Last week in literacy class, sir showed us a film about a small village in Bihar where the women saved the seed bank themselves when the company stopped coming. My granddaughter asked me later what I thought, and I said it reminded me of our own jala situation — when the pump broke in 2019, no government officer came for three months, we had to collect from every household. That film was right: the ones who wait for help from outside often wait too long, and the chaula suffers.

I was listening to my grandson read from his English book yesterday — he stopped on a word, *scoreboard*, and I thought of our paddy cooperative. We keep our own *lekha* (account) in a notebook, every bag of *chaula* counted, every rupee for the pump motor written twice. That is how I know if we have enough *jala* for next season. This talk of entrance numbers, cut-off marks — it is the same. You count the water before the drought comes. But I wonder: when a village child cannot pay for the extra classes, whose numbers are counting that loss?