PAINTING A BRIGHTER FUTURE.

Jalwat Huma, dressed in white, with a white chadar on her head, sits surrounded by children ranging from 12-18 years. Most of the children have on unclean and torn clothes, their hands stained with blue, black, red and white paint. With a canvas placed in front of her on the floor and a brush in her right hand, Huma is teaching brushstrokes to her young students. The children follow her step by step as she instructs.

Huma teaches the art of painting and drawing to the street children and scavengers of Hayatabad, a suburb on the western outskirts of Peshawar, bordering the erstwhile Fata district of Khyber Agency.

Huma set up her institute, named Rang-Geet Art Gallery, in August 2021, by allocating a three-room-basement of her house for it. It is where scavengers, street children and uneducated women from the tribal districts of Khyber and Peshawar come to learn painting and sketching. The Rang-Geet Art Gallery opens at 11am and remains open till 8pm. The students come in groups at their convenience. The female students appear in the mornings because they are not allowed to go out in the late hours of the day, whereas the boys normally stroll in after 3pm, after their day's labour.

'No one has thought about these children, they are the ignored ones,' says the art teacher, looking at the children around her with love. 'They are left behind in the run of life. Society has pushed them into the dungeons of darkness. I dreamt of a place where such children could express themselves. I desired to empower them to express themselves through the brush. I knew that painting has that power of expression.

A woman in Peshawar's Hayatabad area runs a volunteer training centre for street children, teaching them the power of expression through painting and drawing

'Art requires no formal education. Just the colours and the brush can do the job. Therefore, I chose the motto: 'Likh nahi saktay, bana tau saktay ho' [If you can't write, you can paint].'

Suddenly, a child bursts out of a room, brush in hand, shouting, 'Baji, what do I do with the colours that are mixed up in my canvas? It has destroyed everything. It is bothering me!' She replies with a grin, 'We will see to it later. Just continue your work in the lower portion of the frame.'

Numan Khan busy at work on a painting

Huma admits she did not have the same patience with the children's behaviour when she first started teaching them. With a smile on her face, she says, 'Having grown up on the streets...