In the winter of 1989, when fear quietly replaced snowfall in Kashmir, a young mother stepped out of Baramulla with two small sons and a single suitcase. She thought she was leaving for a holiday. History had other plans.
Violence sealed the valley shut. Her husband stayed behind, trying to evacuate relatives, trying to save a government job that would soon vanish along with the office that held proof of his life’s work. In a small town in Madhya Pradesh, far from mountains and memory, she waited.
“It was an extremely difficult phase. We had nothing except education and our two sons,” Maya Kaul would later tell The Better India. “There were no Kashmiris around, and people here had no idea what was happening there. Rumours spread that perhaps my husband had abandoned me.”
Money ran out. Certainty vanished. But Maya did not collapse. She began.
With no network and no safety net, she started teaching children for a few rupees. When she went to collect school fees, what she saw changed her forever. “In households struggling for food, how could education be a priority?” she was quoted as saying by the news outlet. “I didn’t have money to help them. In fact, I was the one who needed their help… so I went to them with employment.”
The next day, she returned with flour, spices, rolling boards. After school hours, women gathered to make papads and masalas. They sold them. They paid their children’s fees. Slowly, dignity returned - first to the mothers, then to the classroom.
At night, when her sons studied, Maya studied too. Literature. Law. Life.
The boys grew up between heat waves and homesickness, between taunts and medals. One leaned towards computers. The younger one loved stories, theatre, books. When he told his parents he wanted to choose art over a secure government job, Maya only said, softly, “You can’t have laddoos in both hands. If you want theatre, choose that.”
That boy would one day become writer and actor Manav Kaul.
But Maya did not stop with raising her children.
In Bhopal and later Indore, she noticed anganwadis with walls but no chairs, children with notebooks but no toys, workers with responsibility but no dignity. She built Takshashila, one centre at a time. Today, she supports 60 anganwadis, empowers women to earn independently, adopts vulnerable children, and still celebrates festivals with widows and takes senior citizens boating just to make them laugh.
“If even one girl learns a few English words, I jump with joy,” she once said, smiling.
Now, at 73, she is opening a library. “I want people to read,” she laughs. “I’ll organise quizzes on books - and whoever answers correctly, I’ll serve them free tea.”
Maya Kaul never set out to be a changemaker. She only tried to survive. In doing so, she transformed lives.
She lost a homeland.
She built a future.
And quietly, without applause, she taught us what courage truly looks like.
