📍 Pennyslvania, 2025 (Lata)
Most children start school at five, but I started working at five. Every evening, I put on my dirty, torn clothes and took my baby brother out to beg on the busy streets of Mumbai. By the time most kids were learning ABCs, I was learning ROI. I knew which traffic lights were “prime real estate,” how to tilt my head just enough to make my eyes look watery, and which shopkeepers might sneak me samosas if I flashed the right smile. I was basically a five-year-old MBA in street survival. Every day at 2am, my mother would collect us from a designated meeting point and bring us “home.” At that age I didn’t realize that “home” was a brothel in Kamathipura, India’s oldest red-light area.
Until the night I realized my mother was hot. I was six, too sick to go out begging, so she tucked me into the loft above the brothel and told me not to peek. Of course, I peeked. From that perch, I watched dozens of men come and go. Every single one of them asked for my mother first. Only if she wasn’t available would they pick someone else. Lying there, eavesdropping through the floorboards, I thought with absolute certainty: my mother must be the prettiest woman in the whole world!
At nine, I finally left Kamathipura for a shelter home for sex workers’ daughters, and for the first time in my life, I entered school. But school was always a struggle. By 12, I had studied in Marathi, Hindi, and English schools, never long enough in one language to catch up. I was always behind. The shelter home itself was a strict Christian NGO, where we spent hours memorizing Bible verses and were only allowed out of the house to go to church. Talking to boys was forbidden, and if you were caught, you were punished. There was no space to discover any other talent or interest — if you weren’t good at school or reciting scripture, you were simply “nothing.” I could parrot words but never felt fluent in anything except survival. When I somehow managed to finish 12th grade, I still believed I was stupid.
That changed when I moved to Kranti at 18. At Kranti School, education didn’t mean humiliation for being “too dumb.” It meant yoga and gratitude letters, puzzles and TED Talks, creative thinking and community leadership. It meant setting aside the textbooks to learn through songs, debates, field trips, and community projects. For the first time, school wasn’t a reminder of how far behind I was, it was an invitation to discover who I could become.
It was also at Kranti that I picked up a paintbrush in a formal art class for the very first time. Until then, art had only been doodles in the margins of old notebooks or henna flowers on my hands when I was bored. At Kranti, art became something else entirely — a voice. When I painted, the shame of failing three alphabets didn’t matter. The brush didn’t ask me to conjugate verbs or spell words. It simply said: show me what you feel. For the first time in my life, I found a language I could actually speak fluently.
Because Kranti required every girl to volunteer as part of our curriculum, I chose to share this new language of art with others. For years, I ran art classes in the chaotic waiting rooms of cancer hospitals where young children desperately waited for life-saving operations. Kranti was teaching us to use what we learned to serve others, but for me, those afternoons became much more than an assignment. The waiting rooms were loud, crowded, and heartbreaking, but also magical. I saw how crayons and paper could make children forget pain, if only for a few moments. I saw how coloring a tree or painting a flower could give them courage for the surgery ahead. Those rooms taught me that art is not just beauty, it is medicine.
Art slowly became my whole life. But it took me years to realize it could also become a degree or a career. For so long, I thought university was for “other people” — people who hadn’t spent half their childhood on the streets or flunked their way through three languages of schooling. I was 22 by the time I finally gathered the courage to apply (with a little ass-kicking from Robin!). Today, at 25, I am in my third year of university in Pennsylvania on a generous art scholarship — something the little girl begging on the streets of Mumbai could never have imagined. Every semester, my artwork has been selected for town exhibitions, and miracle of miracles, I’ve even managed to pass history class!
Even as I celebrate these personal milestones, my heart still breaks when I see children begging on the streets of India. I know I can’t “save” them from poverty or exploitation, but I want to use art to heal them, to give them moments of peace and dignity the way it once gave me.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop seeing the world through these two sets of eyes: the six-year-old who peeked through the loft and thought her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world, and the 25-year-old who now stands in art galleries in America, determined to paint beauty into the broken places of the world.
Congrats. Love your art!
What a story ❤️ love all that you are doing