A few weeks ago I had a dream about kids underwater that morphed to the nightmare stage when the children couldn’t be located. When the dream ended the children still hadn’t been found. A few days before my kids-under-water-anxiety-dreams started we had decided to organize a water-park outing for 34 kids from Saki Naka who definitely can’t swim, have never seen a swimming pool or been in water deeper than what would cover their nicked and cut bare feet. It seemed a good idea.

We stopped abruptly when Indu spotted the cobbler’s stall. Every year we head down this dust bin of a road, jammed into the back of an auto-rickshaw heading to a community not far from Saki Naka but where we have no other business or reason to be there except to find Rajesh, a gentle man who fixes shoes beneath a tarp tied to two leaning bamboo poles. Rajesh has a son, a mentally ill wife and an income so scarce he is always in debt to simply live. I wish I could say that the