This summer, I had the opportunity to be invited to conduct an hour-long session at a summer camp. It was no ordinary summer camp. In fact it was being organised by Teach for Pakistan in collaboration with Institute of Business Administration. The children at the camp were between the ages of eight and 13, and were students of the GBBS Leemo Gabol School, a government school part of which has been adopted by iTeach for Pakistan fellows.

While I accepted the offer without a second’s delay, it took several hours before I was able to settle on a topic for the session. The criteria for selecting the perfect topic was simple enough — it should be fun, should not put the children or me, for that matter, to sleep, and should not make me appear like a person who loves to hear her own voice.

So I selected art, a topic that seems to connect with almost everyone. I wanted to show the children various forms and mediums of art and how it is something beyond our idea of colours and paints.

So when it was time for the session, I divided my workshop and the presentation into five parts. First was the general introduction of arts followed by the rest of the discussion that was divided into various movements and art forms along an exercise for each.

We started off with cave paintings and they were asked to make similar forms of primitive art. For abstract art they had to make an abstract piece using the various colours and their meanings to share their thoughts. Then there was Cubism or “chakorism” as we named it and for which they had to draw their friends as squares. The last and the one which I least expected to be so powerful was comic art. Nothing very fancy, they were to make a comic of four panels with a story using two characters and stick figures.

Here are the stories that came forth:

Story one

Husband: What are you going to make today?

Wife: I don’t know. Will go to the market and see.

Husband: Okay.

Wife: I would need some money.

Husband: You know that I don’t have any money nowadays. I have been sitting at home unemployed for six months now.

Story two

Child: Ammi, Abu! Where were you?

Mother: Your dad and I had gone out for some work.

Child: Why didn’t you bring me ice cream?

Mother: We had it ourselves, since we didn’t have more money.

Story three

Child: Dad can I go out and play?

Father: No. Don’t go out today.

Child: Why not?

Father: The city situation is not okay!

Story four

Naeem: Kashif, where have you been?

Kashif: Naeem yaar, I had been helping my dad out.

Naeem: Yaar, even I have just finished with work.

Kashif: Let’s go and relax for a while.

Naeem: Let me go and ask my dad first, otherwise he gets worried about me.

Kashif: Okay you ask him, and I will go and get the car.

Naeem: Dad, I am going out with my friend Kashif to play.

Father: Okay son! But come back soon, there is work to be done at the shop.

Now, one would expect children to write about fairy tales and monsters. At least that had been my experience in other such sessions but of course those were children from a completely different demographic and class. They came from homes where such stories were shared with them every day before bedtime.

These children, however, belong to homes where life is so tough and unfair sometimes that the only way you can, maybe, explain it is by turning the entire thing into a story … a story that might conclude someday with a happy ending.

Storytelling is a narrative or tale of real or fictitious events. Stories may often have “elements of truth dressed up to make them more palatable,” says an Australian website. But these stories were not palatable. They brought up a sort of grim reality that you find in the work of Manto — hardly digestible, but existing around us nonetheless. And coming from eight to 13 year olds, they seem to be more haunting.

There is a silver lining though — through these stories there emerged a whole new way of seeing our society. Art can be a way of knowing the problems children face to understand their lives better. These stories need to be collected and in order to be brought out to a wider audience. Picasso said, “Every child is born an artist, the problem is to remain one once they grow up.” Our little artists can’t be left to deal with their problems on their own and become invisible with time. They are little Mantos just waiting to be discovered.