Chapter 14: The Flame That Spread
782 Words
It began in a district Aarav had never heard of—Sundarpur, nestled between dusty highways and forgotten train tracks. A place where cellphone towers came late, but resilience had lived for generations.
He found out about it the way he found most things—through a letter.
But this one wasn’t from a worker.
It was from a teacher.
“Dear Aarav,
We’ve read your zines out loud in our night school classes.
The girls here—some of them domestic workers, some textile finishers—say they’ve never heard stories that sound like them.
They want to write too.
Will you come?
We’ll feed you rice and bad tea.
And give you the only thing we own: a chair to sit and listen.”
— Sister Leela, Sundarpur Girls’ Night School
Aarav didn’t hesitate.
By the end of the week, he boarded a train with Ravi, a jhola full of zines, notebooks, and one plastic thermos of chai Meera insisted he carry.
Sundarpur welcomed them with smoke, open skies, and curious eyes.
There were no banners.
No microphones.
Just a chalkboard and fifteen girls in mismatched uniforms.
But as Aarav would soon learn—they didn’t need a stage.
The first girl to speak was named Champa.
Fourteen.
Hands already calloused from embroidery work.
She stood up and said:
“I stitched 900 beads last week.
I got paid for 600.
When I asked, they said the rest were dirty.
But I had washed my hands.
Only their system was dirty.”
Silence.
Then the girl beside her clapped.
Then another.
And then another.
That night, Aarav sat with the girls under a neem tree, passing around a flashlight and writing down each of their lines.
They weren’t just stories.
They were sparks.
By the third day, they had compiled over 30 first-hand narratives—each one raw, simple, and burning with truth.
They called the booklet:
“Threaded and Thrown.”
Ravi grinned. “This might be the fiercest thing we’ve ever printed.”
Aarav nodded. “And it didn’t come from us. It came through us.”
When they left Sundarpur, they promised nothing.
No donations.
No fancy logos.
Just this:
“We’ll make sure someone reads what you wrote.”
Back in the city, the team printed 1,000 copies of Threaded and Thrown.
They sold out in a week.
College professors requested copies for gender studies courses.
A journalist quoted Champa’s line in a panel discussion.
A social media post using the zine’s cover image hit 1.2 million views.
And suddenly, the stories from Sundarpur were being heard by people in places those girls had never even imagined.
Letters started pouring in.
From Nagpur.
From Howrah.
From Dharavi.
From Kerala tea gardens.
“We read the Sundarpur zine.
Can you help us make one too?”
“Our village wants to start a night writing circle.”
“We never thought our anger could fit on paper.”
Ravi built an online template.
Aarav recorded audio guides in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali—explaining how to collect, edit, and publish worker stories safely.
The project became known as:
“Write Your Side.”
It was simple:
No fancy language
No approval needed
Just stories, truth, and local voices leading the way
In six months, 17 zines were created across 10 districts.
By the end of the year, 47.
And then, one day, a call came.
It was Champa.
She had borrowed a mobile phone and climbed onto her rooftop for signal.
“Bhaiya,” she whispered, “we’ve started teaching younger girls how to write too.”
Aarav smiled.
“Champa, you’re a publisher now.”
She laughed.
“No, Bhaiya. I’m a spark. And sparks don’t die—they spread.”
The community center’s bulletin board became too small for all the zines.
They turned one entire room into a mini library.
They called it:
“The People's Press”
Workers came from distant towns just to read each other.
Some wept.
Some raged.
Some simply sat and nodded—finally seen.
Aarav stood in that room one evening, running his fingers over the spines of zines that hadn’t existed a year ago.
From factory girls in Tamil Nadu.
From coal loaders in Jharkhand.
From street sweepers in Punjab.
Ravi entered quietly. “This… this was never in the plan.”
“There was no plan,” Aarav said. “Only a page and a reason.”
Outside, the city pulsed with noise—cars, horns, new glass buildings.
But inside that room, silence reigned.
Not empty silence.
Powerful silence.
The kind that comes after the storm, when voices don’t have to shout anymore to be heard.
- Writer
