Poverty is always hardest hitting when it is described from the perspective of children. In Q&A, specifically, one can see how poverty most affects the daily lives of children at the beginning of the chapter, “A Thought for the Crippled,” within which the younger Ram recounts the time he spent in the Delhi Juvenile Home for Boys.
At one point in this chapter, Ram describes how he and the other boys in the Juvenile Home like to watch Hindi films on Sundays. He describes the viewing as an escape to a “fantasy world [for them], but we never got carried away by it. We knew we could never have a life like Amitabh Bachchan’s or Shahrukh Khan’s. The most we could aspire to was to become one of those who held power over us… The juvenile home diminished us in our own eyes” (p. 75).
By the novel’s end, we know that Ram succeeds in ascending up out of his impoverished state, as do Smita/Gudiya and Salim; this “success” is basically respective characters’ rewards for being “good” and surviving turbulent times. But these are the only characters who ascend. All the other young children described in the home are never mentioned again. At one point, Ram suggests that for them, the Home might be “heaven” compared to where they came from. It seems as though the majority of kids displaced by poverty into Homes like these become complacent and do not aspire to more because they feel they can’t.
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