‘I want to acquire skills. Can I do that, and not be a labourer like my father?’

IN AUGUST, Nishant Khushwaha earned his first salary, at a cardboard factory in northwest Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh. “It was the first time I earned regular money. It was apna paisa (my own money) and I could do anything I wanted with it,” says Nishant, a lean teenager with long hair backbrushed into a pompadour.

But the stint was shortlived. Nishant caught chikungunya and a bad bout of brain fever, his mother Sunita says. By the time he recovered, demonetisation had been announced, and it was the end of job prospects for the school dropout “who has no inclination to study”.

In the new year, Nishant hopes to get a stable job in a mobile phone manufacturing factory.

“My friend Sahil works in a unit where mobile phones are assembled. Kaam seekhna hai (I want to acquire skills). Why can’t I get a job like that? I don’t want to be a labourer like my father,” he says.

Nishant’s family, sitting in their blue tenement in village Haiderpur in northwest Delhi, talks about his anger problems and how they let him be. “He cannot tolerate anyone correcting him or questioning him or stopping him from doing what he wants to do. Especially his father,” says Sunita, who works as a domestic help in the residential colonies just off the Haiderpur-badli Morh Metro station. Like the other parents in the area, she adds, he worries about Nishant succumbing to “the curse of drug abuse”.

Unlike Nishant, their younger son, Ranjan, 15, aspires to become a doctor. As Sunita talks about their concerns for Nishant, Ranjan adds, “When Nishant wants something, he won’t take no for an answer. If my parents promise to buy him clothes or shoes and cannot eventually, he taunts them.”

Two years ago, Nishant dropped out of Shalimar Bagh Government Boys’ Senior Secondary School, which Ranjan too attends. Now, the 17-year-old spends most

of his time hanging around with friends in DDA parks and the wastelands of Haiderpur. Nishant hints at how the open spaces grant freedom and privacy to young men like him, and that they return to the claustrophobic confines of their unauthorised jhuggi clusters only for meals and sleep.

“We sleep with the doors open because there isn’t room enough for the four of us,” he says, adding that he lost his smart phone too because of this. “I had bought it this year as all my friends had a phone. Someone stole it while we were sleeping at night.”

A new smart phone, priced around Rs 8,000, is the first thing he will buy in the new year. “We can surf the Internet, use Whatsapp, listen to music,” Nishant says. “The phone opens up the world to us.”

There are other things on his list — a motorcycle, good shoes and clothes, fancy hairstyles — all of which cost money. “I often ask my parents why they make promises when they can’t keep them,” he says. “I want to become financially independent as soon as possible.”

Nishant has been looking for work at factories around Delhi for some weeks now, with no luck. Some think he is too young because of his short stature, others don’t want to hire anyone below 18 years of age, and at many places, there is simply no work post the note ban, he says.

“The note ban has slowed everything down. It was a noble thing, to wipe out kala dhan, but why were we inconvenienced? We who live hand to mouth, our work and earnings were wiped out within days,” Nishant says, while admitting that he does not quite understand how black money has been arrested by scrapping Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bills.

“All I know is that my father, who applies plaster of Paris to walls of buildings, has not got work for two months since the note ban. Only my mother’s earnings has ensured two meals a day for us.”

SARAH HAFEEZ