RISE OF INDIA’S ‘SLEEP MAFIA’
They control where and how the country’s homeless can rest, renting blankets to the desperate on cold nights,
DELHI, INDIA— When midnight approaches in Old Delhi and a thick, freezing fog settles over the city, the quilt-wallah Farukh Khan sits on his corner, watching the market for his services come to life.
They shuffle up to him one by one, homeless labourers desperate for a few hours of sleep. The bicycle rickshaw pullers, peeling one of his 20-rupee quilts (43 cents Canadian) off a pile, fold their bodies into strange angles on the 1.2-metre seats of their vehicles. The day labourers curl their bodies on the frigid sidewalk, sometimes spooned against other men for warmth.
Those who cannot afford to pay Khan build fires, from plastic if necessary, and crouch over them, waiting for the night to be over.
Does any city have a more stratified sleep economy than wintertime Delhi? Filmmaker Shaunak Sen, who spent two years researching the city’s sleep vendors for a documentary, Cities of Sleep, discovered a sprawling grey market that has taken shape around the city’s vast unmet need for shelter. In some places, it breeds what he calls a “sleep mafia, who controls who sleeps where, for how long, and what quality of sleep.”
The story of privatized sleep follows a familiar pattern in this city: After decades of uncontrolled growth, the city government’s inability to provide services such as health care, water, transport and security has given rise to thriving private industries, efficient enough to fulfil the needs of those who can pay.
But shelter, given Delhi’s extremes of heat and cold, is often a matter of survival. The police report collecting more than 3,000 unidentifiable bodies from the streets every year, typically men whose health broke down after years living outdoors. Winter presents especially brutal choices to homeless labourers, who have no place to store blankets in the daytime hours. Some try to hide them in the tops of trees, but otherwise, a new crisis arrives with each cold night.
The moral quandary of making this into a business is at the centre of Sen’s film, which had its premiere at a Mumbai film festival in November. One of his subjects, Ranjit, takes a protective attitude toward his regular “sleepers,” as he calls them, allowing them to drift off to sleep watching Bollywood films for 10 rupees a night. Another, a hard-nosed businessman called Jamaal, increases his price from 30 to 50 rupees when the temperature drops.
In one scene, when a man pleads, “Sir, I am a poor man, I’ll die,” Jamaal chuckles and replies: “You’re not allowed to die. Even that will cost 1,250 rupees.”
“Look, sleep is the most demanding master there is; no one can stop it when it has chosen to arrive,” Jamaal says in the film. “We were the first to recognize the sheer economic might of sleep.”
Like many of this city’s businesses, sleep vendors are both highly organized and officially nonexistent. In Khan’s neighbourhood, four quilt vendors have divided the neighborhood’s public spaces among them, and when night falls, their customers arrange themselves into rows of lumpy forms on the roadside, in some cases scores of them.
A drunken man, his hair matted, stumbled up to Khan and begged.
“Brother, please,” he pleaded, and Khan uttered a curse under his breath, then grabbed a quilt and thrust it at him.
“If I don’t give him the blanket, he will freeze to death,” he said.
Earlier in the week, this had happened, just a block away from Khan’s spot.
A cluster of “pavement dweller” deaths prompted India’s Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that the country’s large cities must provide shelter. This winter, Delhi’s government expanded its shelter system to accommodate 19,000, but the number of homeless is far larger — above 100,000, by some estimates — and many people say they avoid government shelters because of fleas and pickpockets.
Khan, who has been here for eight years, says he extends credit for regular customers to a limit of 100, or occasionally 200, rupees. (Several shivering men, who had spent the night around a smouldering fire nearby, snorted in disbelief upon hearing this.) He considers boundaries between vendors so sacred that he will not step across them. He makes regular payments to the police and street sweepers so they do not disturb his sleepers, and maintains close relations with the local pickpockets so that he can tell them whom not to rob.
“It’s hard,” he said, “but what would happen if I was not here? More people would die.”