Sarala came back

We are telling this story with the written consent of Sarala's mother and of Sarala herself, who is now sixteen. We are not publishing her photograph or her village, and we have changed her surname. She stopped coming to school in the October of her Class 7 year. There was no decision and no conversation. She missed a Monday, then most of a week, then came back for four days, then stopped. Her name stayed on the roll until March, when it quietly did not appear on the Class 8 list. The reasons, when our volunteer Jyothi finally sat in that kitchen and asked, were three, and none of them was the reason anyone would have guessed. The upper primary school her class was moving to was six kilometres away and the last two of those were unlit. Her school's toilet had no door latch, which had stopped mattering in Class 5 and started mattering very much in Class 7. And her younger brother had started Class 1, which meant one of the two children was going to be dropped, and the household had already made its arithmetic. The bicycle cost us ₹4,200. The toilet block at the receiving school cost ₹78,000 and served 149 girls, not one. The third problem was the hard one, and it was not solved with money — it was solved by Jyothi going back four times over five weeks, and by Sarala's mother eventually deciding, on her own, that she would take on extra work at the cotton gin. Sarala finished Class 10 last year with 71%. She is in her first year of intermediate on one of our merit scholarships, studying commerce, and she has told us with some firmness that she does not want to be written about as a success story. So this is not one. It is a note on cost. If we had been counting only the bicycle, we would have said it took ₹4,200 to keep a girl in school. It took ₹4,200, a toilet, and five weeks of somebody's patience — and the third of those is the one we can never buy.