Mustafa outside the Urdu school he’s building in Ranchi. (Source: Express Photo by Prashant Pandey) Mustafa outside the Urdu school he’s building in Ranchi. (Source: Express Photo by Prashant Pandey)

EVERY MORNING, Mohammad Mustafa, 55, sets off on his bicycle through the narrow bylanes of Ranchi. In a cloth bag slung from the handlebar are a set of brushes, a few bottles of paint and some placards. He stops when he sees a wall with enough space for a powerful message: “Adhe pet khaayenge, phir bhi school padhne jaayenge (We will go hungry if we have to, but will go to school to study).”

This has been Mustafa’s routine since the early 1990s when he found his calling — promoting awareness about education in some of poorest localities of Ranchi. He visits the slums of Neori, Irba, Islam Nagar, Gudri, Hatma and Doranda, where he writes slogans on walls and asks parents to ensure their children go to school.

“Every time I paint my slogans, people gather around me. After I am done with the painting, I ask parents whether they send their children to school. I also talk to the children. They first laugh at me, but later understand what I am saying,” he says, adding that some days he simply touches up his old slogans, giving them a fresh coat of paint.

The youngest of 10 siblings, Mustafa, who is fondly called Chun Chun Bhai, completed his matriculation in 1982 from Maulana Azad High School in Ranchi and graduated in History (Honours) from Doranda College. “My father died in 1985 and I couldn’t study further,” he says. One of his brothers is a former ward councillor and a couple of others are in the fruit-selling business but Mustafa “somehow never got into any profession or occupation”.

He lives in a house near Gudri Chowk that he shares with his mother, his brothers and their families. Mustafa says he largely keeps to himself, in his room with his worldly possessions — his placards, paint brushes and paints. His marriage in 2004, he says, barely lasted 18 days. “The girl saw how I lived my life and realised she could not live with me,” he says.

Mustafa’s only source of income is the Rs 4,800 monthly rent that he gets from a couple of fruit sellers who sit outside his family-owned fruit shop in Ranchi’s Daily Market. He says he has few needs and lives with the singular aim of getting children to school. Though Mustafa says he can’t put a number to how many children he helped put in school, people in his locality vouch for his work.

Sainul Qureshi, 60, a resident of Gudri, says his earnings from the butcher shop where he works were never enough to support his family and so, he never thought of sending his two sons, aged 10 and eight, to school. “Had it not been for Chun Chun bhai, I would not have put my sons into school,” he says. Mohammad Salauddin Alam, municipal councillor of Ward No. 17 where Mustafa lives, says, “Chun Chun bhai has been doing this for very long, at least ever since we were young. Initially, we didn’t think much of his work but now that we look back, we realise that his messages helped several children get into school.”

These days, however, much of Mustafa’s time is spent at Gudri area in Lower Bazar area of Ranchi, where he is building his own school — a four-room structure spread over two floors. An unpretentious white board, with ‘Chun Chun Bhai School’ painted on it in black, is the only indication that the under-construction structure is a school.

Mustafa spent nearly Rs 2.4 lakh on building the school that is coming up on his share of the ancestral property. “I had some savings and some money that my father left me and I decided to put all I had into this school,” he says, adding that to cut costs, he did a lot of the manual labour himself. Though the building is almost ready, Mustafa realises the road ahead is long and uneven. “I need to get teachers first. But whoever I talk to says they want salary. I have no idea how to arrange that,” he says.

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