[Whew. That’s really, really rough. -egg]

With an estimated 100,000 homeless people living on the streets of Delhi, and 18,000 shelter beds, the city’s nighttime sidewalks are the only bed for tens of thousands of workers.

These workers are doubly cursed: not only homeless, but also denied any place to keep their belongings. They have nowhere to keep a blanket from night to night, so they must pay a few rupees every night for a rented quilt from a “quilt-wallah,” a package deal that comes with the wallah’s protection — bribes to cops and street-sweepers, advice to pickpockets to avoid the wallah’s sleeping customers, sometimes even a nighttime open-air Bollywood screening.

Filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s new documentary “Cities of Sleep” follows the quilt-wallahs and their customers through two years of Delhi’s sweltering summers and frigid winters, providing an intimate look at the tragic deaths of the more than 3,000 unidentifiable workers who expire on the nighttime streets every year; the generosity and desperation of the more fortunate sleepers; the varying approaches of the quilt-makers, which swing from tender to venal.

Desperate for slumber in Delhi, homeless encounter a ‘Sleep Mafia’ (Times of India)