His name is Harekala Hajabba. For decades he has sold oranges from a small cart near the bus stand in Mangaluru, Karnataka. He earns around a hundred and fifty rupees a day. He has never been to school and cannot read or write. By every measure the world uses, he is a poor, unlettered fruit seller. One day, sometime in the 1990s, a foreign couple stopped at his cart and asked him, in English, the price of his oranges. He could not understand them and could not answer. They walked away. The moment did not anger him. It shamed him. Then it changed him. He decided that no child in his village should ever have to stand there the way he had, unable to understand a simple question, locked out by language and the lack of a school. His village, Newpadpu, did not have one. The nearest school was about seven kilometres away. So an illiterate orange seller earning a hundred and fifty rupees a day set out to build a school. He saved his coins, approached officials and donors, and donated his own land. In the year 2000, the school opened with twenty-eight children in a place that had never had one. Today that school teaches up to Class 10 and has around a hundred and seventy-five students. Children from his village now study in classrooms he helped build from the price of oranges. People began calling him Akshara Santha, the saint of letters. In 2020, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri, one of the nation’s highest civilian honours. He walked up barefoot, wearing a plain white dhoti, to receive it. He said it was not his award. It belonged to the school. He still sells oranges and has said he wants to use whatever he earns and receives to build a college next. A man who could not answer one question in English made sure thousands of children after him would never be left speechless the same way. Follow for stories India deserves to remember.