Cleared His Examinations Writing With Is Left Toe

June 17 morning, Rajesh Laxman Pille was very nervous. Like thousands of students who had written their school-leaving exams in Mumbai, Rajesh too was awaiting his results. Rajesh, who has no hands, had written all his papers algebra, geometry, science and technology, English, Hindi, Marathi, history and geography by holding pen, pencil, and the geometric compass by the toes of his left leg.

At around 3 pm, one of the teachers at SUPPORT (Society Undertaking Poor People's Onus For Rehabilitation), a non-governmental organizhation that rehabilitates Mumbai street children, told him he had secured 71.82 percent.

Rajesh was a normal boy and enjoyed his childhood. But one day he was running after a kite and accidentally touched a live electric wire with both his hands and lost his hands. He doesn’t say how he ended up on Mumbai’s streets, addicted to cigarettes, for which he begged at the city’s famed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, home to scores of abandoned street children. But Rajesh remembers what he describes as his rebirth, which happened sometime in 1999. Sujata Ganega, one of the founder trustees of SUPPORT, who Rajesh today fondly calls ‘mummy’, saw the limbless 7-year-old smoking a cigarette, holding it in his leg. She wondered: If this boy can smoke with his leg, he can surely write using the same technique.

After completing the legal formalities and ascertaining that Rajesh was an orphan, abandoned on the streets, she brought him to SUPPORT’s office in Vakola, Santacruz, north-western Mumbai, where 180 street kids get detoxified, educated, de-addicted and then rehabilitated.

For the first few days at SUPPORT he would just throw tantrums, refuse to eat food, and abuse the volunteers with expletives. The pangs of tobacco addiction were just too difficult to ignore. It took almost three weeks of detoxification, counseling, medicines and persuasion about the fruits of good life that helped Rajesh wean himself away from his addiction.

The next challenge was to learn to write using his leg. It took almost three years of dogged perseverance before Rajesh could write legibly. But his hard work paid off and now he has dreams of a bright future and is confident that his disability will not impede his future.