Now I am grown up & still now I have a deep love for my aunty & I am proud of her and her family. Rajan, Sukhdev, 11yrs Daisy & 5 yrs Rosy, filled with so much love. My father and mother have accepted their love marriage.

As my beloved aunt Rajan is now running a free school for the poor and needy children and I visited my aunt’s place to spend my vacations.

As, on 15th of August which is our Independence day, after the flag hosting ceremony, the students of Buddha’s Smile School delivered the speech and did some dance programme. Although I speak from my own experience, I feel that all sentient beings, particularly human beings, want happiness, love and care & do not want pain & suffering. On those grounds, we have every right to be happy & to use different methods or means to overcome suffering and to achieve happier lives. I exchanged my feelings with them and also shared their thoughts and soon realised how tough their life is; so pathetic; so miserable. Poverty is a curse. I felt that these students have the determination of a mirror which never loses it’s ability to reflect in spite of it being broken into pieces.

I was observing these students and their action; suddenly tears rolled down from my eyes and I felt that really these children need love, attention, education, care for making their future bright and colourful.

From the deep core of my heart; I am feeling proud of my Rajan aunty who is sincerely doing her job with full dedication. She is very kind hearted women, who is enlightening the minds of young children. She showers her motherly affection on these needy children. According to me , only eyes speak the truth, neither the mirror nor the lips.., the person who loves can see the pain in the eyes while everyone else still believes in only smile. I have noticed , immense love, care and respect towards me from these children.

As, I am a student belonging to a middle class family with lots of hopes & big dreams in my small socket of eyes. From my childhood, the thing which stood as a obstacle in my educational career is ‘money’. But fortunately, money never motivates me, the thing which motivates me is my grade in the class. I am really impressed by the way, the students of BSS, are learning. Upon asked by my, Rajan aunty, I have got the opportunity to teach these students and I felt myself very fortunate to share my knowledge with them.

These children are ignored and not cared at all in their home. Here, in U.P I saw that untouchables and caste system is still prevailing in the society. There is a great deal to teach these children as they do not get support and guidance from their parents. We must seek our happiness in the happiness of all & regard the sorrows & sufferings of others as yours and hasten to assuage them. This is a true life.

It’s very difficult to find someone like Rajan (my aunt). It’s like opening a 1,000 shells under the sea to find one pearl. Anybody can love a rosebud it takes a great deal to love a leaf! It’s very easy to love someone who is beautiful, but love the one who can make your life beautiful…I have spend my few vacations with BSS children and provided the vocational training to them. They all were excited and curious to learn and gain the knowledge. It’s true to say that when you start caring about yourself, you start loving somebody. But when you start caring about others, somebody will start loving you. It was my first experience though it was pleasant. From these experiences my life has been enriched and I have learned many valuable things.

Priya Saini, a student of microbiology; B.SC (Honours) studying at Calcutta university (Maulana azad college) – Govt. college of West Bengal.

The Buddha’s Smile School was founded by Rajan Kaur Saini and her husband Sukhdev Singh Saini. Rajan was from Calcutta, and Sukhdev was from Mumbai. They met and fell in love while Sukhdev was studying in Calcutta. After they finished college, they got married against their parent’s wishes — which in most of Indian society means a lifetime of exile from the family. They moved to Varanasi, a place where neither of them knew anybody, and began their new life. Rajan found a job teaching in a local private school, but they were poor, and lived in one of Varanasi’s poorer neighborhoods. When Rajan came home in the evening, she found many poor street children who had no access to education, and she began teaching them in her front yard. Eventually, they reconciled themselves with Sukhdev’s parents, who helped them buy a small home across the street from the Tibetan Institute in Sarnath. Sukhdev started a chai stall, which grew into a small cafe, serving a diverse menu and geared towards the tastes of the Tibetans and foreigners who are studying at the Institute. Rajan left her job, and began teaching impoverished children on the ground floor of her home full time, supported by Sukhdev’s cafe. She hired a rickshaw driver to pick up the beggar children, and bring them to her home (it is amazing how many children can fit into an Indian rickshaw), but after a few months, she was running out of money to pay the rickshaw man. At that time, a young Fulbright scholar who was studying in Varanasi walked into their cafe. She was sick, exhausted and homesick, and like us, soon found herself adopted into Rajan and Sukhdev’s family. With the help of one of her professors, she found additional funding from the USA to support the school. Today the school has increased in size — serving over 200 children every day, all in ground floor of Rajan & Sukhdev’s very modest home.

I am not a school teacher, and I happened to be down with a cold the day my friend visited the school, so I can’t report my own impressions too far — except to say that the children are well dressed (thanks to a donation of winter clothes from a visiting philosophy professor from Iowa who, by some strange coincidence, I believe I met a few weeks earlier in Delhi), well behaved (even when they are sitting 50 children in a classroom not much bigger than an American classroom’s closet), and seem genuinely excited about learning. Imagine coming from a place where your highest aspiration might be to be a beggar or a day laborer earning starvation wages — and coming to a school where you are fed, clothed, and given access to knowledge and education. Rajan fights to keep these children in school. She walks in their slums and convinces their parents that the sacrifice of a few hours of their children’s time will pay off for them. She teaches the children not to beg, but to give. She is doing what I don’t yet know how to do — giving all of herself to serve others. I don’t know how much of her teaching works, but I do know that her two beautiful little daughters tore apart their home to find gifts to give us. Of course, when I have some money (which I don’t have right now, but that is a story for another day) I will give as much of it as I can to support Rajan’s school. I guess I hope that a few of my brave friends who have read this far into this blog will consider doing the same. I know that in Varanasi, even a small amount of money will go a long way. Rajan is the Ghandi or MLK that her little neighborhood in Varanasi needs to stand itself up. I am not convinced that a foreigner can really make such a difference on their own — but by supporting the genuine jewels like Rajan, I do believe we can began to make a dent.

There is one last piece of this story that I’ve been saving, in part because I do not know how to write about it, because it is too horrible. Rajan had a young woman working as a teacher at her school named Sangita. Last year, Sangita had an arranged marriage, and left the school. She gave birth to a baby. Four months later, she caught fire in the kitchen, and she must have burned, according to the doctors, for half an hour. All of her in-laws were home, but none of them helped her — until at last she called her brother to come help her. She was taken to a public hospital, where her sister attended to her day and night, since there was no nurse to change her bandages. Her entire body was covered with 3rd degree burns. Her in-laws refused to help with her hospital bills or give blood, but her family and Rajan gave blood, and visited Sangita in the hospital every day. Her Australian volunteer friend raised money back home, and was able to move her from the public hospital to a private hospital, where there were nurses, and antibiotics to keep her infections down. She suffered for almost a month. Again, I was not able to go see her, in part due to my own fear, in part due to a miscommunication with my friend, and in part due to my cold, but I will quote my friend’s description. It is worth adding that my friend worked as an EMT on an ambulance for 10 years before returning to school to become a teacher, and has seen all manner of medical emergencies — and should not be someone who has to worry about fainting. She came back from the hospital cold, and told me that she had never seen anything like this. She wrote:

22 days after she was burned, her face was black with 22-day-old, 3rd degree burns. Her lips and nose no longer resembled lips and nose, and her face appeared to be covered by a halloween mask. Her eyes were the only thing that let me know she was human. Two of her fingers on her left hand were burned so badly that all that remained was blackened bone. She was shivering uncontrollably, and looked to be in horrible pain. I am ashamed to say that when I walked into her hospital room and looked at her face I immediately felt nauseous and dizzy. I had to go into the next room and sit down to stop myself from fainting.

Sangita died a few days after I left Varanasi. She told the police that she did know what happened — that she had caught fire accidentally — but human bodies don’t burn for half an hour without some very strong additions of fuel. The fact that her in-laws & husband were at home when she caught fire, and that they never came to visit or offered to help her in the hospital, strongly implies that Sangita was the victim of the all too common practice of dowry burning. Her in-laws almost certainly doused her with kerosene, and then lit her on fire, in hopes of killing her so that her husband could remarry — and perhaps receive another dowry. Her refusal to implicate them in her death may have something to do with the fact that they sill have her four month old son. According to my Sen & Dreze book, there are thousands of these burnings every year in India — the vast majority go unreported. Sen & Dreze also argue that the attention paid to burnings — and the rare practice of sati (throwing a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre) — distract somewhat from the larger problem of pervasive oppression of women in north Indian society. Certainly the violence that can be directed at women, as in the case of Sangita, helps enforce their bondage. Again, I am left feeling helpless, and wondering what to do. Again, I feel that Rajan shows a path, albeit a small one, out of this darkness. I will do what I can to support her on her mission. I hope some of you will too.

Forrest Fleischman

Sukhdev was a pure and honest man, but his family’s religious background differed slightly from Rajan’s, so both sets of parents ardently forbade the relationship. Nonetheless, Rajan chose her true love for Sukhdev over the economic and social pressures inflicted upon her by her family.

After completing her B.A. in Education and English from Calcutta University in 1993, she and Sukhdev married and moved to Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Rajan immediately got a job teaching at a prestigious public school in Varanasi. But after her teaching day ended she would return to their small flat in Ashapur, the poorest and most troubled part of Varanasi. There Rajan would open up her front yard to the nearby beggars’ children, who were not attending school, and teach them reading, writing, and mathematics.

Thanks to donors like Amistad International, Rajan has been able to increase the size of her free school for underprivileged children. Two hundred children are now receiving their education in a warm, loving, and nurturing environment. Rajan is also able to provide snacks and occasional meals for the hungry children. Thanks to Amistad some of the students even have uniforms so that they do not have to attend school in rags and bare feet, giving them pride in themselves and their education.

The students’ parents are rickshaw drivers, sweepers, cow dung collectors, or weavers who are paid well below the minimum daily requirement to live and survive. Many children still beg at the brutal command of their desperate parents, who threaten to beat and even kill them if they do not return with money for dinner.

Many students have come to school with horror stories of dead relatives, brothers, sisters, mothers, who either fell sick from hunger and disease or simply died from cold in the winter or from heat in the sweltering summers. The poorest children have learned to catch rats and snakes and cook them in a fire without even spices or other flavouring, just so that they do not die of starvation.

Vanessa Turner