Stories unheard

“Ram Pratap is gone Master Sahib. There’s nothing left for us anymore.” Her voice did not quiver with emotion. She said it matter-of-factly - her son was gone and she had lost him to a camel. The camel had held him by the neck and tossed him to the ground, killing him instantly. I looked around. The camel was nowhere to be found.

“He is gone, Maaji. But we shall take good care of his children. Don’t worry. God will take care of everything”, Bhaskarji replied. He tried to muster a smile. He couldn't- he had seen too much today.

I had been in Malsisar, Rajasthan for 7 months and my home in Bombay was over a thousand kilometres away. I wasn't quite a localite but in the time that I had spent here training Government school headmasters, I had learnt how things worked.

The bus I took to get to work every morning stopped for a few minutes right in front of the basti- 8 to 10 tents on either side of Bhaskarji’s school perched about 3 feet off the ground by wooden poles. Some days I would peer through the dusty glass windows and see naked children playing in the sand, women making tea and men smoking bidis by the fire. They looked fascinating.

“Kathe gayi re tu, Manju?”, the woman called out to her granddaughter.

She came out of the juggi and stood before us wearing a blue and white chequered school uniform. Bhaskarji had met her father a few days before his imminent death and tried to enrol her into school. Once bitten twice shy- her father had earlier been swindled by the headmaster of a private school who promised to pay him a hundred rupees a month if he just sent her to school. The school was long gone and all that was left of it was the uniform that Manju stood before us wearing.

" Why don't you send her to my school?" Bhaskarji had asked him then.

Her father had explained that they were Bhopas by caste; school was no place for them to be. Besides what would Manju do in school?They were singers by profession and they sang the glories of Pabuji, the protector of sick cattle, on their ravanhattas. It was what they were meant to do and education was just not something that figured of their scheme of things.

Manju raised her head. She knew why we had come.

“Come to school tomorrow, Manju. You will enjoy yourself”

She smiled naughtily, raising her hands up in the air lazily trying to cover her face. She knew that school wasn't fun. Her friends from the village had told her so.

The way she smiled seemed to be her way of saying “No way in hell”.