There are sunny days and cloudy days, rainy days and sultry days. There are days you wish would never end and there are days you wish had never dawned. Sometimes, the same day becomes all of these.
The last few days were hot and sunny days, merging with cloudy and outright smokey days, not to speak of loud and disturbing days. That's what happens when it's rally hot and you are forced to close all doors and windows to try and keep out the din being made by a truckload of road repairers with wives and children in tow. The people noises were hardly audible above the constant thundering of the strange machine that spewed smoke like twenty factories together.
It was so bad, cause we couldn't breathe, our eyes hurt and itched, and the added heat from the burning tar barrels and the gigantic machine just about defrosted our fridge for us. Looking at the women and kids made me feel worse.
While the women either shovelled some sand or gravel or whatever it was that they had piled up, or sat in the shade of some trees, the kids were all over the place, pushing barrels, sitting on sand heaps, beating stones with sticks, looking grubby and happy.
Why were little kids allowed on such sites? Because their mothers had to come too and where would the kids go? Why were some of the kids helping in the work? Because there wasn't anyone to ensure that they didn't, or that they went to a school, neither were their parents interested in that option. Considering that most of them are seasonal migrants, schooling is patchy even in cases where they do get sent to study.
There's a very nice case of such kids being taught by a couple of university students outside a temple nearby. The difference between the schooled and unschooled kids from this fluid migrant labouring group is pretty sharp. On days when people feed the poor outside temples, there are some who descend on them in a mob formation, with the kids being taught by their parents to beg, hide the food they got the first time and come again to ask for more, to lie about having already been fed, and to fight off any other people who might get a grain of rice more than them.
The other group is of kids who are begin taught by the university students. The understand the meaning of a line and seem to get the concept that everyone will get equal amounts if they don't try to grab. They are polite, the older ones teaching the younger ones to say 'thank you' and going off in an orderly fashion after they have eaten. They tend to ask politely if they may take some for their families, and surprisingly, even their parents seem to curb the tendency to socialise them in the 'beg and grab' technique.
