When Arvind came to the Marham hostel, Santosh made him a glass of Rooh Afza. When he needed a new T-shirt to replace his lice ridden clothes, Santosh gave him his own.

“I came to Gurgaon from Chandigarh in October 2014 and worked at a resto-bar for a few months,” Arvind says. “Then I fought with the owner.”

All the boys are migrants to Delhi and most have left home after feuds. They seldom talk to each other about why they left. Irtiza prefers a don’t ask don’t tell policy.

“I never ask anyone about their past. It doesn’t matter to me if you were a criminal. It’s all about moving forward here. It also keeps the peace and saves on judgment,” he explains.

“I couldn’t face my parents after I failed the 10th standard,” Santosh tells me. “They had high hopes from me. I was a good student but slowly drifted away from studies in my teenage years.”

Arvind used to work as a contractual labourer for the Public Works Department and sleep at Geeta Ghat night shelter. He lived on the streets until October 2015, when he started sleeping in the Geeta Ghat night shelter in Kashmere Gate. A massive tin shed, the shelter is one of the recent additions to a total of 198 night shelters in Delhi. Designed to accommodate 500 people, it is one of the larger shelters in the city, which has a total capacity to serve about 20,000 homeless persons, less than half the census number.

Satyaveer Yadav, a shift in-charge at the shelter recommended Arvind to Irtiza as a suitable addition to Marham. But the other boys in the Marham hostel didn’t think so from the start.

“The people who live here have a certain tenacity to beat their addictions and better themselves, Arvind just doesn’t have that,” says Amar, a recovered alcoholic who has been living at Marham since April.

Irtiza spends Rs. 40,000 on Marham monthly including a rent of Rs.15,000 for the hostel, an amount he sources from donations mostly from friends and extended family. Marham does not have a de-addiction programme and nights at the hostel mean hours of wakefulness for the new members battling addictions.

“I don’t have the expertise or the resources to deal with severe addicts,” Irtiza says, “So I ask Satyaveer ji to recommend boys who don’t have severe addiction issues. I always check hands for needle marks before taking anybody in.”

Only nineteen hours into Marham and Irtiza’s rule of thumb seems to not have worked. Arvind is restless. He is finding it difficult to focus, the pupils of his eyes vanish every few seconds, his speech is unclear and his fists are clenched as he tries to tell me how he is feeling.

“I eat gutkha but haven’t for a day. I don’t know what to do, I feel like I haven’t eaten anything, haven’t drunk anything. My mouth is dry.”