Letters from Latitude 20°15′: I need the money… I want to build a toilet for my wife, that’s one wish I have for 2015

Paradip, Orissa

If a rubber dinghy slides into this stretch of beach at Paradip any night this year, and 10 men spill out, with guns, grenades and backpacks, eyes fixed on the nearest government installation across the road, the lighthouse, chances are they will run into Nitai Mandal.

And if they do, they will find him screaming, running towards them, waving a piece of PVC pipe, the edges of his oversized uniform flapping in the wind.

“I don’t know what will happen next but I will do it, I will run towards them with this pipe,” says Mandal, the lone security guard at the lighthouse. “But I hope it never happens, not here, not in Mumbai, not anywhere in my country…That’s my first wish for 2015.”

Mandal is 29, he is one of the thousands of foot-soldiers at the bottom rung of India’s gigantic security structure, and he lives on the eastern most tip of latitude 20°15’ before it leaves the shore and heads into the Bay of Bengal into the southern tip of Myanmar.

When he is not on duty at Paradip Lighthouse, near the port, he sells paan from a cart across the road.

“I need the money,” says Mandal. “I want to build a bathroom for my wife…That’s my second wish for 2015.”

Mandal’s wife Mansi (22), their son Basudeb (2), Mandal’s ailing father, and his partially paralysed mother live in a one-room jhopdi about 10 minutes away by cycle from the lighthouse and his cart by the beach. “My wife has to hide behind the trees near the beach every morning to go to the bathroom. I feel ashamed. I want to build her a bathroom this year. I know I won’t be able to but I can always dream, can’t I?” he asks with a smile and a shrug.

For that to happen, yes, Nitai Mandal’s life will have to change.

In PICS: Letters from Latitude 20°15′

Mandal’s journey into 2015 started at Baltighar in Kendrapara, when his Class X exams in English and History got cancelled in 1999-2000.

“My father was a farm worker and we didn’t have the money to continue my studies. But I wanted to have a proper job, in an office. So I started looking for work as a peon, or an office boy. But I got nothing, and my family needed money, so I started training to be a carpenter. I was not happy, I wanted my family to have a good life, and I didn’t want my children to ever suffer because of lack of money,” says Mandal.

So, he took the train to Mumbai in 2003.

“I was there till 2010, working in a jeans unit in Sakinaka. It was tough but I would have stayed on had my parents not called me back. They wanted me to stay with them… I am the youngest of five,” he says, now deftly rolling up a paan for a college student who’s just pulled up on his bike sporting one of those dark, reflector shades of the 90s.

Mandal returned from Mumbai and did something that he is a bit embarrassed to speak about.

“A contractor working for the refinery here wanted workers who were not locals. He felt the local people would be lazy and not make good workers. I applied, without mentioning my local background, writing only about my Mumbai experience. I got the job but was kicked out within a few days, I couldn’t hide my accent,” he says, grinning widely now, like a schoolboy bragging about his latest prank.

Mandal also sells small packets of chips and snacks from his cart and now turns to pick up a few packets for a line of happy schoolgirls who have come in a bus to see the aquarium across the road.

In a few hours, he will pull on his “security shirt” and an oddly peaked cap, and step into the “roughly two-acre” lighthouse plot, mainly to guard the batteries for the diesel generator, one of which was stolen earlier this year.

“A stable job… that’s my third wish for 2015,” says Mandal.

“I got this security guard’s job in the middle of this year. Someone from the lighthouse was having paan at my cart, when he mentioned that they were looking for guards. I got someone else I knew to vouch for me and I got recruited by a private company from Noida that was handling security duty here,” says Mandal.

“There were three of us initially but the other two left because we are not paid on time or the money that we were first promised — Rs 5,500 plus ESI and PF. I got Rs 3,500 the first month, and Rs 4,000 the second month, and that, too, towards the end of the month,” he says.

Mandal is at the lighthouse from 10 pm to 6 am every alternate day, and returns with his cart from 2 pm to 6 pm.

Mandal has no training in security whatsoever, wears his own pants because the one given to him is three sizes large (“can’t even make it stay with a rope”), does not have even a laathi (“somebody had already cut and kept the PVC pipe, which I use”).

“I am at the lighthouse from 10 pm to 6 am every alternate day and return with my cart from 2 pm to 6 pm. I don’t want to do this all my life, I want a secure job, I want my salary on time,” says Mandal, getting agitated now as the sun begins to set behind his back and a few beach-goers gather around his cart, some tossing empty packets on the sand.

“We try to keep the area near our carts clean. A few of us, who sell things on carts here, are doing out best for Modiji’s Swachch Bharat,” he says. Mandal says he “voted for Naveen Babu’s candidate” in the last Lok Sabha elections, but says he will now vote for Narendra Modi. “But right now, my world is my young family, everything else comes after that,” he says.

By now, the sky has begun to darken, and that reminds Mandal of the other thing that he doesn’t want to happen in 2015 —- another cyclone, like Hudhud in October 2014. “How can I forget that? I was up all night, helping policemen, all of us in a panic, running home, coming back, looking at the ocean. Never again, I hope,” he says.

It’s 6.30 pm, Mandal’s late, and he’s in a hurry to push one half of his life into a corner outside his home, begin the other. He switches off the “petro max” on his cart, turns back to head towards the lighthouse and the sea under a sky that has begun to stain black.

(Tomorrow: Kanker, Chhattisgarh: A teacher in a jail)