Bihar-Jharkhand is rich in mineral sources such as coal. The Heavy Engineering Corporation, a government institution, drew professionals from across India to the region as well as giving employment to local labour. So too a Military Divisional base, following the ‘birth of a new nation’ Bangla Desh, further east.

Sitting with my Santhal tribal and Harijan classmates who were Christian, I was the minority. Hearing them ululate songs for the October festival of the opiate Mahua flower and Christmas hymns, opened doors for me. I saw life on the ground with the shock of the new; the soul of things raw and profound.

I received and exchanged feelings with the Biharis who kept themselves invisible due to social pressure. I was writing continuously, curious about life in the shadows of a gulley. I travelled the streets beyond flooded rivers by cycle rickshaw, or in a military truck functioning as a school bus.

It was a tradition well into the 1970s that sweepers, leather puppeteers, shoe-makers, and anyone dealing with dirt or dead skin, were rendered Untouchable. So too the low caste Shudra, or in Gandhi’s coinage, HariJan (god’s own people).

This oppression was reinforced by the upper castes. Ownership of land – property – created entitlement and the workers, whether on the land or in a city, were commonly ‘bonded labour’; made to feel they were indebted for generations, across lifetimes. They worked without a wage, locked into a lifetime of debt. Much of their existence depended on ‘in kind’ wages – food, clothes, living in tenements. There was no ladder up, or out.

In my story, Kalkathi and the workshop women are all the same caste. It is a story about individual passion and striving, the skills that mark him out. It was unusual for girls (like Kalkathi’s sister, Parul) to be sent to state schools because of social expectations – housework with mother, puberty, marriage, and caring for aged family members of the home they marry into.

It is individual good will – in this case Kalkathi’s teacher and the ubiquitous fat man – that provide Kalkathi with an opportunity to realise his potential as a craftsman. That’s how it works. The workshop where I have placed him, was many things simultaneously – a military depot offering local labour workshops and opportunities while also house rehab space for soldiers with TB and mental illness (often early PTSD) following the war and emergence of Bangla Desh.

These are the realities of a certain time – my time – from the ground. They have fuelled my fieldwork and later, my work with village storytellers and puppeteers from severely disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds.

There are some who continue to get noticed and I felt a short story featuring someone who endeavoured through craft and art and makes it across cultures, shaping an identity for diaspora among other artists and arts, marks what I feel about the value of SADAA’s work, and the vision of its brilliant Founders, Directors, and Executive team at 25.

‘Art should be an axe to smash the sea frozen inside us’
Kafka paraphrased by Hanif Kureishi

Home…Again

Ranchi, 1974

Kalkathi watched his father squatting and sweeping out the overflowing blocked gutters. That was his job. At night, he would glimpse his father smoking his beedi in the cool autumn air of Bihar and hear his hacking cough. In the morning, his father’s face was ready to greet the day with shining eyes when he saw Kalkathi, 12, and his sister Parul, 9. They wore white shirt sleeves two sizes bigger so they could grow into their uniform over the next year -summer to summer. The whites had turned blue with their mother’s rigorous scrubbing from the famous blue Rin clothes soap promising ‘dazzling whiteness’ that she could not read. Perhaps it was a time when everything was understood as what it should be, not as it is; reading blue for white.

“How can Baba wear so many faces?” Kalkathi often asked Parul as they walked at 7:30 in the morning to the yellow corrugated roof of a shed, segregated as a school for the sweepers’ children. Along the narrow gulley bordered with open drains there were shanty homes and each had a head poking out at that time of day.

In the dry season Puroosh would shout: ‘Ay! Kalkathi – did the devil get your chappal last night!’ as he saw the children walk barefeet through the gulley. In the rains, Kalkathi splashed through the muddy water without a care, grinning, and shouted back: ‘Ay Puroosh! What happened? Left your chappals at home? They didn’t want to get soaked?”

Fortunately, in the shed-turned-school they learned how to make things. This was the year when farmers were armed with a red book, fertilisers, and guns, while the crops and tenant farmers were being killed by drought and local barons. But somewhere there was the dream that school, reading, something called education would change life …for the better. Kalkathi wanted to learn.

The word ‘learn’ was a burning flame in the cave of his mind. It was the only chance, or hope, that could strip the shame of his sweeper caste. He would lie awake at night watching his father as he lay on his side, gnarled arms entwined at his bony wrists, resting his broken yet dignified face on hands resembling brown bark. His father’s pink palms peeped from where they were interlocked; even here he was saluting some fate in obedience. His arms were like the sticks that made the brooms for the outdoor squatting toilets.

Kalkathi swallowed the lump in his throat, pained by his father’s condition, and that of all Sweepers. He often watched men going to the kacheri Law Courts mid-morning after sipping hot-sweet-chai from vendors, reading the local Hindi newspaper and having their shoes polished. Some were studying at the local law college which seemed to be mostly on strike, and some practised in the court when in session. It made him angry that he could never grow up to be like them.

Kalakathi was all too aware that as a family they stayed alive, by the food and leftovers that their mother brought from the houses in which she worked cleaning the floors and toilets. But Kalkahti knew that as people, as a family like many of the Sweepers families, they were invisible. There seemed no court or law of justice to their predetermined condition, as all of them – accuser and accused alike – fed the grand canal of karma, that there was no escape from this life. He saw how his father was continually exploited from not knowing how to count, being told that he was bonded in debt to the landowner – debts from the time of his father and his grandfather.

“This can’t be true!” Kalkathi’s stammer accentuated when he protested against the iniquity of this unnamed debt to the neem tree to which he spoke each morning; breaking its twigs to brush his teeth.

How often he clasped his hands and urged Parul to memorise her times tables before class. “You have a good memory – Numbers, counting, will be the most important thing from this school. It’s the only way you will know how much you earn and how much you can pay back…” he would say. Parul was a spontaneous mimic, and cheerfully would stick her tongue out having written 1-2-3 in ink on it! She pulled his arm playfully as he always swallowed on ‘the debt’ they were in; that their lives would be spent paying back debts from fields to gutters.

Kalkathi was better with his hands, fixing the rusted roll-down shutters of shops he went to sweep after school, finding ways of angling the tarpaulin on the lean-to to keep the rain out. He tied the tarpaulin so it was fitted like a wall, acting as a substitute classroom during the rains.

One day a white ambassador car bumped along the narrow gulley to the school. The sun shone. The driver got out and held up a black umbrella like a chatri or ‘shade for VIPs’, for the rear passenger. The rear door opened and small feet in Chappals peeped out but couldn’t touch the ground. Much shuffling later, a crisply starched white dhoti emerged followed by a rotund and important looking man. He looked like the typical Hindi cinema villain on the wall posters around the gulleys. Kalkathi was watching, shading his face from the sun, as all play stopped on the ground. There was a silence. The children who had their class out in the open, saw the man coming out of the car and even if they didn’t know who he was, they could smell he was important as he looked like the stereotyped cinema villain. The image was bobbing in their heads. The important man smelt of supari scented with coconut and jaggery, his lips were red with chewing the betelnut rolled paan. His clothes had evidently never known exteriors. There was no hint of brown dust on them. The man had a big white handkerchief over his mouth as if to say the smell around was defeating him from breathing. Another sign of importance. Not breathing the air that the less important humans breathe.

The man was met by the Teacher, who was swaying like a palm tree in a high wind in great deference. He taught all the subjects in the school from PE to maths, English alphabet, nursery rhymes translated in local Hindi, and making shoes.

Kalkathi was prone to worry. Seeing an unannounced visitor made him suspicious. “Will the school close down? What will we do then? How will we learn?” Kalkathi had decided that the important looking man was an untrustworthy politician or businessman who wanted to buy up the land which was the school. His growing fear was that if this school was taken away no other school would accept the children of Sweepers.

The Teacher turned his head to swat a fly. He spotted Kalkathi instead. Kalkathi squirmed as the teacher waved at him commandingly to come to where the visitor was.

Parul and her class were chanting the 5 times table in Hindi, rocking their upper bodies under the peepal tree. “Five times one is five, five times two is ten…” The tree over many years had broken the boundary wall and created a shaded corridor that served as an open classroom next to the extended wall where Kalkathi fixed the tarpaulin during the rains to create an classroom. The teacher was thankful for the additional space, without having to build one.

Parul caught sight of Kalkathi first, standing in the open under the sun, shading his eyes. He was as still as a kite – only he was not a bird of prey. The teacher’s swooping wave made Kalkathi hesitate but giving in to his genetic trait of obeying commands he sped towards the asbestos lean-to.

‘Yeh hamara Kalkathi hai.” The teacher firmly held the boy on his shoulder and looking straight at the visitor said: “He can do whatever you want.”

By the groomed rules of his birth and caste Kalkathi made himself invisible, looked down on the ground so he could not see any other exchange between the men. “Ok Kalkathi, go tell Parul she must go home after school with Piya and Kissan’. He did, trembling. Parul saw him coming and she too, trembled. But at least seeing each other face to face they could look into each other’s eyes and feel the bond of strength that always made them less fearful. Silently, looking into each other’s eyes, they affirmed they were Human. They blinked. He turned and did not know where or why he was being sent away from school.

The important looking man ambled to the ambassador car still talking, and the Teacher and the driver widened the car door to its furthest limit so he could climb in, holding onto his belly.

Kalkathi was told to walk to Kanke, one kilometre away. Kanke was where the Tuberculosis sanatorium was situated, alongside a prison ward, within a military depot. With every step, bare-footed, he prepared for the worst. Maybe the Teacher had told the important man that Kalkathi could fix anything and that might mean at Kanke, getting out of his clothes and diving deep into the sewer pit and unblocking waste, as he had seen his father do. Kalkathi was tall for his age, so now it could be assumed he could do a man’s work.

Kalkathi walked on. He was thirsty. It was the season of the purple jamun. Some of the ripe ones had been tested by parrots and pigeons and been cast away. He picked some that had fallen off the tree, cupped them in his hand, spat to clean them and let them dissolve in his mouth. The purple sweetness of the tiny fleshy fruit filled him with glee. The child in him wished he had some salt. It was a secret delight for Parul and him to sneak off and catapult either jamun or green mango and cut it in wedges, sprinkling them with chilli powder and black salt; it was the closest to heaven that they would experience on earth.

The sun was dazzling overhead. His puzzlement twisted his brows. Ahead, he saw the barbed wire fence encircling the top of the compound wall that protected the flat roofed double storied buildings. He did not know which gate he was to enter. There was a military check post and a soldier with a rifle standing by the red and white barrier. If only Parul was beside him now, Kalkathi could have crossed the barrier. She would speak for him in her clear, sweet, voice, boldly. It never failed to charm. His forehead and upper lip were sweating. His tongue was heavy and a stammer was descending as his anxiety grew. The dust from the road was rising like the queasiness in his stomach, the sickness from fear. He suppressed a cough, did a 360degree turn, and faced the way he had just come. He was going back, even if it would see him shamed in the school.

“Oi!” Someone shouted behind him.

Kalkathi was breaking into a run. He thought, “It must be the sipahi. Soldiers always think we have come to steal!”

‘Oi!” repeated, and there was a hand on Kalkathi’s collar.

“Arrrreey! I’ve been calling after you for hours! Are you running away?” The man shouted in Kalkathi’s ear and he was turned around like a puppet. His collar choked like a tightening string. It was a man in blue and white striped pyjamas. A TB patient. For the first time, Kalkathi looked up. The man’s eyes were wide open but did not connect with Kalkathi. He was speaking to anyone. His mouth dribbled. There were blood stains on his shirt.

“You can’t leave. I said you could go when it is finished! Now, come…” Suddenly the man began to plead and pull him to the check post.

The soldiers were smiling knowing the Pagal ‘madman’, as they called him, had found that day’s gullible victim. The Pagal madman was one of soldiers who had been in the war front at Bangla Desh and was now in the mental asylum recovering from TB. He made it a daily routine to walk to the checkpost and back in again.

“See, I caught him. He was running away,” the Pagal said to the soldiers. They were changing shifts and let Kalkathi in as if he were a well-meaning relative of Pagal’s with news from home. Kalkathi’s shirt was soaking as Pagal and a soldier who was leaving the check-post escorted him into the compound.

The gulmohur trees had thrusts of orange and yellow amid the fern green leaves, forming a tricolour patriotic canopy to the avenue ahead. The soldier, the madman, and the stray boy must have attracted attention as military and civilian passers-by from the Army Canteen who worked in the Depot stopped to stare as the three gained entrance to the Military Engineering workshop.

Kalkathi peered through the dark doorway, Pagal breathing down his neck following behind. At the far end of the room someone was operating a lathe. The heavy metal door shut behind them with a creak and a bang. Turning round, looking over the head of Pagul, Kalkathi discovered the soldier had left them.

Pagul shuffled and held Kalkathi by the elbow, pulling and pushing him like an excited child and invalid elder all rolled into one. The smell of metal heating as it turned the lathe, and the smell of wood shavings made Pagul give a grunt at first and then a shriek of joy. “This is my work.” He stabbed in the air with his finger “This too, and that.”

Kalkathi felt he had walked into someone else’s dream. His teacher had sent him on a mission. He was terrified it was to clean sewers. Now here he was in the company of a madman, in an engineering workshop, being introduced to a magic world of what-he-did-not-now. He wanted to cry out, ‘I want my mother!’, but dared not. Hearing voices, he followed the trail of sound, and the sun’s glare through a blue glass window to the end of the room. By the window in the same musty room was the fat man in the Ambassador car who had come to visit the school. He was sitting in a cane armchair, swinging his feet so they grazed the base of the chair without scraping the floor. He was waiting for Kalkathi.

The lathe was turning while Pagul , shuffling behind Kalkathi kept repeating mechanically: “Have you operated this? Do you know what it is? I will tell you. I will show you.” His hands were waving in the air as he was talking to the lathe on the other side of the room they had come from. Kalkathi was curious. It did not make sense, but he felt that Pagal was urging him to his new destiny.

The important round man looked at Kalkathi. He looked down at his feet. There were wooden drawers of different sizes varying from half-an-inch to six inches, of unvarnished wooden modelled parts of wheels, steering wheels, car seats, trucks, tractors, armoured tanks, bullock carts, bicycles. He had a soft nasal tone, but in his voice there was power: “Outside you will see, and the women will tell you what you have to do.”

Kalkathi obediently walked out of room of drawers and outside into a verandah with a courtyard shaded by gulmohur trees where seven women were working with wooden dolls assembling limbs, some painting them in all kinds of India’s regional bridal wear. Pagal was stationary yet twitching behind him and exclaimed, “this is my work.”

The women smiled widely showing their white teeth. One of them offered a half inch hand cut wooden toy body where she could not fit the arm in the socket. Kalkathi immediately took out his mother’s hair pin from his pocket and chiselled away the fibrous wood and fitted the limb in. More smiles. “That doll we’ll make a bridegroom!” Everyone laughed.

Then one of the women with a big red bindi and head covered with her red sari, said: “Come son, you look hungry, eat some food.”

Kalkathi knew that only the boss can offer food while instructing others what to do. His hands were trembling but he managed to fold his palms in a namaste and accepted the food.

“After food, wash your hands carefully at that standing drum of water. Then start mixing the yellow powder colour with the blue. You can come after school every day. We will train you, and you will be paid per piece. I’ll show you how the toy models are made and painted – which colours need water, which ones you can mix with sesame oil. There are brushes, thin as a breath and some thick as her plait”. She pointed to another worker with thick plaited hair, who was embarrassed but flattered. They laughed together as if they had been working together for a long time. For Kalkathi , as with the others, the woman took on the role of a professional mother. Being the youngest there, he felt he would be treated differently from places where he had worked where men treated sweeper children with adult loads of labour. Kalkathi swallowed. The lump of sorrow dissolved in his throat. His teacher had given him the biggest surprise and reward of sending him to a place where he could learn to make a craft. He was climbing out of the dirt heap.He was living his dream. He felt the relief of being a child given a chance to work. His teacher never said anything to him, but was watching him all the time, and now this. It was the best prize ever!

‘First eat!’ Seated, she stretched out her hand with a parval green gourd with tomato masala wrapped in a dry chapati. The lump in Kalkathi’s throat dissolved. He was going to learn. He sobbed as he sat next to the woman and allowed her to feed him with her hands. The dry chapati dissolved on his tongue with the juice of the vegetables like his mother’s own cooking. He could start a new life, making a miniature world with his hands. This felt like coming home to a dream he had never dared to dream. He could not change his birth, but he was changing his life.

1989 Bradford Cartwight Hall.

Kalkathi was seated in the main gallery and miniature paintings from Mewar loaned by the V&A hung around the walls. Many Asian families were excited there was an Asian Doll Maker all the way from India at the centre of everyone’s attention. The curator of the programme was about to open with a speech. She began by inviting Kalkathi to talk about his long lineage of doll making, a craft maker of a time-honoured tradition.

Seated on a mat cross legged, Kalkathi held his hands up in a namaste. “Friends, big and small, first a doll, then a puppet. When it comes to life, then the story.” The adults craned around him, as he picked a block of wood, shaped it into a boy. Each of his implements laid neatly like a surgeon’s on a low wooden pedestal. Even the children stopped their distracting high-pitched banter to focus on Kalkathi’s hands. Kalkathi chiselled, he had mixed colours, he painted, he blew a dry breath on his creation, and the lids of the doll blinked. A hush of awe from the gathering in the gallery. He then set the boy that he had just made, on the pedestal. From the drawers beneath, he brought out a fat man doll in a white dhoti, a teacher doll in white pyjama and kurta, and a third male in blue and white striped pyjamas. There was a little girl doll in a frock with numbers, and a woman doll in red sari making food, and a crouched man doll sweeping.

He had climbed across the fields of time. He had climbed out of the gutter of the deluded lie about generational debt. Kalkathi had learned well at the workshop. He had won a national award, creating a lineage of learning; crossing continents, celebrating, and celebrated. Parul had helped him, keeping count and overseeing the packing and delivery of orders. She had become his ‘accountant’ with help from the teacher and the fat man. Kalkathi was learning to tell that story without a stammer.

2000 London

A young woman is heading for a meeting at a house in Pelham Street. She is the youngest. The gathering consists of women writers and translators who are British and from India, Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Sri Lanka. There are two English men who have been teaching South Asian studies for decades. This group have decided to create a foundation that recognises South Asian artists – dancers, painters, writers, thinkers, photographers, weavers, quilt embroiderers, sculptors; communities who have come to Britain and given a life’s breadth of an identity from a location left behind to one that is newly forged.

Their journey has helped create a diaspora of the imagination and a legacy of recognition. The young woman has strong memories of watching her brother stammering as he made magical toys and puppets in costumes that got local awards. He became a national hero in India. Parul is that young woman now living and working in Britain, not working solely with maths but with museums and the arts, translating culture for a new debate: can traditional art ever be contemporary? Is that even a question?

Over the years, they archived art by people who shared skills, crafts, traditions, new work within the wide brim of the south Asian chatri – an evolving diaspora of the enigma of home from Home…again.

This story was inspired by BR Ambedkar. It is dedicated to the founders of SADAA – Ranjana Ash, Rukhsana Ahmad, Lakshmi Holmstrom, Richard Bingley, the Commonwealth Institute and many others.