Zamane ab tere madd-e-muqabil
Koi kamzor si aurat nahin hai.
— Fariha Naqvi

(O world, look who stands before you is no longer a weak woman)

I kept returning to these lines when I saw the photograph of 47-year-old Ramabai, a woman in a sari, running barefoot on a road. Ramabai works as a cook and is raising two daughters. She entered the three-kilometre Amrit Daud in Ambajogai because the prize money could help pay for her daughter’s education and books. That detail changed the photograph for me. A mother finding a way to put a little more within her daughter’s reach. She wasn’t running for a medal. She wasn’t trying to prove that she could outrun anyone else. She was running because her daughter wanted to achieve something.

Something about the image felt deeply personal. I could picture the moment her slippers began to trouble her, the brief decision she made, and then her feet meeting the road. No fuss. No hesitation. She simply carried on. Ramabai’s determination can be seen in small, almost ordinary choices: the sari, the slippers left behind, the bare feet, the decision to keep going. Three kilometres may not sound like much. But I keep thinking about what it means to run those three kilometres with your child’s future in your mind. There is no grand speech here, no carefully staged act of heroism. Just Ramabai, doing what she knows to do: working, mothering, and when an opportunity presents itself, running.

Zamane ab tere madd-e-muqabil…

The woman standing before you is not weak. She is barefoot, and is running towards something her daughter can one day reach.

In an economy that is being claimed to grow by 7.8 per cent, a mother still has to run barefoot three kilometres for her daughter’s education.

Text and photos by Prerna Jain.