‘Glittering eyes,and magic!’

I had just organized my Excel sheets, for Bookaroo in the city  and getting them in order when there was a last minute crisis! Our volunteer had fallen sick. So I had the opportunity to attend one of the sessions by Indu Harikumar.

I was accompanying our Essar Foundation representative, Poulomi Pal, to be honest I was a little dubious of how puffed-up she might be, but to my surprise she was an entirely different person!  I effortlessly jelled with her, and  conversed about Delhi, her trip, her admirable education, and I finally indulgedmy curiosity inquiring the meaning of her name, Poulomi, which now I know ,is a name of a Goddess , who was lord Indra’s second wife.

We reached the venue and the school was in a not-so-good looking building, before I could analyze anything about the structure, we were welcomed by a group of lovely girls, singing a welcome song and greeting us with the samskara of sprinkling us with holy rice. Wow! When we entered the building the first reaction which I and Pouloumi shared was admiration of the vividness and ingenuity of the place, the school had been festooned with chart papers filled with inspirational and eco-friendly quotes, the ugly walls, as school’s coordinator Ma’am Geetanjali said, were hidden behind cute curtains. The creativity was at every nook and corner of the school, it was a kind of place every kid would love to go to because of the bright and positive atmosphere.

The tiny kids of 2nd, 3rd class greeted us with the rhyming good morning,

which hit me with nostalgia and immense love for those little ones.

We headed towards the session where the kids were placed in a little room and Indu was narrating a story to them, and asking them questions. The way those students were engrossed in the stories and the spontaneous answers they gave, was brilliant. They were receptive, vivid and in high spirits. But the finest part begun when Indu asked them to narrate one of their own tales, one of the girl students narrated an account of how honesty and patience always imparted fruitful results, and one of the boy students narrated an anecdote about a monkey and the hat guy.

The next fun element was when our volunteer Shashank engaged the students in an activity where they were to spin a yarn collecting few words. The kids titled the story as “dosti” and chose words like- ‘fight’ ,’books’, ‘same class’ ,’love’,  ‘fun’, ’toys’, ’park’ and to our utter surprise ‘facebook’ (to which Poulomi responded “I feel like I am 100 years old”, and one has to agree!) and we had a story which went like “Two classmates Abhishek and Manoj (the students from the same class, in real life) were studying in the same class ,they fought about books, as they were to share the same books,in the evening they wanted to have fun so they went to a park with their toys, they played together, and the love in their friendship bloomed. But, it was late in the evening, and they had to part, Abhishek asked Manoj if he had a facebook account, and Manoj said yes. They went back home, and added each other and had a chat over internet. That’s how they became good friends. It was the most amazing responsive, impromptu yarn that could have been spun!

It was the time to say our goodbyes to the kids, but I left with an amused and overwhelmed mind, which was intimidated by the fact, that little and simple things were the only element vital to make those kids so happy! And one of my favorite author’s words never stopped striking me for the entire day, when he said :

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

I daresay, I believe in some magic, and I found that instilled in Deepalaya school, contained within a not-so -good looking building!

– Pallavi Karnatak