Her long hair hits the ground like a lash as she sits on the floor, gyrating her small torso. Dressed in a white sari bordered in red with a big vermillion bindi on her forehead, Monu Kishko looks as if she is in a trance. A single Santhali mother, she is playing the role of a roja (witch-doctor) in a play focussing on adult literacy and primary health concerns of the villagers.

Some children and their mothers are sitting under the straw roof that extends outwards from Monu’s house, while the men are sitting on their haunches on the mud road that runs by the side. Under a starlit sky, a group of villagers are enacting a play called Andhokarer Alo (light in darkness). The children laugh in glee as a blind-and-hunchback duo approach the roja with a drunken friend who has contracted tuberculosis.

Ironically, the play takes place in the light of a borrowed electric connection. Monu cannot afford to bring electricity to her house. The play tries to attract attention to adult literacy, sanitation, polio immunization and “100 days of work”, as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is popularly known in the villages of Birbhum.

Through with her role, Monu runs and changes into the attire of a regular village woman attending an adult literacy class. She writes on a blackboard in neat bold letters the word, ‘aamra’ (us). Perhaps she understands the word in a way that we cannot. I find myself wondering how a single mother who labours eight hours on others’ fields cutting paddy has so much energy to engage in activities that do not benefit her materially?

One of the posters on her front wall announces that the house is an adult literacy centre. On weeknights, Monu’s only room is filled with women learning to read and write in the light of a lantern. Many have young children fast asleep on their laps. A little bit of literacy helps them immensely in their everyday lives: from reading bus numbers, signing their names, figuring out where their names appear on the waiting lists in hospitals, to getting an idea of what their children are learning. “If I were a little literate, I could do something more to earn a livelihood. All I can do right now is sow paddy saplings and wait for them to ripen so that I can cut them and that too on other people’s land,” says Monu.

Except for a brief spurt about two years ago, the NREGS has not worked well in her locality. Ironically, a road is being constructed nearby using diesel powered earth-moving machines, going against the job-scheme norms.

The month of Aghran (November-December) is a busy time for Monu — one of the few times of the year when she earns. During this period, she gets up at 3 am to cook and clean. She has to reach the fields before 8 am to start work. Her four-year-old son stays behind, with his grandmother keeping an eye on him from a nearby house. Like all agricultural labourers, Monu gets a break of two hours around noon to come home and eat the rice she had cooked in the morning.

The wages are fixed at Rs 70 a day and, with work for three to four months a year, it can barely ensure a living for Monu. She frequently runs into debt and has to borrow from her employer. The borrowed amount gets deducted from her wages during the work season. The days of moneylenders extracting big interests are gone, she says, at least in her village.

Are there days when she has to go without food? She nods, quickly adding that there aren’t many such days. During the monsoons, continuous rain sometimes makes it impossible for her to venture out: “We soak raw rice in water and eat it with gur.” Monu sings beautiful Santhali songs of joy, freedom, brightness and victory.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist, had compared human suffering to the behaviour of gas: regardless of its quantity, gas injected into an empty chamber will take up the whole space evenly and completely. Similarly, suffering fills up the entire human soul and conscious mind, no matter how small or big. Monu is a glaring exception to Frankl’s theory.