HAND THAT FEEDS

G.C. Shekhar in Chennai

Just before six in the morning, one corner of Pycrofts Road in Triplicane, central Chennai, wakes to the bustle of traffic and the tea stalls. But to one man waiting on the terrace of a two-storey building, it’s already breakfast time for his 3,000 friends.

For the past hour, C. Sekar had been placing clumps of boiled rice, washed in water, on a dozen wooden planks. He inspects his work, washes his hands and steps back into the narrow staircase.

“Don’t worry, they’ll be here any minute,” the 62-year-old says. As if on cue, a flurry of green wings arrives, screeching.

A few at first, then a dozen more, till there are hundreds of them, as though Chennai’s entire parrot population has invaded Sekar’s home. For the next one hour, it’s a wavy sea of green on the terrace, broken at the edges by the black of a few pigeons, outnumbered in their own backyard.

The parrots line up on the mesh of TV cables and eye the terrace gingerly before dropping onto the planks.
As one batch finishes, another flies in amid an incessant cacophony of parrot talk. The occasional bus horn or vroom of a motorbike sends them into a brief tizzy before they land back on the planks.

One hour later, the last of the parrots flies out, leaving behind the handful of local pigeons.

“They’ll be back at five in the evening for dinner,” Sekar says. “I tried counting them along with a few college students, and our estimate is that we get about 3,000 parrots a day.”

The love affair began in December 2004, a few days after the tsunami, when Sekar spotted a few parrots on his terrace. He threw a handful of grains at them and found they were only too happy to polish them off.

“I realised they were unable to find food, so I kept some rice ready next evening only to see more birds arriving. Their numbers kept increasing and they began arriving in the morning as well, expecting me to feed them twice a day.”

Sekar, who repairs cameras and has a collection of over 4,000 vintage cameras and accessories, some as old as 200 years, uses up 60kg of boiled rice every day, which comes to Rs 600 a day.

“Initially, all the money came out of my own pocket but seeing my dedication, several nature lovers now contribute every month. So my personal expense is only Rs 12,000 a month. A local trader supplies the rice at wholesale rates,” Sekar says.

A wildlife official who visited him after hearing about the parrots has told him the birds come from a national park near the IIT, from the Theosophical Society’s large gardens and from a few cemeteries.

“He said the parrots do not fly more than 10km for food and are happy to find a regular feeding spot on my terrace.”
The routine means Sekar has rarely stepped out of Chennai these last 11 years. He left on his latest outstation visit, to a relative’s wedding, after laying the breakfast spread in the night and returned before evening.

A few of his neighbours tried to copy Sekar by laying out the same rice breakfast but the parrots simply ignored them.

“I gave up after a few days as the parrots preferred Sekar’s food to mine,” said Shyam Das, who sells automobile spares and lives two streets away. Still, Sekar has to watch his friends eat from the staircase: “They are wild creatures, you see — they’d fly away as soon as they see anyone on the terrace.”

The pictures had to be taken with a remote camera or from another terrace, hiding behind a cloak.

During the recent floods, the number of parrots nearly doubled to 5,000 as they couldn’t find food elsewhere, says Sekar. Every shower washed the rice away and Sekar, wearing a raincoat, kept replenishing the planks. “This went on for almost 10 hours during non-stop rain on December 1.”

Sekar can’t think of life without the parrots. “I’m willing to give away my camera collection to a museum; I’ll be happy to spend the rest of my life feeding the parrots.”

What will happen to the birds after him? “They found me, I’m sure they’ll find another like me.”

 

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MAN O’ SCRIPTS

Muzaffar Raina in Srinagar

When hundreds of his peers from Srinagar’s old city were trotting across the Line of Control to receive arms training a quarter century ago, a young Manzoor Ahmad Daikoo was keeping alive a legacy often associated with the Valley’s fleeing Pandits.

He was collecting rare manuscripts, some over a millennium old, that were getting lost to the mayhem following the 
advent of militancy.

“I have more than 11,000 manuscripts, more than the state archives department has and perhaps the largest individual collection in north India,” Daikoo, now 50, says.

He calls the collection, stacked in racks and gunny bags at his home in suburban Nishat, the “Kashmir Research Institute”. Sure enough, it keeps attracting scholars from across the country and abroad.

“Many of my manuscripts are from unknown authors and without a second copy. Many are original, unpublished scripts,” Daikoo says.

“I’ve manuscripts written on paper, birch bark and even cloth.... They can buy me a fortune but I’ll never sell them.”
Daikoo has what his mentor Triloki Nath Ganjoo, former Sanskrit professor at Kashmir University and a Shaivism expert, avers is a rare “complete” manuscript of the famed Kathasaritsagar, a 10th-century collection of stories.

Most of the manuscripts are in the Sharda Lipi, the ancient script for Kashmiri and Sanskrit writing, or Persian.
“I also have manuscripts in Kashmiri (in the calligraphic Nastaliq script), Punjabi, Hindi and English.... I have pieces written with fingernails, called khat-e-nakhoon, an ancient art,” Daikoo says. 

He explains that these were written without ink, by using specially pruned and nurtured fingernails as styluses to make fine grooves on paper that last centuries.

“I have a couple of manuscripts of nail-written religious literature in Sharda, around 300 years old. They are among my most prized possessions.”

What inspired Daikoo? Like many others in the Valley, mostly the Pandits, he had inherited a collection of manuscripts from his forefathers. When the Pandits migrated, many left behind their valuable collections, much of which was in danger of falling into the hands of thieves.

Besides, the security forces, in their hunt for subversive writing, were questioning people over every piece of literature they possessed, prompting many to destroy their manuscripts.

“Even my uncle dumped a bag of scrolls once in the Jhelum to save his skin and mine,” Daikoo says.

“That motivated me to do all I could to preserve these documents. I tried to convince whoever would listen that they were precious. I started buying as many as I could.”

He says he has travelled to Hyderabad, Badaun and Punjab to procure parts of his collection. But most of it was from Kashmir, covering aspects of Kashmiri life ancient and modern, from history, philosophy and religion to politics, literature and medicine.

“Many are about Kashmiri Shaivism or Trikishastra as it is called. There are translations of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat in Persian. One book shows how much our ancestors knew about the veterinary sciences.”

He says he has unpublished writing by Urdu poets from the last century, such as Brij Narain Chakbast and Nand Lal Farsi.

Daikoo, who translates oriental literature for a living, had inherited large tracts of land, some of which he sold — he says they would fetch crores at current prices — to buy the manuscripts.

Ganjoo says Kashmir’s rich tradition of writing grew partly from its cold winters when many would sit indoors and write. He said there were 30 lakh Sharda manuscripts across the world, much of it taken away by western scholars during British rule.

Daikoo also has thousands of books, administrative orders and key documents of past regimes, and old photographs, coins and newspapers.

He says he never received any assistance. “Only once I received preservatives worth Rs 1.6 lakh from the government.”

Most of his collection is therefore poorly preserved, stacked in gunny bags and easy prey for termites.

“Preserving them scientifically costs a lot. I approached the state government but it offered no help,” he says.
Nor did the Centre’s director of manuscriptology when Ganjoo met him, he says.

Only 3,500 of Daikoo’s manuscripts are catalogued. “You need experts to do that and you have to pay them. I spent Rs 2.6 lakh on cataloguing; I couldn’t afford more,” he says.

He is saving up to build a preservation chamber on his lawns. “It will take me Rs 30 lakh to build but I shall be better able to preserve them,” he signs off.

 

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FACE OF SCARRED MEMORIES

Muzaffar Raina in Chahal, Baramulla

When human rights activist Khurram Parvez wants to put a face to Kashmir’s “disappeared” youths, he thinks of a very wrinkled one. It’s the face of Baramulla farmer Atta Mohammad Khan, 82, who Khurram says is the only man in the Valley ready to declare he has buried nameless dead brought by the security forces — all 235 of them.

Rights groups that estimate 8,000 men went missing in custody — the state says the number is far lower —  want an international probe to find out who are buried in the unmarked graves.

They claim to have found 2,700 unmarked graves containing more than 2,943 bodies in three of the Valley’s 10 districts alone: Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara.

“Khan was the only gravedigger who came forward to speak about these graves and thus became the face of that expose…. He said that at the most he could get killed,” said Khurram, coordinator of the J&K Coalition of Civil 
Society.

“I have buried some 235 people there (the local graveyard),” Khan acknowledged at his ramshackle home in Chahal village, 80km from Srinagar.

He gave them a proper burial, after conducting a funeral, when the security forces came from nearby camps with bodies and asked the village to bury them — a common occurrence across the Valley during the height of militancy.
Khan volunteered because none else would, fearing trouble from either the forces or the militants. That was from 2002 till 2006, before the graveyard ran out of room.

Now Khan is bedridden with multiple ailments and his memory is almost gone. But one thing he doesn’t forget is to keep reminding his son Manzoor Ahmad to take care of the graveyard.

One of those buried at the graveyard was a six-month-old girl. “I remember the army saying she was killed in crossfire…. Nobody has ever come looking for her,” Manzoor said.

If that was one of the most heartbreaking sights Khan had to see, he was spared another.

When the forces brought the body of his nephew Mohammad Salim one day, Khan was not home and, for once, “somebody else buried him”, Manzoor said.

“Later, when we checked the photograph (clicked by the police), he turned out to be a cousin of mine. He was not a militant but had been missing for a year or so.”

Khan, despite his failing eyesight and memory, tried to remember the appearances of the bodies he had buried so he could later help families who came looking for missing loved ones.

“Around half a dozen of the graves now have tombstones with names inscribed on them. My father helped identify them,” Manzoor said. “Some of them, possibly, were militants and some were not.”

Manzoor said the burials affected his father’s health over the years.

“I would help him bury these bodies, which were badly mutilated and in many cases defaced,” he said. “Every burial would leave him deeply disturbed and haunted by bad dreams for days.”

After the rights groups came out with a report titled “Buried Evidence” in 2009, with Khan the sole gravedigger who testified, the forces came looking for him and asked troubling questions. “We faced harassment but were not harmed,” Manzoor said.

 

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TURNING A CORNER

Nishit Dholabhai in New Delhi

Good morning, sir,” the cabbie says in English. His accent, body language and ease of manner suggest a college education. “Er, how far did you study?” I ask hesitantly, wondering if he might see it as unwarranted curiosity.

“Well, I have a degree in civil engineering,” he says after a moment’s pause and bursts out laughing. I join him, in disbelief and surprise.

Ramit Arora, 29, had sometime in 2012 decided that signing up with Ola Cabs made better sense than sticking to his Rs 10,000-a-month construction supervisor’s job with realtor Gaursons India Limited in Ghaziabad.

“I’d learnt by word of mouth how much they earned,” the Ghaziabad businessman’s son who graduated from a private engineering college in Meerut said, changing gears as he tackled the evening traffic at Mandi House, New Delhi.

So, borrowing a little from friends, he bought a car. Today, he says, he works over 12 hours a day and earns at least Rs 90,000 a month.

Ramit explained he had to pay Ola a portion of the fare, which rises sharply during the peak hours — 6am to 11am and 4pm till late evening (a 25km ride in Delhi between 4.30pm and 6pm on December 6 cost me Rs 478). But the key is the incentive of Rs 225 per trip that Ola pays him during the peak hours — to pre-empt attrition in a fiercely competitive taxi-hailing industry. 

“I hardly have to wait 10 minutes between two trips,” said Ramit, looking smart in his Ola uniform — white linen kurtas with shoulder straps and matching jootis.

But the road to prosperity offered a few tricky turns. First, the family found his new profession demeaning. When his sister, a lawyer, got married Ramit told his family he had hired a driver for his cab — just to spare them embarrassment before the in-laws.

Harder to handle has been the condescending attitude of some of the passengers, who would address him with a “tu” and often speak disrespectfully.

“One afternoon there were some extremely impolite passengers; I dropped them halfway, near another cab, with folded hands and said I didn’t want the fare,” Ramit said.

“The company told me my ratings (which Ola seeks religiously from the passengers) would drop but I said I can’t compromise on self-respect.”

Aprameya Radhakrishna, who founded TaxiForSure with Raghunandan G. before selling the company to Ola, said the average monthly income of a cabbie attached to a taxi-aggregating company was Rs 50,000.

“There’s a social mobility, with even students working as part-time drivers,” he told The Telegraph.

But Radhakrishna warned that Ramit and his peers might be enjoying a first-mover advantage that might not last. As the taxi-hailing industry grows — estimates suggest a combined fleet of 300,000 taxis in major Indian cities — only a handful of competitors would be left standing and the fares would rise while the incentives for drivers fell, he said.

Ramit, whose father runs a wholesale grocery business in Uttar Pradesh, has inspired a cousin, a diploma holder in mechanical engineering, to become an Ola driver too.

“I’ve been driving a cab for two years but my family doesn’t know. I’ll tell them once I buy a second car and hire a driver — that will raise my status,” said the young man, who earlier worked in the machine tools department of a well-known gear company near Delhi.

He asked that his name not be revealed lest it interfere with his marriage prospects.

Ramit ducked a query about his marriage plans, smiling and saying he needed to save money first.

 

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A LONG INNINGS

Piyush Srivastava in Muzaffarnagar

When a young Vijay Singh walked out to bat — stage a dharna outside the Muzaffarnagar collector’s office, actually — P.V. Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister and Sourav Ganguly a mere Test hopeful.

Almost 20 years from that day — February 26, 1996 — the frail-looking 54-year-old is still at the crease, on the same dharna, protesting large-scale land grab in his village of Chausana, 73km away.

That’s nearly two decades spent non-stop on the roadside in rain and shine, 44°C summer to 5°C winter, protected by a canvas tent, surviving on roti and vegetables he cooked on a brick chulha and then a kerosene stove, leaving his post only to use the nearest public toilet.

Except that one time the ex-schoolmaster had to visit Chausana when his father died in 2002. And, oh, that other time in 2006 when he had to be taken to hospital after suffering a “mild heart attack”.

A few things have changed since last year, though. A sympathetic administration has allowed him to shift to an unused veranda inside the collectorate premises, where he has set up home with three plastic curtains. And he has an LPG cylinder, provided by an admirer.

“Masterji, enough is enough, go home now,” a fresh-faced additional district magistrate would tell him now and then. “Only after you meet my demands,” would be the instant reply out of the 5-foot-7, 65kg frame.

The DMs don’t talk to him: he has seen off 23 of them, including a few who tried to browbeat him.

Nowadays he sometimes leaves the spot to speak on human rights at school functions. “Masterji” has become part of Muzaffarnagar’s lore.

The hawkers give him Hindi newspapers for free every morning. His handful of fans now contribute Rs 2,500 every month, so he’s stopped accepting the money that his nearly estranged family of well-to-do farmers used to send through acquaintances.

Singh’s wife Pushpa, whom he left to bring up three young children all by herself, and son Gopal, a 21-year-old BSc student, look after their 23-bigha land, which grows sugarcane, paddy and wheat. Daughters Kalpana, 25, and Sakshi, 23, are doing MSc and BEd, respectively.

“Initially, my wife would call me a godly character because I was fighting for others. But after the first four-five years she began objecting. Now they all think I’m crazy,” Singh rued.

Gopal and Kalpana accuse their father of being uncaring and doing nothing for them. The son last visited him three years ago but his daughters sometimes call him. In Singh’s conservative boondocks, his wife isn’t expected to travel and meet him in public.

Does he feel guilty about abandoning them? Occasionally, yes, but he believes “the cause is bigger”.

A boy’s cry 

It wasn’t Singh’s plots the mafia grabbed but 4,000 bighas of the government-owned gram sabha land, leased to Chausana’s landless to grow food.

Since 1982, when he was 21 and had just begun teaching economics and civics at the village school, Singh had been writing these victims’ applications and accompanying them to the collectorate.

“My life changed on a February evening in 1996 when, on my way home from school, I overheard an eight-year-old begging his mother for roti. She had none to give because the family’s plot had been snatched,” he said.

“I wept through the night. While there was so much fertile land, a child was sleeping hungry. I decided to quit my job and take up this fight, but I hadn’t the foggiest that it would stretch 20 years.”

Within days, he had pitched his tent at the “dharna sthal”, a designated place for protests just outside the collectorate gates — a feature in many Uttar Pradesh districts.

“As a rich landowner, he could have led a comfortable life but chose to fight for others. That’s why we respect him,” said Devraj Panwar, the man who provides the LPG cylinders.

It was here that Singh had felt chest pain one day nine years ago. “I had the phone number of the then city magistrate, V.K. Singh, whom I somehow managed to call from my mobile. He came and took me to hospital,” Singh said.

“Nowadays, when I occasionally catch a fever, I can go to any doctor in town. They all know me and never ask for fees.”

“We know his struggle is genuine but the land mafia have political patronage,” said a district official, pleading anonymity because chief minister Akhilesh Yadav is seized of the matter.

Singh had undertaken a 19-day, 610km padayatra to Lucknow and met Akhilesh on April 28, 2012. Akhilesh ordered a probe, which helped free 300 of the 4,000 bighas the same year. But progress has stalled again.

Appreciation has been coming, though, with the Limca Book of Records in 2011 declaring Singh’s protest the longest continuous one-man agitation in the country and the India Book of Records honouring him for his “non-political, non-violent satyagraha” the following year.

What if he achieves his end some day, will he go back home? A shadow crosses Singh’s face.

“I don’t know if I can,” he says.  “Since most of the land-grabbers are my fellow Thakurs, I fear ostracism if I return to Chausana. Besides, my family’s alienated from me.”

So will he spend the rest of his life on this veranda? “Haven’t thought about that yet,” he replies slowly.

 

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INSULT TO CRUSADE

Basant Rawat in Rangpar

Ratna Ala couldn’t see their faces but the mocking laughter rang in his ears. “What use is information for a blind man? Get lost, son,” the sarpanch said to a chorus of guffaws.

That moment changed the now 39-year-old Ala’s life, turning a mild-mannered, disabled herdsman in Kathiawad into a Right to Information crusader feared by the mafia and corrupt officials alike.

This was sometime in 2007. Ala had been listening to a radio programme on the RTI Act, enforced since October 2005, and was impressed. “Why don’t I do something about my problem?” he thought.

So he turned up at the local panchayat office in Rangpar, 40km from Rajkot, to ask why they weren’t repairing the rutted village road he was finding difficult to negotiate.

“Their rudeness deeply disturbed me. But it made me think,” Ala told this newspaper.

He wondered how much a man who could only read Braille do. Ala had lost his father at 15 and studied till Class X with help from a philanthropic organisation.

So, when he learnt about the RTI helpline run by the Ahmedabad-based NGO Mahiti Adhikar Gujarat Pahel, the first question he asked Pangti Jog, one of its officials, was: “Can a blind man file an RTI plea?”

“Of course, why not?” she assured him before teaching him how to draft an RTI application. Since then, Ala has been unstoppable. The reply to his first RTI query told him the village road had been repaired twice in the past two years. On paper, that is. Ala got a local newspaper in Rajkot, 40km away, to publish the story, and the road was repaired soon.

The same year, 2007, Ala prevented 281 acres of village pastures from being illegally handed over to a clock factory by local officials. In 2010, he exposed Rangpar’s incorrect voter list braving threats from a political group that thrived on bogus voting.

“A friend told me that when he went to correct his name on the voter list, he saw many names without photographs,” Ala said.

His RTI plea revealed that the rolls carried the names of 35 who had left the village and 10 who had died.

A grateful Rangpar fielded him as a people’s candidate in the local polls three years ago and elected him its deputy sarpanch unopposed, sending him to the office from where he had returned insulted five years earlier.

He then found out that the mining mafia was “scooping out moram, a soft gravel”, from village grazing land at night.
“They had political patronage and tried all kinds of tactics,” he said. “Some people came to my home in my absence and warned my wife Ila that since both of us are blind, they would eliminate us and nobody would be the wiser.”

Like the former sarpanch, they would soon learn that abusing his blindness only helped stiffen Ala’s resolve. So they tried a new tack, offering to build Ala a two-storey house.

“My fight goes on,” the 12-bigha owner said in the two-room thatched house he shares with Ila and school-going sons Ajay and Ashish, a few yards from a polished village road that stands witness to how Ala humbled the scoffers.

 

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THUMBS-UP TO LIFE

Ananthakrishnan G in Kochi

Sometimes, asking the wrong question can lead to a right answer. It’s perhaps the best lesson little Amrita Antony of Kochi has learnt in school.

An anxious query by the Class III girl, heartbroken at a younger mate’s brain tumour, has triggered a campaign by her school that will help save lives and was highlighted before the nation by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Except that the Prime Minister did not know of Amrita, or teacher Abhilash T. Prathap who found the answer to her query, or the unfortunate Bhavana Lakshmi who had inspired it.

“Can’t we give her a new brain?” an anguished Amrita had demanded at the “school parliament” at St Mary’s Upper Primary School, Kochi.

She had just learnt that Lakshmi, the Class I girl who had stopped coming to school last year, was severely ill even after two brain surgeries.

No, what Amrita had asked for was impossible. But it provided to the young Sanskrit teacher Prathap his eureka moment.

“It was an innocent question from Amrita. Its impact hit us a little later, and the discussion veered to organ donations. Participants wondered what we could do to spread awareness,” said headmistress Shajimol K. Thomas. “It was then that Prathap suggested the map.”

It was this colour map of India, printed on a sheet of cloth and covered with white thumb impressions that give it a mottled look, which was sent to Modi with a request to promote organ donations. The 2,500 thumbprints signified 2,500 signatories.

“Four large pieces of cloth were sewn together for the map, which was displayed as our 400 pupils organised a street play on organ donation on August 11,” Prathap said. “The onlookers and passers-by gave their thumb impressions.”

Till now, the school has got 150 adults, including many of its teachers, to actually sign up with an authorised NGO, pledging their organs after their death.

Of course, organs can be harvested only from “beating-heart cadavers” — patients who have suffered brain death while being attached to a ventilator that keeps their hearts and lungs functioning. This is a possibility when death is caused by conditions such as head injury (as in road accidents), stroke or a brain aneurysm.

Still, signing up formally means that if any of the 150 are eligible to donate organs after death, their relatives cannot block it.

“Initially, I was surprised: why a map of India from thumb impressions?” Modi said in his Mann Ki Baat broadcast on October 15, before lauding the school’s efforts.

When the school celebrated its newfound fame, it invited Lakshmi too. 

“She was happy but didn’t seem to understand what it was for,” Thomas said.

Lakshmi has been advised 30 chemotherapies but the family had to stop after three as she was growing increasingly nauseous.

“We funded the second surgery in July by mortgaging our house,” her father R.S. Moorthy, an auto driver, said.
Prathap has his own problems. Like many other teachers in government-aided schools, he and his wife, a fellow Sanskrit teacher in another school, are not paid because the government is yet to recognise their posts.

The matter is in court while Prathap, father of a nine-month-old girl, works part-time as a welder and gas-stove repairer to sustain the family.

All the while devising new ways of thumbing his nose at adversity, no doubt.

 

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FOR THEM, WORLD’S A SCHOOL

Nalin Verma in Araria

Kerala Public School” is hardly a signboard you’d expect to see in a north Bihar town, 10km from the Nepal border and 2,500km from the state whose name it bears.

Nor would the school have existed in Araria, or drawn the Election Commission’s attention during this year’s polls, if gun-toting Naga militants hadn’t visited the home of the owners — Bindu and N.J. Shaju — in Assam a decade ago.
If that’s confusing, first things first.

After getting a BA in English in her home district of Wayanad, Bindu had trained as a nurse and joined a hospital in Lumding, Assam, in the late ’90s.

“It was a low-paid job in a small hospital. I’d been a good student and wanted to shift to teaching which I loved,” Bindu, 40, said. “I applied and got a job at Don Bosco School, Lumding, in the year 2000.”

Her family married her off the same year to Wayanad boy Shaju who, after graduating in English, was running a grocery. He was only too glad to join his wife’s school as a fellow teacher.

“We lived happily. Then the terrorists targeted migrants,” Bindu said. “Four men brandishing firearms and sickles barged into our home and set us a deadline to leave.”

Many of the couple’s relatives and friends from Kerala, working as professionals, teachers and nurses in Lumding, left because of the threat.   

“After several fearful days, we received a call from some of our relatives and friends who were working in southeast Bihar’s Maoist-hit Jamui-Munger region, where missionaries from Kerala run several educational institutions,” Shaju, 43, said. “We caught a train to Jamui.”

But the wages at the private school that recruited them were “very low”. So they left for Lakhisarai to work at a girls’ school.

“Members of the land mafia were on the school’s board and fought among themselves. The school was in perennial turmoil: our wages were kept pending for months,” Shaju said.

So, on to north Bihar and Araria. This time they opened their own school from a rented house. It was 2009.
“We were given two small rooms at a congested place. The landlord fleeced us, and we didn’t attract enough students, barely 15-20,” Shaju said. “We began looking for another neighbourhood.”

A violent tropical storm that struck in April 2010 and killed 90-odd in north Bihar also left an asbestos-roof house in Araria’s Mahadev Chowk devastated. “The owner was very generous; he rented it out to us on a nominal rent and asked us to open the school,” Shaju said.

“We had no money; so we removed the debris ourselves and shifted here in 2010.”

Five years on, Kerala Public School has 320 students including 80 girls and stands as a beacon in a district whose literacy rate of 55.1 per cent trails the national average of 74.04. Of the 15 teachers, 11 are from Kerala.

“People here believe that teachers from Kerala are better. We too feel a connection because we believe we have something to offer to these backward areas whose new generation wants to study,” Shaju said. “Literacy is high in Kerala, so is the competition in the field of education. Bihar gave us the chance to follow our passion.”

The English-medium school, affiliated to the CBSE, draws the children of Araria’s middle class and its elite — district officials, Sashastra Seema Bal officers and local businessmen. Bindu said the tuition fee was 

Rs 450 to Rs 500 a month. “It’s an extremely good school,” an SSB officer averred. “My kid is doing well. She’s learnt to speak English.”

The couple’s younger son Shabil, 11, lives with them but the elder Shabin, 13, studies in Thiruvananthapuram.
The school caught the eye of the election authorities who paraded its students on Araria’s streets ahead of the Assembly polls to urge people to vote. District officials and townspeople had perhaps told them what they told this newspaper: that Bindu and Shaju ran Araria’s “best” school.