Magnets

There are usually three or four of them. Ladies wearing dirty clothes, something gypsy like about their dress, walking along the road site and poking their sticks into garbage.

Or that's what I thought they were doing until I realised that their sticks all had a round metal head at the end. At first I thought it was for breaking things open. Recently I saw otherwise.

Poking her stick into a pile of waste left over from some carpentry job or interior decorating debris, the lady pulled it out with a small swarm of black things around the head of the stick. She held out her can and scooped off the collection into it. Nails, probably. Rusty, small, bent - but all metal. And together worth something at least.

The ladies are prospecting for metal. Magnets are the name of the game. Its not pretty, but they are scouring refuse for pieces of metal - of whatever shape or size - which they will then sell to the next person up in the waste sorting system. The local 'rabdi-wallah' probably - who will then sell off this collected scrap metal to others who will resmelt it and make cheap shoe-racks or some other items out of the collected iron.

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I didn't have an image to go with this note - which has been in my head for about 2 weeks now - but then the trusty BBC website had a shot of a young boy who does the same thing in Kashmir. Long way from Thane - but the same business.

In the Bible the Israelites were told not to go over their fields twice - to leave some for the poor to glean - for the birds to eat. Living in the strange urban landscape that we inhabit - with its breathtaking luxury straddling squalor and want - where do I *really* look out for the poor?

Oh that my heart would be broken anew.