The textile mill I worked at for twenty-six years closed without much warning, and at fifty-eight, nobody was in a hurry to hire me for anything else. I had savings enough to get by, and far too many empty hours in the day.
A neighbour’s daughter was struggling with her school textbook one evening, and I sat with her for an hour, the way I used to help my own children. Word got around the lane. Within a year I had children showing up on my doorstep most evenings after school, sitting on jute mats in my small courtyard while I went through arithmetic and Hindi grammar with whoever needed it that day.
It’s been nine years now. I’ve lost count of exactly how many children have passed through that courtyard, but the number is well past three hundred. A few of them come back now, in college uniforms, just to say the multiplication tables finally stuck. That’s the only fee I’ve ever taken.
Leave Your Footprint
"I lived this." "I relate." "My father was exactly like this." Say what this stirred in you.
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