The first time she held a pen, her friend held her hand.
That moment has stayed with me since October 2025, when me and my fellow facilitator, we sat in a circle of eight women in Tigri, Devli, women domestic workers who had themselves requested literacy sessions through the Martha Farrell Foundation's Adult Functional Literacy programme. We had just begun our first session, and my co-facilitator had asked everyone who could write their name to do so on a sheet of paper. Most reached for their pens without hesitation.
But one woman quietly told us she had never held a pen in her entire life.
We wrote her name in Hindi for her to trace. As she picked up the pen, uncertain, tentative, the woman sitting beside her gently reached over and covered her hand with her own. She didn't say anything. She just helped her hold it.
I don't think I'll forget that image for a long time.
It shifted something in how I understood what literacy means. Before fieldwork, I thought of it as a skill, the ability to read and write. But the women of Devli taught me that it is far more than that. It is the ability to use knowledge meaningfully in everyday life. It is the difference between being easily cheated and making an informed decision. Between depending on someone else and doing it yourself.
When we conducted our needs assessment before designing the sessions, we asked the women where they felt the absence of literacy most in their daily lives. Their answers were immediate and specific. At home, they couldn't read medicine labels, check expiry dates or help their children with homework. In the community, they struggled to fill bank forms, read ration slips or understand electricity bills. At work as domestic helpers, they hesitated with grocery lists given by employers. One woman told me she had to rely on the local chemist to read her prescription for her every single time.
None of these are abstract problems. They are daily indignities, small moments of dependence that accumulate, invisibly and quietly, into a larger exclusion from public life.
We designed the sessions to begin exactly where the women were, not where a textbook assumed they should be. We started with names, because that is what they asked for first. One participant said it plainly, "Sabse pehle apna naam likhna aana chahiye." For some women in that room, it was the first time they had written it without a thumbprint as a substitute.
From names, we moved outward. We used the letters in each woman's name to introduce new letters and sounds, so that every new character they encountered was anchored in something already familiar. In one session, a participant, in a quiet burst of enthusiasm, wrote the names of all her fellow participants on her own sheet, unprompted. It was a small act of generosity I hadn't planned for, and it was more instructive than anything I had prepared.
As the sessions continued, so did the scope of learning. We covered basic health literacy, reading medicine strips, understanding OPD slips, knowing the difference between a registered doctor and a quack. We used real prescription slips and a first aid box as props, because abstract explanations don't work for adult learners. Context does.
The session that moved me the most, though, was the metro trip. In March 2026, I took twelve women domestic workers from Devli to Saket Metro Station, and we travelled together to Nehru Enclave via Hauz Khas, navigating colour coded lines, interchange stations, security checks, and escalators. Most of these women had never used an escalator before. When the time came, I watched a woman who had told me she was afraid of them step onto one by herself. She didn't look back.
During the group reflection we held at the end of the trip, one woman said: "Yeh class mein nahi hota tha." You couldn't have gotten this in a classroom.
She was right. Because literacy, real, functional, liberating literacy, doesn't live in textbooks. It lives in the ability to read your own prescription. To catch the right metro. To sign your name on a form and know what you're signing. To hold a pen for the first time and feel a hand holding yours back.
It begins where life does, in the ordinary moments that are, for too many women, anything but ordinary.
The Adult Functional Literacy Programme is facilitated by the Martha Farrell Foundation in partnership with women domestic workers in Delhi. Sessions are designed to be participatory, need based, and rooted in the lived realities of participants.
