MIRROR EXCLUSIVE

PHOTO ESSAY

El Dorado

Avenue Road

goldsmiths

From daybreak to sundown, a well-networked group -- some to earn a living and others to supplement their income -- hunts for the precious metal in the filthThe streets may not be paved with gold but the gutters of the Garden City are a veritable. At least for a ‘community’ of young boys and men who, at the wake of dawn, descend on a maze of lanes and bylanes near K R Market area only to swiftly slip into the murky pits that receive the overnight and morning ablutions of the locality. They are looking for Element 79.In the early hours, manholes -- with its covers removed and placed on the edge -- on, Cubbonpet, Nagarthpet, Anchepet, Siddanna lane and Kilari Road are guarded by emaciated boys to warn drivers of vehicles and passersby to look out. One might assume the band of boys, numbering at least a 100, is on a routine cleanliness drive or, mistake them, as we did, for manual scavengers hired by civic agencies to clean the sewers.Peer into these pits and you will see a youngster (usually a teenaged boy), with hopeful eyes and a broom — clearing the thick, oily, grey-black sludge, which shimmers in the morning light. It is underground scavenging with a difference.Avenue Road and its adjoining lanes are a hub forand jewellers. There are more than 300 goldsmiths in this area who are the design supply chain for some of the top jewellers in the city. The gold dust from these workshops/units lands up in the drains when the goldsmiths wash up at the end of the day or gets strewn on pathways in powder form. That is the gossamer lode that the young boys are purposefully hunting.“We scour the area from early morning till around 7:30 am to collect the sludge from the gutters. We then take it to a place to get it filtered,” explains Karthik who gets into the trenches every morning to make the most of the golden hours before he switches to his primary role as an auto driver. Most times, however, it is only mud and nothing else, says Karthik, who joined the tribe of treasure-hunters three years ago. The occasional extra bucks or rather the hope makes it worthwhile. Gold, the 79th in the periodic table of elements, has seen a peak of Rs 30,000+ per 10 gms in 2012 and hovers around Rs 23,000 now.When we visited the patch of land adjoining the railway tracks at Okalipuram, we found around 20 people, mostly women, busy silting the waste (brass often is a collateral find). They use mercury to draw out any accumulated gold.Once it is collected, the wheels of recycling kick into motion and the gold is sold to dealers in the same area. But in terms of yield, the returns hardly seem proportionate to the human degradation it involves.M Krishnachari, who has been a goldsmith for the past 45 years, explains, “When we’re melting gold, there’s a small amount of wastage -- for every 10 gm, at least 1 gm is lost. These remains end up on our hands and feet. We usually rinse our hands and feet outside the store which is how the gold flows onto the gutters along with the water,” he says.While jewellers couldn’t be troubled with salvaging this scattered1 gm, for the boys, it is a means to a livelihood. The glittering castaways that once belonged in treasure chests don’t command the same respect or money on Avenue Road once scooped out. Some goldsmiths feel the gold is not pure enough, while others view the boys with scepticism. “Often, they come in and distract us. While we are examining the gold, they might just take away some expensive gold jewellery,” says Ramesh Raju, owner of Shantala Jewellery Works.Vishwanatha, from Vishwanatha Antique Dye Works, who specialises in embossed work says it is difficult to estimate how much gold the boys collect on a daily basis. “It is really a question of luck. Sometimes when we send our workers to get some polishing work done, they put it in their pockets and lose it. At such times, these boys may get nuggets of gold, while at other times they have to separate the dirt from the gold powder to get something,” says the goldsmith.“We get Rs 400 per day for collecting the muck and depositing to the filtering units. If we manage to get any gold or precious metal, we have regular contacts who buy it from us and pay us a little less than the market price, but it’s okay for a couple of hours’ job,” says Santosh, who is a daily wager working as a rebar bender at construction sites and hails from Okalipuram.Santosh and 11-year-old Arjuna work as a team. When Santosh enters the manholes, Arjuna keeps vigil. He is also the more outspoken of the two. “You people come and click our photo and publish, then you make money while we suffer,” retorts Arjuna as I take my camera out to click them in action.Often the young boys, who are regularly yelled at by irate local residents for placing bricks inside manholes that affect the flow of drain water, return empty-handed.The wiry Babu (24) doubles up as filtering staff near Okalipuram where they all head daily to sift the gold from the waste. He says overcrowding has hit business and it is not as easy to strike gold anymore. “When numbers were low we managed to scoop out quite a lot of gold and other metals. But now the tribe has grown and everyone is looking in the same places, at the same time. Of late it has been very tough to lay our hands on anything precious,” he says. Babu earns an extra Rs 400 for labouring over mounds of sand, most of which contains human excreta, in search of the elusive microparticles.The ramshackle filtering set-ups draw residents of the slum adjoining the railway lines. “After finishing household chores we spend time silting until sundown. We get paid Rs 250 per day for this work,” says Priya, who lives nearby.When asked if they didn’t find it revolting to get into gutters and look for gold amid human excreta, Santosh shot back with his words of wisdom, “Saar, are people who live above these gutters as decent as they look? They do worse jobs than us to lead a luxurious life. What’s wrong with getting into gutters for a livelihood? Ayyo go saar.”He then quietly shut the lid of the manhole on Ganigara Galli near Rama Mandira lane in Nagarthpet area. With his lookout helper in tow, he walks away with a bag full of silt and muck, hoping he has hit gold this time around.