AN ABACUS FOR HER JIGSAW OF LIFE

Like it or not, rural women may be financially savvier than their urban sisters. Microlenders educate the former with the math of money to help them live better and realise their dreams

- Indrishka Bose & Kumar Chatterjee

The forty-nine phonetic letters of the Kannada alphabet gave Sunitha a tough time negotiating when she began taking evening classes at a literacy drive by an NGO. Three years on, she was able to teach her two children the basics of the language so that they needn’t wait till their thirties to spell their names. Literacy gave her the right to dream but it didn’t resolve her distress.

Husband Suraj Divakar’s income from farming was just about their everyday sustenance. There was hardly anything left at the end of the day for their tomorrow. Sunitha remained a housewife until 2013 when a fellow villager prodded her to start painting on fabric – a common cottage industry in the Madwanagar area of Udupi district in Karnataka. But she spent her earnings from painted fabric by buying food and clothes for the family. Then, there was nothing left to buy new fabric. Dreams parched in drying coffers. “My daughter made a confession on the day I made my first earning of ₹200. We had chicken and rice in dinner. At the bed at night, she said she wanted to be a teacher, just like the smart ladies she saw at the private school in the town,” says Sunitha. Dreams are contagious, and most often, they overlook the hurdles until they met with reality. “I didn’t know everything will suffer a nosedive in just a few days.”