What happened to Budhumuni?

"Please help our Budhumuni..."

I remember the old man, Budhumuni's grandfather, his taut body after decades of hard manual labour wrapped in a thin layer of skin, his forehead marked with two vertical lines drawn with some sort of a white paste_perharps referring to his tribal identity, his body bent over, hands folded, brows furrowed.
"We'll not get her married till she's at least 26," he'd said, as if keeping her unmarried longer was going to get her the opportunities she missed by not being a child bride!

Budhumuni was the reason why Rekha Kalindi, her 12-year-old friend and neighbor, told her parents she was not ready for marriage yet. Budhumuni had been the bolder, outspoken, free-thinking individual. She's never heard of Shah Rukh Khan or Hrithik Roshan, but with the strange inventiveness pre-teens develop, she had used a razor to sculpt her eyebrows. "I do it on my own," she's giggled when I asked her about her 'done-up' eyebrows.

Rekha was the shy girl, Budhumuni was all words. It was perhaps this ability to speak up for herself that had led her parents to not push her for marriage.
Till the day Rekha blurted out in her school that her parents were planning to get her married off and she didn't want to. It had been Budhumuni's idea that she bring it up in school. Rekha knew she had her friend's support, that Budhumuni could speak all those lines about the ills of child marriage, those long and difficult explanations of why child-marriage is a health risk, that the girl child, if given the opportunity to educate herself, can perform as well, and built a life for herself. That the reason Rekha's sister had grown so weak and frail was because she'd been married off off early and suffered several miscarriages. Budhumuni had explained how Rekha would have to suffer a similar fate if she did not stand up and speak up now.
Then, Rekha did. And overnight, she became the star. First the local media, then the national media, then the international media came down to meet Rekha. She blossomed under all this attention, she pulled out her 'good dress', the one her school had given her for the photo-shoots, she learnt to point at the right things, pose the right way, say the right words. She learnt that if she ran across the narrow lane between the daub and wattle huts they lived in, the pictures were appreciated. She memorized lines she'd have to speak at rallies and community meetings. Rekha loved being the star. The shy girl was now a chatterbox.
The President of India gave the girls (Rekha and three others who had refused child marriage) Rs 10,000, which Rekha set aside in a bank. They were awarded the National Bravery Awards. They travelled to Delhi, sat on bejewelled elephants and waved at the crowds as they rode on Rajpath. A new world had opened up, a new world of opportunities that might just turn her dream of becoming a school teacher into reality.
It had been Budhumuni's dream too. She had been the smarter one and when they'd been admitted to school by the NGO, Budhumuni, on account of being the smarter one had been promoted to Class 4, while Rekha qualified for Class 2. Budhumuni wanted a bicycle so she could go to middle school which was in the next village. "I want to become a teacher," she'd said, partly because the girls did not know of a profession more qualified than that. "Me too," Rekha had added.
When we set off with the girls, the brave ones who had refused to be married off and were now being tom-tomed as the stars, who would speak at community meetings and make an example of how the girl child can flourish. The car was full and there was no place for Budhumuni. She stayed back in the village, waving to her friend.
What happened to Budhumuni?

The bird who knows her birthday

It began with a math lesson. Simple addition.

Do you think animals have a sense of numbers, Angad?
Of course they do amma, they have a way of knowing their birthdays, how many days before it is their birthday, how old they'll be...

My immediate response was a smile. Then a hug. Then to speak about the sparrow who knows when an egg has been stolen, or how a mother lion knows how many cubs she has, or a mama-bird knows which chick has been fed and how much.

Migration and magnetic poles, estimation of wind speed or synchronising distance and the time required to cover it..., birds and animals would know all of this and more, but I could not think beyond eggs in a nest.

A couple of days later, Angad had to speak a few lines on how important water is to animals. In Hindi. So we wrote about how life began in water (to which he pulled out a dinosaur book which had illustrations of how life evolved from unicellular to multi-cellular to fish that began to walk and turned into dinosaurs) and so I had to drag him back into talking about the importance of water.

Kya aap jante hai ki prithvi par jeevan samudro me hi paida hua tha...

He took a while to memorise that, rephrasing it each time dfferently, sometime forgetting to say Paida, sometimes forgetting samudra...

We then spoke about how animals living in forests drink from rivers or lakes, how animals like the camel can live without it for days and others like crocodiles and turtles, live in water. Then some gyan-tinted-line on how the hot summer dries up the water around us, so please make sure to put out water for thirsty animals, cows, cats and dogs.

Of course he did not get 'selected'.

No matter how non-pushy or open one is about education, no matter how much we believe in giving each child his or her own space to grow and develop, if you are one of those parents whose only option has been to send your child to a school which lacks vision or imagination, you are left wondering what to feel when your child is not one of those who is 'selected'.

Looking inward, I also realised that in the hurry to give information and push an agenda (to put out water tubs for thirsty animals), to make Angad sound intelligent different, I forgot all he wanted was to have fun.
I forgot his bird who knows her birthday.