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By Neeta Lal From poor village boy, to ragpicker, to famous muppeteer, Mohammad Shamsul admits his life matches up to his dreams!
 Mohammad Shamsul’s life has all the chutzpah of a Bollywood potboiler. Born to abysmally poor parents in Bihar’s Saharsa village, he ran away from home -- decamping with his employer’s money -- at the age of 16 to arrive in Delhi. Penniless and friendless, but determined to make something of his life, the young boy spent weeks at the New Delhi railway station ragpicking, eating at gurdwaras and fobbing off local dadas and cops who threw him behind bars anyway. Rescued from jail by Salaam Balak Trust (a streetchildren’s NGO) volunteers, Shamsul pieced his life together again. Today, he has emerged as a talented muppeteer, employed with a leading television company at an enviable salary.
“I’ve had a pretty amazing life,” admits Shamsul, now 21, dressed in a T-shirt and denims, flaunting a cellphone that beeps every now and then. “My parents and village folk can’t believe that I have such a nice lifestyle -- a decent flat, good food to eat, and a job with a prestigious company in a big metro. It boggles their mind!” It would boggle anybody’s mind considering Shamsul’s modest background. His father, he discloses, was a teacher at a local mosque in Saharsa, a vocation that garnered him plenty of goodwill in the local Muslim community but very little money. The family lived in a tiny tenement with three children; they were forever squeezed for cash and space. Finally, their monetary situation deteriorated so much that little Shamsul -- all of seven years then -- had to be pulled out of his madrassa and put to work in a teashop. He worked from morning until midnight, making tea and scouring dishes for a piffling Rs 50 a day. It was a dreary, Dickensian existence. “I was desperate to flee my home,” recounts Shamsul, “more so because the shop’s clients would keep telling me about India’s other beautiful cities, especially New Delhi -- the land where people’s dreams come true”. By a strange quirk of fate, the boy soon got a chance to realise his own dreams. His father, he recalls, arranged a temporary transfer to Muradabad and he took little Shamsul along. One day, seeing his dad in a good mood, the boy pleaded with him not to take him back to Saharsa but to get him a job in Muradabad instead.
“Dad agreed,” says Shamsul, “and got me a job in a local watch showroom.” At his new employer’s, the youth learnt a new craft -- watchmaking and repairing. But sensing that this wasn’t quite what he had in mind for his future, Shamsul planned a dramatic escape to New Delhi. After about a year at the showroom, the teenager decamped with the Rs 1,000 his boss had given him to buy things for the shop; instead, he bought himself a train ticket to Delhi. “I fell in love with Delhi the moment I set eyes on it. Its railway station was just like I’d seen in the movies -- teeming with people and radiating energy,” Shamsul recalls. A whirligig of tea vendors, snack vendors and coolies jostling for space among the passengers -- young, old, rich, poor. The station struck Shamsul as being an egalitarian place, a great leveller. During the course of his month-long stay at the station, Shamsul befriended the other boys -- mostly ragpickers -- who had descended upon Delhi from other small towns. These street-smart boys taught him the art of survival in a big city without money. Thus began Shamsul’s routine of selling plastic bottles to vendors and eating at local temples and gurdwaras. However, Shamsul’s larger game plan was to get out of the railway station quickly. He got the opportunity two months later. Following complaints of luggage theft by the stationmaster, one day the cops raided the boys’ platform, arrested all of them and threw them into lock-up. Soon after, rehabilitation workers from the SBT arrived and took Shamsul under their wing. Shamsul’s new NGO home -- bustling with young boys like him -- offered basic things like food and shelter. He was also enrolled at a local school where he began learning the three ‘rs’. At the NGO, he was taught craft and Shamsul chose muppetry as his subject. The sheer joy of manipulating the inanimate cloth objects, says Shamsul, sparked his imagination like nothing else ever had. “I felt empowered; like a master of these amorphous objects,” he says. Soon, his friends started acknowledging him as a talented muppeteer. Meanwhile, SBT offered Shamsul a chance to train under the legendary puppeteer Dadi Padamjee, who taught him the intricacies of the craft. He gave a few well-attended performances under Padamjee’s tutelage. The little artist was also chosen to be part of a United Nations’ HIV/AIDS project where his group had to educate slum-dwellers about the disease. The project was a great success. Shamsul’s stars were clearly on the ascendant! Shamsul was chosen by SBT, under its exchange programme, to visit London. “I visited Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the House of Commons… I saw so many white people in one single place! I also visited Taipei last year and was mesmerised by its beauty,” he says. Life was looking up, finally. In the meantime, Shamsul’s time at the SBT home was up, as he’d turned 18. He shifted base with three other friends to a tiny flat whose rent the trio shared by doing odd jobs. Soon, however, he heard that a TV company was auditioning for muppeteers for a TV show and were scouting for talent. He landed up at the audition and was chosen for the coveted slot after endless rounds of interviews and mock shows. Shamsul’s current job requires him to put in long hours of work -- usually 14 hours a day -- during which he shoots in shifts. The assignments offer him lots of scope for creativity as, in addition to being a muppeteer, he’s also a ‘wrangler’, an artist who fits the costumes on the figures. “For a show to look good on TV, everything has to be in sync -- the clothes, the movements, the music, the backdrop… And I want my muppets to look the best, always,” explains Shamsul. “My new job gives me a sense of immense fulfilment,” he admits. “More so because I’ve achieved everything on my own. My parents are so proud of me now. The running away from home, ragpicking, jail, everything’s been forgotten and forgiven. Mom says tears well up in her eyes when she sees my credit roll on the TV show Gali, Gali, Sim Sim. This is a huge compliment for me. I hope life has bigger plans for me. Inshallah, I shall soon have a TV programme of my own!” (Neeta Lal is an independent journalist based in Delhi) InfoChange News & Features, September 2007
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