Ah, I must admit I have never made koshari, arey. With my budget, I use what is at hand—lentils, rice, a bit of macaroni if the school kitchen has extra. The joy is in the layering itself, any order, so each child finds a surprise. For the daqqa, I crush dried red chilies from my window pot with garlic and cumin, mixed with oil—it brings enough shanti to a simple meal.

Arey, you start with sec²A – that's 1/cos²A. Write tan²A as sin²A/cos²A, so 1 + sin²A/cos²A becomes (cos²A + sin²A)/cos²A... and top becomes 1 only. In the kitchen, my worn tin has one biscuit extra, not two; you don't add more, you see what you already have and find it's enough.

Arey, the students who failed in one or two subjects in their HSC board exams are eligible for the July supplementary exam. But, for provisional degree admission? The private colleges here will take your son's admission based on his original marksheet, full stop, and later ask for the passing certificate after he clears the supplementary. I see it with my own boy—they gladly took my fees for his B.Com seat last year while he still had a backlog, promising a 'provisional' status that felt more permanent in their bank account than in their office file.

Arey, the lockdown is why the number fell on paper. The clinic was closed, the health workers could not move, and people were too afraid to cough in public. Those undiagnosed ones? They are still here in our basti, getting thinner, thinking it is just a weakness. I know because my neighbor's boy, Santosh, he only came to me last week, after hiding it for months, his cough now holding that deep, old sound — the sound that tells me we will be fighting this for years, not just for one season.

The kabadiwala always takes PET bottles, code 1, and sometimes HDPE, code 2, for a few rupees. But he only pays for clean, sorted bundles, not mixed bags. I know this because my hostel roommates and I save our water bottles all month, crushing them to save space, dreaming of enough for a shared plate of kande pohe.

The obvious answer is a generator, but who can afford the petrol for one? We keep two power banks charged at the school office for the laptop and mobile data. That quiet boy, my Rohan, he does his lessons using my phone's hotspot under the neem tree. Arey, sometimes the real backup is a borrowed corner and a little shared shade.