In Sensuka, some very basic primary education is offered free of charge by monasteries and temple organizations. For those families who can afford the moderate fees, however, there is also the option of sending their children to a kadilu (from a word meaning “greenhouse”). At these schools, boys and girls aged six to eleven learn arithmetic, artistic and athletic skills, and the reading and writing of poetry. The largest kadilu is located in the Topla district, and it is this school that is depicted in the print.

Not only time but space too appears dilated when one is a child, and by a far greater factor than can be accounted for simply by one’s smaller size. In this view of the schoolyard surrounding the Kadilutopla, the artist alludes to this childhood perception of the world by wildly distorting the scale of the depicted elements and of the distances between them. The main school building in the background is so far away that its ground floor is partially hidden under the horizon, while the drystone fence around the perimeter of the schoolyard soars towards the sky like a mountain ridge. For the child in the foreground of the image, from whose vantage point we are observing the scene, this far corner of the schoolyard constitutes a curious little world unto its own: The beaten earth surface contains a variety of interestingly shaped pebbles offering themselves up for solitary play, and there are several species of ants to watch deftly weaving their way through the uneven terrain as they scuttle about their inscrutable errands. The patches of moss in the moist and cavernous recesses visible at the base of the stone wall are redolent with mystery, and the mind boggles at all the countless unknown realms that must lie hidden in between the cracks of this seemingly endless escarpment. As for the trees whose lowest branches overhang the wall, they are so tall that it would not even occur to one to try to look and see how far up they go.

The schoolyard is subdivided into sections for different age groups. We are in the area reserved for the youngest children, in the vicinity of a separate, smaller school building (not visible in this view) where they receive instruction. Before us, variously-sized clusters of small children can be seen forming, dispersing, and reforming, in ever-shifting embryonic manifestations of fellowship and rivalry, collaboration and combat, idolization and ostracism, love and hate. Out in the distance, beckoning tantalizingly, stretch the glamorous lands of the slightly older children, those aged eight to nine. And far beyond that, completely out of sight, on the other side of the main school building, is the region reserved for the oldest students, those who have ceased even really to be children anymore. It is a place one thinks of with a sense of wonderment, but also with a certain suspicion, one cannot quite say why. One knows one will go there oneself some day, but for now, that knowledge is something purely abstract. It is a time so far away one can barely imagine it.