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Slumdog’s child star sees shanty home torn down
Ed Harris20 May 2009
The Mumbai shanty home of another Slumdog Millionaire child star was torn down today.
“I'm feeling bad,” said nine-year-old Rubina Ali who played Latika in the Oscar-winning film. “My house has been demolished. I'm thinking about where to sleep.” Munni Qureshi, her stepmother, said her husband was beaten by police supervising the demolition. He was taken to hospital with minor injuries.
“How can the police barge in any time without giving us notice,” Mrs Qureshi said, as she wept, holding her forehead. Neighbours poured water over her to keep her cool as she sat in the scorching summer sun with Rubina.
Slumdog Millionaire won eight Oscars and brought in more than £210 million but it has done little to improve the lives of the film's two impoverished child stars, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail and Rubina, who live in the slum of Garib Nagar, or the “city of the poor”.
Dozens of police with bamboo batons walked around the alley where Rubina lived and supervised demolition crews of young men wielding sledgehammers and metal rods who tore down the shanty homes.
Last week, bulldozers demolished Azhar's home in a different part of the same slum. Days later temporary homes had already sprung up. His family tied blankets and sheets of blue and yellow tarpaulin to a wooden frame to create a shelter.
Slums are destroyed because they are illegal or in the way of city development plans. Government promises of housing are often unfulfilled and when slum-dwellers are given homes it is often in poor-quality buildings on the outskirts of cities, far from their jobs.
Rubina and Azhar were discovered on the Mumbai streets by the film's makers. The adult stars, Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, have since shot to international fame.
The producers of Slumdog, which was written by Danny Boyle, say they have done their best to help the young stars. They set up a trust to ensure the children get proper homes, a decent education and a nest egg when they finish high school. They have also donated £480,0 00 to a charity to help slum children in Mumbai.
Producer Christian Colson has described the trust as substantial, but will not say how much it contains — not even to the children's parents — for fear of making them vulnerable to exploitation.
