And that’s what Anuradha Marwah has been doing through her creative classes. With communalism as the main theme—she focuses on gender and class issues too—she has taken these workshops to Kashmir and Rajasthan and some other parts of the country too.

“In Gulmarg, we took 25 Kashmiri Pandit children from refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi and 25 children from the Valley,” she says. “We divided these children into two mixed groups and asked them to come up with stories,” she adds.

In these workshops, Marwah would give these children a situation and ask them to add to it and develop a story around it. “The result of the workshop was mind blowing,” she remembers. “At the end of the workshop, the children performed a play to a packed house in Srinagar,” she adds. “One of the girls who was with us at Gulmarg has now published two short stories,” she says.

Marwah started conducting these workshops for public school children in Delhi after the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 but wasn’t too happy with the outcome. She then started organising workshops for children in slums and the response she got there gave her a “deep sense of satisfaction that she did not get anywhere else”.

But why did she choose creative writing to interact with the children? “They will learn to empathise not just at an intellectual level but also at an emotional level,” she answers.

Marwah who teaches English at Zakir Husain College, also writes. “My latest novel, Dirty Picture, was inspired by the Ajmer sex scandal in 1992 that involved school going girls,” she says. “Not unlike Nithari, even in this case the childhood of these children was snatched away.”