In a narrow lane tucked behind the bustling streets of the city, where the roofs are patched with tin sheets and the walls made of patchwork dreams, lives Naziya Parveen. She is six curious, bright-eyed, and barefoot most of the time. Her world is a tiny jhuggi jhopdi in a crowded slum, where the aroma of evening meals mingled with the scent of dust and determination.
Her mother, Parveen, works long hours as a maid in nearby apartment buildings, scrubbing floors and washing clothes. Her father drives a school van from early morning till dusk, ferrying children who carried lunchboxes and school bags,things Naziya watched with silent wonder.
Naziya does not go to school. Not because she does not want to, but because life has not made room for such luxuries. The family’s income barely covers food, rent, and medicine. Books and uniforms are dreams packed away in dusty corners of hope. Then one bright morning, something changes.
A group of cheerful volunteers arrive in the slum with brightest smiles. They are from the MilesSmile, an NGO that works to bring respite to those who have faced mob lynching, demolition, communal violence, riots, and who are poor. One of them, a young lady named, Srishti, the Director of the Miles2Smile Foundation, sits down near Naziya while she was frolicking with her friends.
“Would you like to learn to read this?” Foziya asks Naziya holding up a colorful book.
Naziya nods slowly. That nod changes her life.
New Beginnings, New Life
A week later, she is enrolled in Miles2Smile’s Bi Amma Learning Center, set up right there in the slum in a room with posters on the walls, mats on the floor, and joy in the air. The center is named after Bi Amma, a symbol of courage and education from India’s freedom struggle, and it quickly has become Naziya’s happy dwelling; her safe space.
Every afternoon, Naziya washes her face, combs her hair with her mother’s help, and runs to the center. She sits cross-legged on the floor with other children some older, some younger but all equal, all eager.
She learns letters that turned into words. At home, she recites poem taught at the center while helping her mother with dinner or count her father’s coins with practiced accuracy. Her parents watched in quiet amazement, pride swelling in their tired eyes.
Naziya does not know where she would fly yet but she knows she has wings now. And every evening, when she returnes home with stories from the Bi Amma Learning Center, her life is enveloped with love and happiness.
Because sometimes, all it takes is a book, a mat, and someone who believes in your dreams. Naziya Parveen found that someone in Miles2Smile. And the rest is only the beginning of her story.
