While playing in mud with her friends,
thirteen year old Kalpana looked up
and saw two children of her age
coming out of a nearby building,
wearing ironed uniforms and carrying
a heavy bag of books. Instantly
her mind went back to the days when
she used to dress like that and
walk to school, a whooping 10km walk
it used to be! Her father always
yearned to make her learn, to make
her well educated. He wanted to
detach her from the vicious cycle they
were entrapped in from
generations, the cycle which lead to
nothing beyond a miserable life.
Her illiterate father very well knew the
fact that unawareness makes
you gullible and thus at the expense
of the world. He had sold his
seasonal yield at a low price, off
season just to compensate for the
expenses of paraphernalia like books,
uniform, boots, pencil box which
he made her buy, forcefully. Kalpana, she had
never liked the idea of getting
up at 5 am to pack the lunch for
herself and then set for a 1hr
tedious journey to school. She
abhorred this idea, the idea of leaving
behind home- the caring tender
shelter of parents, miss those
'laughing giggling together'
sessions with Chutki and go to
that far fetched place instead. ''A
boring, monotonous job it is'' she
had always claimed, never well
realizing the irony that her father was
adamant to depart her from a world
she regarded as colourful. Seeing
those kids she is swiched back to her
past, to those days when things
though unsatisfactory, were simple.
An year has passed by then, her
father has commited suicide following
a treachery by his brother. Her
family has been devastated, they were
conned of their ancestral land, their
sole income! Seeing no light at the
tunnel Kalpana and her mother sold
themselves to the 'agents' who on the
pretext of earning big brought
them to Delhi.
Kalpana, now13, works here at the factory,
a factory which manufactures
dolls. She has been always fascinated
by these small, plastic,
colourful creatures. One day she had
kept that pink doll, her
favourite one, which dances once
loaded with the battery under her
dupatta before signing out for the
day. How happy she was to play with
it that night. Hush! Such small are the
pleasures of poor! Despite not
going to school anymore, she gets up
at 5am, leaves for work and
return at 7 pm. Alas! Though the
circadian rhythm has adjusted to this
schedule, she still misses those laughs
with Chutki, her neighbour.
She misses the masterji at school who
used to reward her with a
chocolate everytime she used to
correctly solve the maths problem.
She
still wonders if he had ever enquired
about her whereabouts in the
past year! And most importantly- she
misses the dry kisses of her father
on her forehead everyday when she
used to leave home at 5 in the
morning, with a whisper in her ear
''Acche se padhna'' and Kalpana
used to answer that with a default
line everytime ''Ji babaji''.
Time has changed. Now she longs to
go to a place, a place she used to
detest with her heart and soul!
