man had had a boy a year or so before in Bombay who he also had cut. When he was transferred with his job to Madras he had taken the boy and left him outside a hijra house in the city. The boy knew of hijras, the third sex, the eunuchs of India who form close knit communities but who are also so generally despised. He knew that when that man got tired of his current boy that is where he would end up. He knew that if he was cut his fate, too, would be the same and it frightened him.

As the year progressed Barry and the boy were able to communicate more and Barry told something of his home in Australia and showed photographs of extraordinary animals that stood upright on massive rear legs and had little arms and hands in front of them and carried their babies with them in a pocket. He had never seen an animal with pockets before! The boy enjoyed these talks and was fascinated by the stories, but more than anything he enjoyed Barry's occasional fleeting kindnesses.

He had lived with Barry for a little over a year when "the cough" appeared. He had thought for a while he was just getting a little cold but it progressed and within days he knew what he had. It was long since his parents had died but this was something not easily forgotten.

Barry soon noticed the boy was unwell and initially was concerned if peeved. He had his doctor friend come and call. The doctor examined the boy and took a blood sample. The next day, by which time the boy was much worse the phone rang and the boy heard Barry talking rapidly in English, so rapidly he couldn't follow. In a few minutes Barry appeared with the boy's clothes. He helped the now weak boy to dress then they took a rickshaw to a small poor-looking hospital in a poor area further into town. Barry took the boy in, gave the receptionist a thousand rupees and left the almost comatose boy on a bench.

The boy was in the hospital for three weeks. He was severely ill for much of that time and was lucky to survive. The treatment he received far exceeded the money left by Barry but it was a charitable foundation set up to deal with HIV/AIDS so the costs were met somehow. In that place MDRTB and paediatric AIDS were familiar bedfellows.

He was nursed painstakingly back to some semblance of health whilst he lay and dreamt of huge kangaroos carrying him in their pockets across the red earth of Australia.

When he was much recovered they let him go, they needed his bed for other sick folk, much sicker than the recovering boy now was.

Weak though he still was the boy walked through the city in the noonday heat, all the way to the house in Mylapore. He knocked on the door expecting to be welcomed back but got no response. He thought then to climb over the wall and surprise Barry when he returned from wherever he was. The climb cost him an enormous effort, it was then that he truly realised how weak he was.

Sitting astride the wall he gazed down in to the yard and saw another boy there, a younger boy, stark naked. He was possibly nine years old, at a stretch he may have been ten. This new boy was very protective of his new security and screamed imprecations at the interloper on the wall. Our boy knew he had no strength to fight but was angry he had been usurped. Into the middle of this uproar Barry returned from town. He shut them both up with a barked command. He told our boy he had been replaced, that he couldn't hang around waiting for a sick boy to come back; and anyway, he said, the boy's body was changing and losing its attraction. He delved a hand into a pocket handed up a few small wrinkled bank notes and coins to the boy still sitting on the wall and told him to never come back.

The boy dropped to the outside of the wall, sat on the ground and sobbed with exhaustion and defeat. As he sat "the cough" returned, he was wracked by terrible coughing and spat out blood-flecked sputum as both his parents had and as he had done before in hospital.

Clutching his money he hauled himself to his feet and headed off, terribly slowly, haltingly, to the beach, supporting himself against the wall and stopping often for a rest. Just short of the there, just near San Thome Basilica, he came across a group of three tiny waifs staring at a Bel Puri man with their mouths watering. He couldn't bear the sight of their hunger so he bought Bel Puri for all of them, himself included; he had to pay in advance as the man didn't trust a street boy, and one who looked so desolate. How could such a one have money? The kids could hardly believe a guardian angel could descend to them like this and they wolfed the food lest it suddenly disappear.

When they were all full the boy gave the rest of the money to the oldest of the three then he carried on to the beach. He walked across the beach to the water in the late afternoon sun and sat waiting for dark. He sobbed as he sat there; he was ignored by the passers by, what was another weeping waif more or less in Madras?

When it was dark and he knew he would be unobserved he walked forwards into his friend the Ocean heading for Australia and his dream of seeing kangaroos for himself. . .

. . . seeking sweet oblivion and his waiting mother's arms.

- - - THE END - - -

The entire story is copyrighted to mr malaprop 2004