The Hole in the Wall

* Re-posted from an old blog. Written on 27 August 2012.

Tushar excitedly led me through the lanes in the direction of his house. By the time we reached there, I had no sense of direction left.

After walking for twenty minutes in the rain with an umbrella that barely protected the two of us and both our bags, we reached the maze. I call it that because there is no other way to describe it. Scores of homes scattered around, with dozens of lanes running crisscross in every direction. Like a city made for dwarfs. Except it’s not dwarfs that live there.

The lanes were barely wide enough to fit two children, and flanked by houses on both sides. I passed by naked children running along the lanes, sidestepped women washing clothes and dishes in front of their homes, tried to avoid stepping into the overflowing foot-wide gutters, attempted to peek into the barely 8-square-feet houses without being obvious, and ignored the blatant stares of the residents, all the while trying to keep up with the child running freely ahead of me, tracing the way to his home as he has done every single day for several years.

Every 2 minutes we would switch our roles and I would ask the 7-year-old kid leading the way: “Are we there yet?”

And every time I would get the response: “A little ahead.”

After 10 minutes of huffing up stairs, squeezing through the maze, and praying I had lost enough kilos so as not to get stuck between the walls, I finally heard the beautiful words: “We’re here.”

I looked around, trying to figure out where here was. We were out of the maze, in a small courtyard that offered a little more breathing space than its precursor. But I saw no house. I looked in the direction that he was pointing, and all clichés aside, felt my mouth drop open for a few seconds.

Now, I have been to many of my students’ houses. I have been to their chawls, their 8-square-feet houses placed lower than the surrounding ground or above local shops, and their vertical staircases that are impossible to descend from. I thought I had seen them all.

Clearly I was wrong, I thought, as I gazed up the rickety ladder that he was pointing towards.

It was a hole in the wall.

If you’re picturing a rat hole, think a little bigger; but if you’re picturing a cave, think a little smaller: it was a hole just enough for a crouching adult to squeeze through. To enter, you have to push aside the box masquerading as a door. The door to a home: his home, where his mother greeted him warmly as he scurried up the slippery ladder with little effort.

From his doorway, he waved down to me cheerfully, and noticing the lost expression on my face, came back down. He knew I was lost. So he proceeded to lead me out of the maze, consequently nulling the point of me dropping him home. I followed him silently, wondering what on earth would motivate this child to come to school and attempt addition and subtraction and break his mind on a language that makes less sense with each passing day.

*****

Sometimes it scares me, the amount of trust people place on this system known as education. Every morning on the way to the school, I see parents living under a flyover get their children into their school uniforms, walk long distances back and forth to their school, and work endless hours to ensure that their children’s tuition fees can be paid: all this, so that their children can receive an education; so that their children have a chance at a better future than their parents.

It’s scary because I don’t think our education system is quite there yet.

There was a time when the government had to work hard to convince everyone to send their children to school, to convince them of the importance of education.

They’re convinced now. They are doing their bit to get their children to school. If not all, a lot of them are.

The question is, can our system match up to their level of trust and conviction?