The backpacker’s library

The conductor calls out “Mallikpur brickfield!” as the bus grinds to a halt. Across the road a tall chimney is visible — part of the brick-making outfit that this place is named after. A narrow sand-and-gravel path snakes from the road, through paddy fields, towards a village. The landscape is punctuated by coconut trees and quite a few lichen-covered ponds with ducks. The path ventures into a clearing that is dotted by a cluster of small houses with tiled roofs. A couple of narrow wooden beams have been thrown across a pond as a makeshift bridge. From here, a short walk brings you to another clearing where a group of children sit on a colourful plastic sheet under the shade of trees, surrounded by ponds and paddy fields.

“I asked you to list the birds we saw last time. Have you done that?” asks a man with salt-and-pepper hair. “I have done it but it isn’t very good.” “That’s okay,” responds the man. “This is not an exam. Read out what you’ve written.”

“I listed a ‘hoop’,” says the boy.

“That’s a ‘hoopoe’, not ‘hoop’.”

“You see this,” says the man as he points to a map of West Bengal. “It is our state. This is where we are. If we go to another district, say Birbhum, the birds will be different.”

“That’s a shepai bulbul,” he points to a bird flying above. “It is red at the throat. If you go towards Birbhum, the red is missing.”

The man is Partha Kayal, a schoolteacher who spends his free time operating an informal mobile library out of his backpack for the children of Kalagachia. He has been regularly visiting this village in South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, for the past nine months. Every Saturday, he sets off at around 6.30 am from Kolkata and arrives in Kalagachia after a two-hour journey (with a change of bus en route). Every Saturday, some 20 youngsters wait to receive his help in learning to read or listen to the variety of tall tales, adventure stories and natural world lessons he has prepared for them. His programme complements what the children learn in school. The books they do not have access to, they get from Kayal.

The session today is a follow-up to the books on birds they have been reading for the past few weeks. Kayal is an environmental activist and has been involved with campaigns to create awareness about the crisis in the Sunderbans. He writes for several publications and helps a theatre outfit in Kolkata that works with children in rural areas. He is also a math teacher at a rural school. “I realised that the regimented structure of a classroom was not conducive to learning. I wanted to really interact with the children, create an atmosphere of immersive learning.”

Kayal began his interactions with village children by bringing theatre into their lives. The children now love to put together plays for the village. Kayal had earlier worked with children from another village. “That was a couple of years back. But I could not sustain it. The children were more interested in television, the internet and mobile phones. Also, their parents weren’t very helpful.” The experience with this group, he says, has been more productive. The parents too have pitched in. “For instance, they give their rooms for our reading sessions when it’s raining.”

The books he brings to Kalagachia come from a wide variety of genres. Some are about the natural world, some have messages, others are fairy tales and fables.

They are mostly given by friends or sourced from old workplaces, while some are from his own collection.

Kayal peppers the sessions with activities and games. The children are expected to write about or draw out three things that were discussed on each Saturday. Then there’s the bakko (word) game where each child says a word. And each word has to make sense when added to the previous one, ending in a legible sentence. The one they play today ends with sentences like “ Aaj — aami — haantey — jaabo . Haantey — jai — maachh — kintey .” (Today I will go to the haat . I go to the haat to buy fish). “We string these together in the end. The idea is to try to create stories,” says Kayal.

He also brings with him newspaper clippings as he likes to introduce discussions on current affairs. Today he has brought an article about astronauts growing zinnia flowers on the International Space Station. After he reads it out, a discussion ensues around the effort taken to grow a flower in an environment without the sun, wind and air; things we take for granted on earth. The children are excited to hear that the flowers were grown under special lights that mimic the sun, so the plants think they are getting the sun’s rays. And since there is no wind, the moisture released by the plants had to be evaporated with fans. To take the discussion further, Kayal introduces a book on space.

The next twenty minutes are taken up with the children poring over images of astronauts, the moon, and other planets. ‘What is this around this person,’ asks a boy, pointing to an image of an astronaut on the moon. Does the moon have many holes like these? Are they big? How does the astronaut go to sleep in such heavy clothes? Can you get up when you fall on the moon? The children are full of questions, and Kayal answers each one patiently and with as much detail as possible.

“These children are very active, running around fields, swimming in ponds, climbing trees. They can identify plants, birds and insects. But they haven’t had much exposure to books. Reading requires concentration and sitting in one spot for a long time,” he smiles.

The day’s session ends with Kayal reading out from a much-leafed thick, hardbound book. It is an old-fashioned fable across hundreds of pages that they have been reading for the past couple of months.

“Where were we last time? What was the queen asking for?” A boy leans across the mat to get closer to Kayal, his chin resting on his hands, scowling in concentration. Gradually, a silence falls over the group as the world outside fades away. He says, “Books are how we connect them with the world.”

(Anuradha Sengupta is a Kolkata-based freelance journalist and founder-editor of Jalebi Ink, a media collective for children and youth)

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