This is a distressing read.

This happened to me a little over ten years ago. I grew up in Mumbai, India, and I was used to seeing beggars on the street pretty much everywhere. Growing up in a city where so much of the population lives in poverty, you almost become immune to them – which sounds terrible, but it’s the truth. One night I was the passenger in a taxi with my family on the way home from dinner – the other passengers were my mum and dad, a cousin who was visiting from the US and his then 6 year old son. It was around 9pm, and we were waiting for the exceptionally long traffic signal to turn green.

There was what I assumed to be a family of beggars on the pavement next to the road. It was dark, but I could make out a woman, a young boy who couldn’t have been more than 10 and what looked like a baby that was wrapped up in a blanket. My counsin’s son, being a 6 year old who had never grown up in that country, had all sorts of questions about them and my cousin was doing his best to explain things to him. I was just looking at the woman, because something didn’t look right. Like I said, it was dark, but there was just something about her behaviour. Suddenly, with no warning, she got up and picked up the baby in the blanket and brought it down on the ground. She did this over and over again. Our windows were up so we couldn’t hear anything - probably for the best. All of us were in shock, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It’s like my mind refused to process it. My nephew started crying, and my cousin had to hug him to his chest so he couldn’t see what was happening. The light changed to green, and our taxi driver sped off – the only one of us unfazed by the whole thing.

We called the police, but I honestly don’t know what (if anything) happened after. As horrific as something like this is, it’s not uncommon, and a lot of the time it’s dismissed because of thinking that goes along the lines of “they’re beggars, so they don’t count”. My heart breaks a little every time I think about it.