Blog: A Cow in the Playground

Sitting in a dusty classroom reading my favourite stories to Hindi-speaking children … teaching was never better than this for Jean Ashbury.

White cranes lined up on the school wall and eyed their insect breakfasts in the cow manure below. In the field beyond, camels the colour of dark chocolate foraged in the tops of acacia trees. Beside them, I could see the corkscrew horns of endangered black bucks and skittish chinkara deer (Indian gazelles) as they grazed in the scrub beside nilgai antelopes. In the playground a cow headed towards a classroom. And in the rafters above my head swifts flitted back and forth nest-building with twigs and scrap.

I sat on the steps outside a classroom with Haseena tucked in the crook of my arm. “Baloo,” she said in Hindi and pointed to the cover of the story book in my hand.
“Yes. A bear,” I replied.
“Yesyes,” she said dismissively. “B-e-a-r … bear.”

Haseena’s portrait of me!

I was at Haseena’s school in a small village in Mandore near Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Four Book Bus volunteers and I were working on a pilot project to support learning English as a foreign language, and we were using favourite stories that British children read. Our aim was to teach with stories children enjoy instead of setting dry vocabulary and grammar exercises.

Seven year old Haseena is literate in Hindi, the medium of instruction in her school. She also speaks Marwari, a regional language of western Rajasthan. She’s memorised the letters of the English alphabet by their names and spells words out before saying them. Every day she practises writing English script and carefully copies phrases from the blackboard. She doesn’t often remember what these say or what they mean. When we met she greeted me with “Howareyou?” but looked lost when I asked her the same question.

To get to school Haseena walks about 1km from her house. But we had to cope with half an hour of traffic mayhem through Mandore’s sprawl of ramshackle chai shops, stores, low stone houses and spanking new government buildings. In between jerk-braking for road goddesses (cows) to amble past and slaloming round those pretending to be speed bumps, daily life flashed past: reed slender women draped in saris carrying heavy loads on their heads; sinewy, nutmeg coloured men splitting sandstone with small pickaxes. Every job that can be completed by a small machine is done by hand … many, many, many hands. It was a glimpse of the grinding existence that might be Haseena’s future.

I sat on a charpoy on the porch of Haseena’s house drinking milky masala chai, hot and fragrant with ginger and cardamom. The water had been heated inside the house on a one-ringed gas burner, but on the bone-dry ground near the step was a pile of dried cow dung ready for lighting the chulha (stove) next to it.

Haseena’s house is a one storey, flat-roofed rectangular structure made of bricks. It has areas for sleeping with mattresses and rugs on the floor, and one for cooking. Pylons, and large pipes from the Indira Gandhi Canal in Jaisalmer on the Pakistan border, bring power and water to the house. Water is always scarce, but there is always some left for wildlife, and for refreshing the wilting okra and spinach plants in the kitchen garden. Indira’s promise to green the Rajasthani desert remains a promise. The drought prone land supports short crops of grain and vegetables that are subject to the whims of the monsoon – late, early, or not at all. Scrub thorn, acacia and khejri trees are typical of the area where Haseena’s family tend their sheep, goats and cattle.

The school, big enough for a hundred pupils, was typical of the five we visited: low brick buildings, exteriors painted with the colours of the Indian flag, basic classrooms with blackboard and chalk, no resources to speak of, benches and desks for older children, and floor blankets for the younger ones.

“Kal milenge,” said Haseena as she waved at the jeep taking us away from school.
“See you tomorrow,” I said, and suddenly felt impatient for the morning.