Jayavel’s rise from being a beggar’s son to studying in the UK and then being sent back may make you admire him. There’s a whole other chapter to the resilient young man’s indomitable spirit
Add a couple of twists and turns and you’ve got yourself a commercial potboiler that’ll put modern cinema to shame by some measure. After I meet Jayavel at the crowded building that houses Suyam Charitable Trust, in North Chennai’s crowded Vyasarpadi area, I’m surprised at how remarkably at ease he is for a boy whose entire dream of getting a foreign education has been shredded in a matter of months.
But then if you’re going to go from begging on the streets to dragging beggars’ kids to school and coaching them till they clear their exams, chances are you’ve got a lot of resilience. One of the fi rst things he tells me is that if you’d asked him as a kid if he’d get to study Engineering in the UK, he would have laughed at you. “That’s the thing about growing up on the streets. Like I did,” he says, “You don’t really aspire for too much in life.”
Almost on cue, a younger boy comes and sidles up to him, before Jayavel playfully puts him in a headlock, and introduces him as a cousin. It was with this assortment of aunts, uncles, cousins and relatives of varied denominations that Jayavel’s family moved from the border towns on the AP-TN border to Chennai.
“They say that we had fields and were doing some farming,” he says slowly, “But I never saw them.” All he remembers seeing was the squalor of living in tenements in Avadi, where they reared pigs — an existence that soon petered down to begging after his alcoholic father gambled away what little they had. “We then moved from pavement to pavement within the city,” he recounts with a grin.
A chance rescue by a couple who were making a documentary on children like him gave him an out from that life. “It was only after I turned five that I started taking studies seriously. I began to read English books, but I was always a little conscious of my spoken language,” he tells me. After moving from a Montessori school into a larger establishment like Velammal’s, he found that there was a lot more competition out there, “No one really said anything (about where I came from) but there weren’t any great expectations of me,” he explains. But he had plenty of himself.
“When Uma (Venkatachalam) ma’am asked me whether I would consider going abroad, I jumped at the idea. I said ‘Yes’. I didn’t even know where ‘abroad’ was, but I said yes anyway,” he laughs almost bemusedly. So he wasn’t going to miss his mother or his ‘people’, whom he frequently visited? “No,” he says stiffly, “I don’t like the fact that she still drinks.
I also don’t like going back because they’re constantly trying to get me married. They say I’m way over the ‘age’!” Coupled with a more-than-decent Cambridge Assessment in the IGCSE exam and with some help from sponsors, he managed to wangle places in a varsity in Japan and at the Glyndwr University, Wrexham to study Automobile Engineering.
“They wanted me to speak Japanese at the first place,” he mumbles, “My English was slightly better, so...,” he trails. No-brainer really. Except when it was time for the UK visa interview, “I was nervous. Really nervous. I think that worked well because normally I speak so fast that people ask me to repeat myself. With all that nervousness, I ended up speaking slower and the visa officer gave me a stamp of approval,” he says. That started a two-year period in Jayavel’s life that was in complete contrast to the 20 years that came before. “I was very worried about speaking in class because they spoke pretty fast, so I just occupied myself by taking notes and then scurrying back to my dorm room,” he relates of his time in the UK.
“I’d use the Wi-Fi to call the guys back home,” he adds sheepishly, “I did miss them a lot and wanted to return quite a bit.” He would Facebook his ‘boys’ — all from his begging community — and ask them if they were going to school. A year of living that life, a host of part-time jobs, and some new-found confidence can do wonders. And he began to find his groove towards the end of his second year when life, famously, went off the rails.
His roommate deleted his entire project and files off his laptop after they’d had a tiff and he failed a term. To top it off, his university was hit by a scandal when an exposé found that the agency handling their international students had conducted invalid language speech tests. Along with 300 odd others, he was told that he could not continue his degree there any longer. With the spectre of a large, unpaid loan and a degree cut short, he could have wilted.
Just gotten some ‘IT type job’, earned a salary and photobombed Facebook for all eternity. But Jayavel is made of sterner stuff. “I know that if I don’t complete my degree abroad, not only will all these efforts go to waste, but my community will lose faith in anyone ever offering them a better life through education,” he says sensibly.
So, when he came back, he looked past other jobs and concentrated on getting into another international varsity that would let him continue his degree, “That’s how I got an acceptance from the University of Turin. But, the person who was helping with the paperwork fell sick and I lost out. I’ll go next year and use this time to tutor more people from my community till they become really good at school work,” he adds.
Strangely enough, his mission appears to be on track. In the background, I notice that a gaggle of children have made their way to the centre of the building’s courtyard. They’ve all got books in hand but their minds (much like their curious eyes) seem to be darting toward Jayavel. He indulgently smiles and heads towards them, quickly barking out questions and pointing out lessons that need to be dealt with. It’s evident that they’re listening to him, because they know who he is. And where studying has taken him today. That’s a chance they’re not going to let go a-begging. Talk about being bowled over.