It is a warm April day in New Delhi. The session we are about to conduct is our third with girls who attend a bridge course in a resettlement colony. The course helps girls who have dropped out or never enrolled in school to come on a par with the literacy and learning levels of those in school.
Eight of us – four young teenage girls and four women – move about the room imagining ourselves in different places. Sometimes we are walking in open fields, sometimes we are catching the metro. Sometimes we are shrieking in glee and running through unexpected rain.
T talks about the day the mosque across her house offered namaz for three deaths together, an unprecedented event that shook up her entire mohalla. S talks about her friend who lives down the lane, who is left orphaned after the recent passing of her mother.
The world of play and rules have an interesting equation – you need them, you play within them, and yet, something else emerges. Winning, losing, anger, disappointment, joy, excitement…
