The television cameras have long gone from Mumbai's Bandra slum, along with the crowds who turned out to mob Azhar Ismail and Rubina Ali the day they flew home from Hollywood. For one short week, the pair were the darlings of the big and the small screen, the young stars of the smash-hit movie Slumdog Millionaire transported thousands of miles from their lives in the city's slums to the glamour of America's West Coast.
It seemed then that the whole world wanted to talk to them, to marvel at the contrast in their fortunes and those they left behind them. But a month later, they are adjusting once more to the realities of life in a world of squalor, where open sewers run past their homes and the rubbish-choked streets are ripe with the stench of human waste. The children still have the outfits they wore to the parties on Oscar night - 10-year-old Ismail his tux, Ali, nine, her little blue dress - but the magic is already beginning to fade. What they have left are their memories, a few snapshots and a lingering minor celebrity that they and their families cling to, hoping it will be enough to effect the permanent transformation in their fortunes that they crave so desperately.
Whether that will be enough is hard to say: there have been glimmers of hope, but while Freida Pinto has transformed her relatively small role in the movie into a vehicle that has propelled her on to the cover of Vogue, Ismail and Ali have had to content themselves with a brief stroll down the catwalk for a collection by the minor Indian designers Ashima and Leena Singh at the New Delhi fashion week.
Pinto, virtually unknown before Slumdog hit the screens, has been deluged with offers of roles from directors such as Woody Allen and Julian Schnabel and is now said to be the highest paid actress in India, even reportedly turning down a role in the next Bond film. Her young co-stars have so far only managed an eight-minute cameo, playing themselves in the Bollywood filmmaker Vashu Bhagnani's new film, Kal Kisne Dekha, and, for Ali, a soft drink commercial co-starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Ridley Scott.
Still, India's ruling Congress Party, eager for success in the forthcoming general election, clearly hoped to capitalise on the popularity of the film. It snapped up the rights to Jai Ho, AR Rahman's Oscar-winning song from the movie, to use as its campaign soundtrack, and a couple of weeks ago, the Congress president Sonia Gandhi met the young pair during their visit to Delhi. They later emerged enthusing about the party and their desire to campaign for it, though no one has yet pursued that idea.
Neither has anything yet come of the promises the families received of shiny new flats where they could start their lives anew, away from the slums. When it became common knowledge that the children were still living in poverty in Bandra, the filmmakers and the Indian authorities both hastened to let it be known that they were looking for somewhere else for them to live. Ismail's mother emerged from her meeting with Gandhi confident that she had secured an assurance that a new house would be forthcoming.
Yet, a month after the children were carried shoulder high through the crowds which had turned out to see them arrive back at Mumbai international airport, they are still living in the same places that they have always known. It was Jai Ho that provided the soundtrack to the day the children came home, belting out from speakers set up in the streets of the slum. Ali's family were waiting for her in a tiny shack at the end of a dark lane, close to the railway line that cuts through it. There is a new LG flat-screen TV on the wall and a DVD player and speakers. The family has a fridge, a real luxury in Bandra. There are shelves of cooking pots and a single bed on which several family members sit.
Ali's uncle, Mohid Din Khan, went with her to the US, flying BA World Traveller class. "She was playing with Azhar on the plane. They sat together and they were cracking jokes and playing together as if they did this sort of thing all the time," he said. When they arrived, Danny Boyle, the Slumdog director, had arranged for a selection of clothing for them to choose from. He had clothes brought to the hotel and told them to select what they wanted. Ali picked seven dresses and four pairs of shoes.
After the Oscar parties, they returned to the hotel and asked for Indian food because they didn't like anything on the menu. The hotel sent out to an Indian restaurant for them."The people in the US were better than we expected. We thought they were really nice and really warm," Khan says. "After the Oscars Rubina said she wanted to move to a good place. She said she didn't want to stay here anymore."
The night she arrived back in Bandra, Ali refused to go home. Instead, she insisted on staying with another relative in a more upmarket part of town."Rubina didn't want to come back to Bandra after she got back to Mumbai but we have all tried to convince her to come back," Khan says, glancing around at the tiny room into which six other family members are crammed. The film company has set aside 1.25 million rupees (Dh900,000) for each of the children in trust funds, to be released when they turn 18, reasoning that this is the best way to ensure that they have a chance to make something of themselves in life. The families also received payments for the filming - £500 (Dh2,628) for Ali and £1700 (Dh8,938) for Ismail - and each receives a stipend of 1500 rupees (Dh108) a month to cover the costs of travelling to the new English language school they now attend.
Ali flounces in and shoves her way on to the crowded bed. She is still wearing the Suzanne Lively Designs dress she wore on Oscar night, though she has dropped food on it and there is a brown stain on the front. Nevertheless, she refuses to be parted from a tangible link to the good life. The hotel where the film company put them up for the Oscars has stuck in her mind. It had a small swimming pool and a large swimming pool and she and Ismail went swimming in the small pool.
Bandra, it appears, does not hold the same charms as Hollywood. LA was a lot quieter, for a start. At least she has a roof over her head, which is more than can be said for Ismail. The city authorities demolished the illegal shack that he shared with his father and mother, so now they camp out in a 2.4 by 1.2-metre tent improvised from plastic sheeting. The front gapes open for passers-by to stare in.
The tent barely has room for Ismail to stretch out his legs. At the rear, where the plastic sheets are secured to an iron railing above a low wall backing on to a stinking open drain, is a low table where they pile the cooking pots. His mother, Shammim Begum, who accompanied him on the trip, says he has struggled to come to terms with the reality of slum life. She gestures at the animals wandering past outside and the people staring in at her. "I asked Danny Boyle to give me a flat because we live in this terrible place," she says."In India we understand suffering. If the director had a heart he would have sorted out a new house for us. In India, we have a heart."
Ismail did not come back empty-handed from Hollywood. Some of the presents he picked up along the way are strewn along the side wall of the tent: he points out a pair of black and white Converse trainers and the fluffy blue toy dog he won at Disneyland. He is playing with the wine-red Nintendo DS that was bought for him in the States. He tries to affect an air of world weariness, but his words are those of a child who has been given the run of the sweet shop and does not want to leave.
Ismail picks up a red plastic basket from a table at the rear of the tent and lifts out what looks like a malnourished guinea pig. The boy insists it is a rat, a present from an uncle for appearing in the film. He sits playing with it, while outside one of the tens of thousands of rats that live in the slum scuttles across a nearby pile of rubbish. He tries to be blasé, but doesn't quite pull it off: "I'd never been on a plane before but I wasn't scared," he says. "My ears got blocked and I was a bit worried but it was OK when I got off. The roller coaster at Disneyland was scary though; that was very very scary." He is wearing a pink New England Patriots T-shirt, another souvenir of his trip. On Oscar night, he says, he dressed up in his tux and the big stars all wanted to meet him.
For a few brief days, Ismail and Ali lived a life they could not even have imagined before they were plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight. Now comes the tough part: accepting that they have had their 15 minutes of fame, or doing something that countless actors have discovered over the years is harder even than wining an Oscar and turning that lucky break into a career. Both say they want to act when they leave school; both insist they will finish their studies first. Ali's grandmother, who used to look after the little girl, believes that her future - and Ismail's too - hinges on whether they can get out of the slum.
"We want her to leave here and get a better life. She's a smart girl, an intelligent girl," she says."They live in a dump. If they get a nice place she will be happy and it will make a huge difference to her life. This is the big chance for her." She stares out of her front door, across the narrow street at the ramshackle warren of jerry-built structures that make up the slum. Maybe, she says, a little dose of reality will do them no harm.
"She is smart enough to be able to adapt to this situation," she says. "I think coming back here she will be a little scared now and a little happy and excited.There is pain and happiness and sadness in life and she's probably a bit fed up with happiness right now."
