North India

Tourist destinations attract beggars.  Children do gymnastics in the traffic, knocking on the windows of cars with foreigners in them, gesturing towards their mouth for food.  Families circle the parks, sending tiny little ones up to the tourists to say 'Money, money' and then you see they live in huts made of scrap metal and empty burlap cement bags alongside construction sites, building fires of garbage because it's cold in Delhi now.  Old people bed down for the night on scraps of blankets under the overhangs of restaurant marquees.  Whole communities of huts cluster under the highway overpasses, everyone using the road for their toilet.  We take the leftovers from our meals in the restaurants and hand the fancy bag to the first person we pass who lives in the street, not looking into the faces, too distraught to make that much contact.  One old man touches my feet as a gesture of thanks and I think I'll faint with horror.