A Nest in The School
When virtue has gone out of any word, this is not merely a semantic fact, but an indication that a similar virtue has gone out of an activity to which the word directly refers.
-- 'Illuminations', Prof AK Saran
There is a nest in the school of Sonepur. It is the only school in a region of about 130001 population.
Sonepur's is a primary school. It is a two roomed structure. Its doorframes are without doors and windows without panes. Children sit on a floor broken here and there, almost everywhere. Chunks of plaster have fallen off the walls; the walls are convenient for nooks and crevices.
In one such crevice is a tiny bird's nest.
Sonepur's is a deeply forested area. There are innumerable small and big trees --usually favoured by a bird. Yet, the little bird has made its nest in the wall; such as are many times to be seen in our village schools. It is as much at ease --or should one say unencumbered-- about its nest as the village is about its school. Strands of grass and twigs keep hanging down, sometimes falling off. It keeps flying in and out without doing reparations. Singing, breezing in now and then, looking around and breezing out high and low are what it takes joy in.
Each morning Verma guru1 ji2 hurries down the village. Verma guru ji is a man in hurry in any case. He has a teacher's conscience. Stick in hand, each morning he is visiting houses and pressing children. Lucky ones swim across the river to trap birds before he reaches. Those yet asleep --and unawares-- are driven to the classroom; naked or clothed, washed or otherwise.
Guru ji is teaching tables in high pitch six days a week. He is the head master. Uikey guru ji is the teacher. Uikey ji remains almost perpetually on leave. He comes on the first each month to mark the attendance register and collect his salary. Salary is needed at home a hundred kilometres away; earnings are always needed at home; so is he. He has to tend to his aged parents, wife, children, lands, cattle and community. These are the biddings of the lands of his birth and ancestors; it is an ancient conviviality, not easy to ignore. He abides by his land and finds it edifying. The State's is too lowly an office to nurture what lands and enduring ancestors do. Verma ji's village is about 1000 km away, in Bhind-Morena, Madhya Pradesh. He goes there during summers when the school is vacationing. It is official leave. Verma ji is appreciative of Uikey ji's calling; he too has a homeland.
Sonepur is not Marxist, Socialist, or Gandhian; neither modern nor primitive; neither secular nor otherwise; nor libertarian. It is not Sonepur's svabhav to be thus. It is just a village in continuity of its home; its memory is not mere residue. Unlike Sonepur, the State comprises of homeless people; it breeds on them. Their estrangement with lands provides the State substance and vitality.
School is like a festival; much din, noise and celebration; colourful without colours. Verma ji screams out the tables, children yell them back. Like the broken floor they sit in broken rows; but there is a unison and rhyme in their screaming the tables, in the raising of right arms with each successive scream, as though singing. In between Verma ji screams invectives when they suddenly rise chasing a dog racing after a cat that has jumped in their midst through the pane-less window. The invectives are of ill-temper, not ill-intent. With many children out, he now rests the throat with a beedi3 till they gigglingly run in again, dog happily in tow.
Back on the floor they are again screaming the tables. Some are patting the dog rolling over to scratch its back. The bird flies in anew into its crevice, to fly out again for food and cheer. Some climb atop each other in a pyramid and put grass and twigs back into the nest. Many times the pyramid falls and there is mayhem of fisticuffs, crying, laughter and blaming. Verma ji twists Suklu's ear without either of them interrupting the tables. There are no students at the school, only children. The children, too, do not look upon themselves as students, just children.
Like the rest of the village the large, unkempt compound is well-provided with dung heaps, anthills, rocks, fallen leaves, and branches. Its bamboo fence has as many breaches as humans, cattle, swine, goats, cats and dogs could create. The breaches are brief pauses whereafter the fence resumes again. In such continuum of broken-unbroken fence, broken-unbroken floor, broken-unbroken walls, broken-unbroken tables, and broken-unbroken doors and windows is the Pause. It is the shyness of the incomplete and tentative. The village recognises and reveres the incomplete.
A goat has briskly climbed into the pane-less window. Some cows and a grandmother with a restless, howling toddler unhurriedly walk into the compound through a cleavage in the fence; cows and grandmother alike in their patient, poised gait. The former settle near the termite infested flag pole, latter in the jubilant classroom. Now enchanted, the howling infant is quiet and humoured. Teacher, tables, children, infant, grandmother, goats, dogs, cats and cows all together in broken-unbroken continuum. The bird has made its dwelling there; and finds cheer.
A while later she hands over her toddler to the children. She has to be home and cook rice and khatta bhaji4 for her sons and daughters-in-law who are out in the forest, and for grandchildren who would soon run home. Like Uikey ji she is needed there. She shares a calling.
In the high excitement, enthusiasm and celebration, the school rarely has a dull or dreary moment. Its story is that of the village, its people and landscape; each revitalising each. Old and young, animals and birds are all together; none without the other. All are welcome and espoused, none is barred, just like the Abujhmadia's hut or landscape. It is for everyone and everything, not just teachers and tables. It is for the State as much as for Space. It is the only forum where the State and people have an unfailing, daily interface. Each day the people win, albeit only somewhat. The village and its earth, trees, space, rocks, animals, birds, insects, the ten directions, sky and winds, their meanings and significance --the large Story-- walk into the school each day. Just as such substance has ever been in all of Creation, so is it in school. All come; none preventing or intruding on the other. This curriculum is the village's very own. That it remains so, is the village's inherited undertaking. Each village has its own. No two are same. There is no uniformity. The curriculum manifests the longings and learnings of the village just as do Uikey ji, the grandmother and the bird. Theirs is the zest and ardour to longings and learnings. So long as there is the home there are also the longings and learnings. School is an extension of the village, its ways of living the earth, the ordinarity of everyday life as of humans; its uncertainties and tentativeness. Vitality and substance win each day, albeit only marginally. Each day the margin abates and the State augments. Soon enough, fence and floor would be seamless and uniformly unvarying, as would curriculum, windows, walls and fence; the bird would be homeless. Space would retreat. There will remain place, an uneducated and uncultured place.
Festivity is highest at porridge time. Known as the 'Monthly Stock' it is only occasionally sent in by Education Department's office at Narayanpur, some four hours walk. A handful children haul the logs, others light the fire, yet others run to the river to wash pots and pans. Cooking done, they wrestle and snatch from each other. In the pandemonium Verma ji throws in more invectives while swallowing his own from the leaf plate. Dogs come scurrying for the strewn while goats look askance. Cows are in reassurance, left-over and leaf plates are theirs. The little bird has come in again. Each has its pristine svabhav6 as divined for its being.
With the coming of April Verma ji declares results in a land where there are no declarations. Though results are announced, none ever knew which standard one was in. But most pass to the next. Much like the passed the failed do not well-know failure; but gift a rooster and move to the next; such being negotiations with Power. April is Verma ji's chicken month. Weary of roasted or boiled, tasteless crabs and shoots, I sometimes come down from my village and join him. His earnest boast as the best cook in all of Abujhmad is not entirely vain. Verma ji is always without competitors. Over chicken he talks of home --stories from his grandparents, of fields, famines, crops, lands, rivers, ponds and the fictitious lions and tigers of his land. He is boastful. Such is one's land, one yearns to invest it with everything.
Primeval forest is a place where all is one, undifferentiated. That certain 'disorder' in the school is the same as one finds in design and contours of apparent 'disarray' in intertwined vegetation, irregular contours of a mud house, of a forest trail meandering into inscrutability, in physical postures, course of a stream, value and worth of everyday conversations, the laughter and playfulness, and intense engagement with some unknown intangible that is forthcoming to all; so finely weaved into the 'disorder' and tentativeness of life, its ethics and world view. Such 'disorder' asks no questions of itself, or its landscape; neither does it answer any. It declines both in their expedience. In following the precepts of not-knowing lies Sonepur's nameless, its religion and spirituality.
Sonepur or its school are not a mythical construct. Large parts of contemporary Bastar were much the same till may be a century ago --though there were no schools. Abujhmad goes back still more in time. Modernity at large tends to connote them as myths that need be dispelled. For the State they are dissociations, for Sonepur they are the discourse of the Pause. Being the lone Halba7 village in all of Abujhmad, it itself is a pause in continuity.
This is how the school of Sonepur lives each day; so do the village and its people, trees cats, dogs and cattle, its river, sun, moon and sky. So does the unencumbered bird and its nest.
That is the substance and Story of the bird and the school.
Sonepur is about 4 hours walk from Narayanpur (nearest town). It is the only Halba village in Abujhmad. Of about 70 families, it has one jogi (Hindu mendicant) family and one Panka (makers of musical instruments) family. The only village practising agriculture, has country-tile roofs and the only one where cattle is milked. There are no schools in the rest of Abujhmad.
1Estimated population, Abujhmad, 1981
2Guiding light, Master
3Sir (Honorific)
4Leaf cigarette
5Tart-like vegetable
6Temperament, nature, character
7A tribe in central Bastar
Based on field notes and memory, Abujhmad, 1984