It is lunchtime and laughter, like the paper planes that bored children fly, darts out of the 8A classroom. Jessy Cleetus is sitting in front of the blackboard chopping mangoes, her saree hiked up to her knees, her right leg stretched out. She is visiting her daughter Sheeja who calls the classroom her home. Around them, clothes and cooking utensils are piled up on the plastic chairs. They are talking about a subsidised gas connection scheme, worrying about how and where to get one. And they are laughing at the irony of their lives: they are homeless, and worrying about a gas connection. It is an acquired quality, this ability to laugh at their own misery.
I am inside a 300 sq. ft classroom in Kerala’s Valiyathura town, at the Government Regional Fisheries Technical High School. Sheeja and her children share the classroom with two other families. Three adjoining classrooms shelter 15 more families.
Every monsoon, scores of people in Valiyathura town lose their homes to sea erosion. Five years ago, it was Sheeja’s turn, and for her and another 40 people, this school has been their refuge since.
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Sheeja is a single mother who works in a catering company. “My mother also lost her home,” she says, “but she lives in a rented house.” Jessy is obviously able to pay the ₹3000 rent her shanty-owner charges, but she takes a 30-minute bus ride everyday to help her daughter. She carries lunch, sometimes fruit, mangoes or jackfruit.
“I am tool old to live like this,” she says, her hands drawing a wide arc to include the uneven, sand-strewn floor, the asbestos roof that has more holes than a colander, the greasy walls almost the colour of the blackboard from the layers of soot emitted by the three cooking stoves that constantly burn here.
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Life in the classroom gets increasingly challenging with every passing season, but the families have made peace with the slippery dates of the promised government accommodation. “We were supposed to move yesterday to a two-bedroom flat promised by the government,” says Sheeja. “But they postponed it again.”
Meanwhile in the school, one of the two toilets broke down last month and now all 40 of them share one. This week the false ceiling came crashing down. Last December, after cyclone Ockhi, the school was as crowded as a carnival ground.
Reesamma, who lives here with her grandchildren, walks up to a cupboard and fumbles inside. She digs out a photograph of her sea-facing hut. “I lived in this house for more than 50 years. This is the only proof I now have of it,” she says.
Every year the sea claims homes. So far, flats have been allocated to 122 families living in various camps, many in schools like this, across the coastal town, but they are not yet ready for families to move in.
Across the playground is the staff room, where Jayasree M., the headmistress of the Valiyathura Vocational Higher Secondary School, has to strain her voice to be heard because one of the women whose name has not appeared in the list of flat allotments is raising hell. It’s the reason why the headmistress has forbidden the students from using the playground. “Instead we take them to a private ground,” she says.
Jayasree is distraught that the school, which can accommodate 120 children, now has just 40 students. “We cannot have a smart classroom, a laboratory, or the space for basic needs like a projector,” she says.
The hostel now doubles up as classrooms, which leaves six kids to share one hostel bedroom. The teachers use the veranda as staffroom, and in front of them is a water pipe where a septuagenarian takes a shower.
A few yards away, the Valiyathura Lower Primary School is also in a sorry state. Four of its five classrooms have been turned into camps and the single remaining room has been divided into four spaces, where teachers teach classes I to IV simultaneously.
It may be a few months before the flats get ready and these families move out. Till then, these classrooms are where they celebrate and lament together. Sheeja’s children received their first communion here, and often they all seem like one large joint family.
As for the school, its walls will soon get a coat of whitewash that hides the soot marks from the stove, the classrooms will have benches and desks again, and the children will reclaim their playground. All this until the sea breaches the coast again.
The writer’s hometown Thiruvananthapuram and its many eccentricities feature in her stories.