Vellai Thamarai: imagine going to a school named White Lotus. It’s not yet entirely finished but is supposed to be by January. Nearly every villager in Cinna Kattupalayam lines the road to greet our bus with cries of hello and bonjour. On a Monday morning, the children are beside themselves at the prospect of going to school. There are enough smiles for a thousand mornings.

We take our yoga classes on the roof of the new school, under a tall, thatched structure with open sides. Most of the people in the assembly know their hatha-style yoga; others stumble a lot  but soon everyone gets into the flow, despite the great sensual distractions: banana groves to the north wavering in the gold sunlight; rice paddies to the east where a few dozen women bend weeding at daybreak; thick coconut trees to the west that invite the eye to enter and roam; and to the south, the village, overlain with teak, drumstick and casuarina trees, where cooking-fire smoke rises and every dog yaps at everything.

There’s a blessed break around 9 to boat a mile or so down a green stream, which takes us to the sea for an hour’s swim in view of a towering blue Hindu temple. The coast here was struck hard by the tsunami in 2004. In the tiny Pondicherry district alone about 600 lives were lost. But the 10-meter, or nearly 35-foot, waves didn’t roll up to the future site of Vellai Thamarai, and the village was spared the worst.

By the time we return, school classes are under way, and the air rings with voices of children shouting out their ABCs. The young Tamil teachers in dazzling saris instruct the little ones to greet the visitors as we fill the classroom doors and windows. A few of them are still crying for their parents who’ve left them for the day. One or two sleep soundly on mats, others sip warm milk and sugar, still others reach out to shake our hands.

Classes in Indian culture, taught by Ajit or his wife, Selvi, guide us through the thickets of marriage, life in the Aurobindo ashram, techniques of meditation and the Hindu pantheon. We discuss the future of the school, how the rice and bananas growing on adjacent fields help the bottom line, how financing from the government is sparse and how much the project depends on donors. The director of the school works without pay. He and the social worker and even the building superintendent follow the guiding principle of sharing the labor; many a midday found all of them squatting in the kitchen with the cooks snapping green beans or peeling onions and ginger. Hierarchy counts for nothing here; helping one another is everything.