Mumbai: Bulldozer razes teenage footballer’s home & hope

Inside an olive green dustbin on a footpath near Sion’s Shanmukhananda hall, there is a school bag, two pink dumbbells and a few long notebooks one of which spells ‘Philomina’ when shut. That’s the name of Mary Naidu’s younger sister who is wearing Mary’s hand-me-down red football T-shirt and hoping not to inherit her failures.
Unlike 18-year-old Mary, an SSC dropout, tenth-grader Philomena will not have to quit school because this morning, as on many mornings, Mary—a gifted football defender who shook hands with PM Narendra Modi once—defended her school books and other family valuables including her badminton-playing younger sister Angel’s dumbbells from wreckage.Mary hid them all in the nearby BMC office’s trash bin, the only place that the municipal bulldozer would not rampage.

When it first gatecrashed into Mary’s life, the bulldozer was a fearsome monster that would make her cry as it extinguished her school uniform, buried her sports trophies and left her father digging his clean-up-marshall hands into the rubble for her medals. Today, after having razed not only the concrete two-storeyed home near the footpath that housed her family for 10 years between 2001 and 2009 but also many of the family’s makeshift shanties over the last few years, the mean machine’s cameos have come to assume the rote feel of the education system she abandoned because of it.
“I am used to it now,” says Mary about the bulldozer whose fresh carnage has made her move her stuff into the nearby empty parking spot of the BMC’s garbage truck. Two years ago, Mary—the only girl in to show up in her Dharavi school classroom in regular clothes after losing her uniform to the bulldozer’s rage— quit both academics and football for want of a steady roof, a practice ground and funds. Till then, despite the looming threat of demolition, life had been fairly good. In 2015, the athletics-loving teen found herself representing an NGO called Anstregung United—that lends academic support to underprivileged kids—in small sports tournaments at the nearby Don Bosco High school. Here, she would compete with the boys in football—a gig full of rough lessons and injuries including a right hand fracture that set her father, Prakash Naidu, back by several thousand rupees.
What etched the dream of “playing football for India” in her heart was the ringside view of her idol, Indian football team captain Sunil Chhetri at a tournament in Andheri where she served as a “ballboy”. All the skills that earn him a place above “god-gifted” Lionel Messi in Mary’s order of heroes-—“dodging, speed, passing and communication”—are now serving as mere survival hacks for Mary who was chosen as part of Mission XI Million—the centre’s talentscouting football initiative that hopes to take the sport to 12000 schools—to meet PM Narendra Modi in Delhi in 2017. That handshake had brought in its wake a cheque from her school for Rs 25,000, a bicycle, a dress, cash prizes and assurances of a concrete house from local politicians. “But no one follows through on their word,” says Mary, who even recalls a local authority “lying to a TV camera saying that she had given me a house.”
Now, the defunct nearby street light she used to study under startles a laugh out of her. Even the footpath where she would kick around her football for hours and sometimes wake up to find it stolen elicits the same sad laugh. When she shows off an Instagram video of a proud goal from the past to a veteran Matunga resident he eggs her on to finish SSC by promising her free admission at a nearby college. She nods distantly and asks him: “Sir, do you know of a college with sports facilities?”