here I go

“Why did you cut your hair?” asked Rubina, disapproving.

I mumbled something about it being easy to manage but she wasn’t quite convinced. Thirteen-year-old Mayuri – the oldest among the girls who attend our informal Learning Centre – explained: “Sethlog like to cut their hair. They like to wear trousers and not saris…”

Sethlog refers to those of us who live in pucca houses and drive around in cars. I argued for myself: I wear saris for hospital work, and on formal occasions. When I finally managed to stem their queries, we began our class. It was their third lesson about our country and we had the map of India before us. We were well on our way, learning the names and locations of individual states, and I remembered my first question to the class when we started this Know My Country session.

“Who is the Prime Minister of India?”

Mehboob’s hand shot up. “Amitabh Bachchan!” Seeing the horror on my face, he tried “Shah Rukh Khan:”and then “Bal Thackeray” before giving up. Poonam, with her beautiful, all-teeth smile, said, “Veer Sarvarkar”. There were no more guesses.
It is nearly three years since I gave up my full-time job as a surgeon. At a time when I was really enjoying surgery and everything that goes with it, I opted to spend some years being an ordinary doctor. I see patients at home, I see them in a clinic and sometimes in their homes. Thanks to this madcap decision (so say some wise friends), I became close to the community of migrant workers who slog away at construction sites in the booming housing colonies of Lonavla in Maharashtra. The children who come to our learning centre are aged 4 to 14 years and are either from interior Maharashtra or north Karnataka. Their parents who can barely earn Rs 30 a day in their own arid villages, find the daily wages at the construction sites (Rs60 to Rs100 a day), hard to resist. Their children either stay back in the villages with grandparents or come with their parents. Some go to municipal schools but don’t progress beyond a few years. Reason? A lack of interest in studies, parental pressure to start earning or the physical and mental abuse piled on by the teachers.

“Basha, why did you drop out of school?”

“I wanted to earn money.”

“You can earn more if you finish school.”

The real reason, his mother tells me, is that he is reviled for being dark-skinned and ‘low caste’. Not only by other students but by the teachers. And what guarantee is there that he will get a better job after school? So twelve-year-old Basha does odd jobs like gardening, minding their pets or fetching provisions for the sethlog. Especially those who come only on weekends from Bombay and are willing to pay good money. As for learning, he has forgotten everything he once knew and cannot read a full sentence in Marathi.

So we decided to pitch in and start a learning centre and library. That was three years ago and was the beginning of the Nalanda Trust.