Once upon a time in the village of Narayanpur there lived a bunch of people who assembled children’s toys at the rate of 144 toys for Rs 20. Calculation yields that assembling one toy fetches them a little more than 13 paise and a little less than 14 paise. But alas, as much as I would have wished I was talking about some distant past when calculations were still in paise, I am not.

Narayanpur is a village situated in the Hooghly district of West Bengal. At about 3 pm, while we waited in the front yard of one of the “ghors” (houses), some women came back from the fields – visibly reddened by working in the sun and frazzled by the cutting of hay at this time of the year. And strangely all of them wore full-sleeved men’s shirts on top of sarees. Why did they wear those shirts? Because one gets hurt while working with the sickle in the fields. We gathered that each labourer got about Rs 200 rupees for working for about six hours (around 7 am to 1 pm), and those who were stronger, and fitter could work for a second shift till sundown for another Rs 200, or maybe even a third. Because the only work they’ll ever have in the entire year is these four months of harvest.

And then comes sowing potatoes which are about a week’s work. And they’re basically doing nothing for the rest of the year – because there is nothing to be done. One woman summarised it for us, “gotoraachhe, kaajnei” (we have healthy, strong bodies… but no work). Moreover, some landowners (who belong to the village itself) are bringing “machines” for cutting the crops rendering labourers even more dispensable.

We saw the men of the family sauntering around homes, pretty much like the goats and kids, and chicken and rooster. They said they took the day off, though there was no obvious reason for doing so.

Moreover, they stank of drink even in broad daylight. How do they pay for these addictions? From the Rs 200, the women earn in the fields, of course! Someone said he had two sons – one had passed class ten and one class twelve, yet they were no better than their parents. They had no jobs and no option but to work in others’ fields during harvesting season and nothing thereafter.

But why didn’t they go for better jobs. ‘Bribe them, only then they’ll give you jobs,’ came the reply from the mother about seeking government and other jobs. Another woman said her son stopped going to school after class six because “he didn’t like school”, and after all, it wasn’t that lucrative given educated children also met the same fate as their uneducated counterparts. So, what does her son do nowadays? Oh, just sits at home and idles away his time, she said.

A young teenage boy sitting at home with nothing better to do, because he didn’t like school! And maybe there’s a reason he didn’t like school? It was one thing to hear of primary schools with abysmal conditions, and quite another to experience it firsthand.

A teacher said: “The men who bring the children to school – a father or a brother or an uncle – will sit right outside the classroom and smoke bidis. Some women put cow dung cakes to dry on the outer wall of the school (a 10-feet by 10-feet room with un-plastered walls) and it smells so bad we can barely sit inside.” The school (or the room) had classes of up to 5 and all the students – about 40 of them – would be in the room at the same time. I couldn’t imagine how a nursery kid would tell what was meant for him/her and what was for a class 5 student.

The room had a small, aluminum table, a small chair, a small board, and an alphabet chart. Some shataranchis were rolled on the sides on which the children usually sat. No wonder children must be exceptionally motivated to actually “like school”. There was no toilet for the school. The teacher showed us a tiny so-called toilet which basically was some sheets of cloth joined together. Naturally, it had plenty of gaps. And it was by the side of the road, where usually you’d expect tea stalls. No wonder it was as entertaining to the men smoking bidis outside school to gossip at a tea stall as it was to gather near a toilet that allowed sneak peeks.

The teachers said they didn’t drink water before coming to school since they couldn’t go to the only available toilet. And this was taking a toll on their health. And what do they get for all their efforts? A measly Rs 800 per month. There were only two teachers in the school, one had joined recently and the other had been working for six years. Both got the same salary – there had been no increments. One of the teachers was a widow with a ten-year-old son and parents to look after. “So, the other day someone was found dead,” one of them shared cautiously, pointing to a house – an unmarried girl of marriageable age, whose house was by the side of the main road, a place which often hosted young men for their drinks and food. She was found “hanging” though the circumstances didn’t suggest suicide at all. Her legs were tied, and she had blood stains all over her body.

Everyone knew it was murder. The police had come but neither the police nor the girl’s family wanted to dig deeper. So maybe it was safer to have boys than girls in the village? “No,” the teachers were unanimous. It was even worse – boys will stay in the house, and bring wives, so then you must give them room, and feed the grandchildren, and the burden increases. But with girls, it ends when you marry them off. She goes to stay with another family and becomes their responsibility.

Several of the women, hardly in their twenties, were mothers of three to four children. Many of them said they had hardly been to school or had been early dropouts. Some got married when they were in class 7; so much for the legal age for marriage. Narayanpur is about 80 km from Kolkata, yet the real distance seems to be in time, between now and thousands of years earlier. Entering the village requires you to be oblivious of formal institutions like government, police, and judiciary.

It requires you to keep your notions of privacy and hygiene at bay. It requires you to surrender principles of honour and dignity of women at the boundaries of the village. It requires you to imagine toys as remnants of exploitation rather than playthings for children. A child in this village thus holds kids, instead of playing with toys – fattening them up to be sold for meat, to fetch some money, to buy some food.