On a grey afternoon in July, children were out on the streets in Flower Garden, a slum in the Cottonpet area of Bengaluru. A few were playi...
On a grey afternoon in July, children were out on the streets in Flower Garden, a slum in the Cottonpet area of Bengaluru. A few were playing with toys, others rode their tricycles, and one stood with a racquet in hand laughing uncontrollably at something. Oviya S stood quietly outside her house, her eyebrows drawn together, staring intensely.
Oviya is 13 years old. She had just returned home after spending four hours cleaning apartments in a nearby middle-class locality.
The last time Oviya sat in a classroom, she was 11 and in Class 5. When her teacher at the government school she attended announced in March 2020 that school would be shut prematurely due to the coronavirus pandemic, she didn’t mind. When the teacher called her mother to say that exams would be cancelled too, she was very happy, she now recalled with a faint smile. But one and half years later, Oviya is sad and disappointed.
“I want to go back to school,” she said. “I really miss my school, classmates and teachers.”
When the two-month long lockdown ended in June last year, Oviya, the eldest of five siblings, started accompanying her mother, Sumathi S, to work. “My mother was scared that if I remained...
