A lot of it is based on my own experience. Our family was never as poor as the family described in the novel. I grew up in railway towns very close to railway stations. So i knew very well this kind of life around the railway tracks, and in other people who had no access to public toilets and had to go for open air defication near the tracks. And one of my sort of memories of growing up in these places is of a schoolmate of mine returning one morning from open airdefication with a bottle in his hand. He still remembers the expression on his face he realized that he had been exposed as someone who did this very degrading thing every morning,. That was something