A Helping Hand

By writing exams for persons with disabilities, one woman hopes to help them realize their dreams

- Anu Prabhakar

PUSHPA HATES TEARS but when she narrates incidents from her childhood, which she spent battling poverty, she can’t help feeling overwhelmed. “We used to be able to afford only one meal every day,” she says. But as challenging as those early years were, they would lead to her remarkable life as a scribe for people with special needs.

Pushpa remembers enjoying a blissfully normal childhood, peppered with “toys, dinners out and movies at the theatre”, until around grade 4. But life as she knew it vanished when a freak accident left her father paralyzed.

“My mother, who wasn’t well-educated, had to work for `500 per month.” They struggled to stay afloat. But what hit her hardest was her struggle to continue her education. The memory of her grade 7 teacher refusing to allow her to attend classes over unpaid school fees still rankles.

“We never had textbooks. My brother and I shared notebooks by writing from opposite ends of the same one,” she says. In a desperate scramble to save the family from slipping into absolute poverty, the children took up temporary jobs at garment stores, STD booths and even factories. Pushpa cleared her grade 10 exams but dropped out soon after to work to supplement her mother’s meagre income.