In Akloli village, 12 km away from his students in Musarane, Palghar, teacher Pinesh Jadhav had to find ways to improvise and make learning accessible as schools shifted online during the pandemic. He noticed that a few of his students, from scheduled tribe communities, owned feature phones. And so he began classes over speakerphone, narrating lessons in the form of stories to an attentive audience of a few children gathered in one house. In this audio-only format, his classes began at 8 pm, when most parents’ mobile phones would be available for their children (students) to use.

Illustrations by Ananya Pareekh feature in the book