It is quarter to 3. I am meeting Gauri in 15 minutes. Basically a designer who works with her mother in their own boutique, she has been teaching drawing to kids for some time now.
Summer is already here, with fire raining down from the skies. The sun mercilessly beats everyone and everything that comes in its way, with its intensity.
The city runs, busy as always. I take an auto-rickshaw, and have to hold on to my seat as the driver speeds up on the road, overtaking other vehicles, honking all the time.
I reach the destination well before time. It is a plush locality in the suburbs of Bombay. The street is unusually wide with private banks, café houses, hi-end garment stores, expensive cars neatly parked around, and tall residential buildings on both the sides.
I walk around looking for a “group of children studying by the side of the road”. I am amazed at the sheer size of the class that is spread out on the pavement: 30 kids crouching on mats, poring over textbooks in the shade of a big building. Instead of being bogged down by all the traffic noise around them, they drown themselves in the sweet cacophony of their own chatter and laughter.
I observe that Gauri brings in her own characteristic simplicity into her work too. Her style of teaching the art to the kids is unpretentious, to say the least and her way of interacting with the kids downright friendly and innocent.
There is an immediate sense of welcome one feels when she is around. The kids like her instinctually, and because I am with their teacher I am accepted in their midst by default. There are no awkward introductions and no formal courtesies. She opens her own book of drawings, and displays a rough sketch she has made of a motorbike. “Anjum wanted me to draw a motor bike”, she says, pointing to a boy in a red t-shirt. He is hardly 10.
I can sense the excitement and know instantly how keenly they look forward to their weekly drawing class. I can only imagine the respite it brings to them from their daily lessons in history, science and geography.
Pencils are sharpened, things borrowed and given, queries asked and resolved, after which everyone gets down to concentrating on his/her own sheet of paper and drawing-colours. The chatter gives way to silence as each one of them dives into the creative aspects of their energy. The silent space that they hold between them is so stealthy that it keeps away the madness of the city that lurks just around the corner.
She is their Drawing Teacher, and they seek her help in expressing their imagination on paper, in lines and curves that perhaps only she, with her expertise, can help them bring to life. And I see she is doing a fantastic job.
Another teacher informs me that they come together at the same place everyday after school. “Back home, it is difficult for them to study. Either the parents are fighting, or they themselves have to do household chores. This is where they can study in the company of fellow-students. And we are here to help them”.
But it is not that everyone wants to do the drawing. Gauri informs me that she has given up on a few older students, pointing towards a group of kids sitting in a distance. “They don’t want to paint or draw”, she says. It is a sad sight watching these 5-6 students sitting away from everybody else, all tense and serious, taking down notes from textbooks. Playing is a luxury they can’t afford to indulge in. Of course they want to catch up with a world that threatens to leave them behind. The fear which rules the outside world, has somehow managed to creep in within the circle, taking the first few hostages.
However it is encouraging to hear their teacher speak to a little one, “You will become a Cartoonist”, she says. Then to another, “Look at that! How very smart of you to have drawn it so meticulously! You are going to become an engineer”. “And you Neesu” she kisses a little girl, “you will get to become a teacher, just like me”.