From wearing her hair in a plait and helping her parents in the fields bare feet to cropping her hair short and donning spikes with shorts and T-shirt, Ruby Kumari, 16, has dribbled a long way from the lush fields of Bihar to some of the best football grounds in India, playing for her home state.
“We used to struggle for two square meals a day,” said Ruby, who has four siblings, as she travelled back home in a railway sleeper coach from Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, where she competed in the under-17 junior national soccer championships.
Bihar was knocked out in the qualifying stages, having lost to Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand. The lone victory against Himachal Pradesh was not enough to earn them a quarter-final berth in the tournament. Yet, Ruby was not daunted.
A Dalit girl from Narindrapur, a nondescript village in Siwan’s Ziradei block, the hometown of India’s first President Dr Rajendra Prasad, Ruby was born to a poor family and her, Surendra Ram, worked at a brick kiln before turning a farmer.
Ram now works on bataidari, a sharecropping system where a landowner lends his land to another who spends money and labour and the produce is shared between the landowner and the tenant. His wife, Durgawati Devi, is the lone help Ram now has in the field after Ruby took to playing soccer in 2017.
{{/usCountry}}Ram now works on bataidari, a sharecropping system where a landowner lends his land to another who spends money and labour and the produce is shared between the landowner and the tenant. His wife, Durgawati Devi, is the lone help Ram now has in the field after Ruby took to playing soccer in 2017.
{{/usCountry}}“Driven by poverty, I wanted to step out of home and earn for my parents to give them a comfortable living. Inspired by Amrita Kumari, a national footballer, trained at the Rani Laxmibai Sports Academy in Laxmipur village of Siwan, around 5 kms from my village, playing soccer was the only option before me to help my parents. So, I decided to move to the residential sports academy,” said Ruby, a student of Class 12 at the RK Girls High School, Mairwa.
Sanjay Pathak, Ruby’s coach, mentor and a social science teacher at the Adarsh Government Middle School, Mairwa, remembered meeting a young but determined Ruby.
“She came in a group of 3-5 girls for the selection trials I had kept in 2017. I saw the talent in her as a defender and made her play in almost every position, and she excelled both as an attacker and a defender,” said Pathak, who coaches 90 girls at his academy during his spare time from school.
Ruby, who is among the 50 residential players at the Rani Laxmibai Sports Academy, has so far participated in four junior national soccer championships, including the under-17 event in Bhubaneswar as well as the Subroto Cup in Delhi, both held last year. Prior to these, she played the national soccer school games in 2020. The Bihar government also conferred upon her the Khel Samman twice in 2021 and 2023.
So, what does independence mean to Ruby?
“The freedom to girls to move alone freely, without any fear or inhibition about their attire, and what they do; to compete shoulder to shoulder with boys, without feeling inferior to anyone, is what independence is all about,” she said.
But this expansive dream lives uneasily with the reality for Ruby – is her father’s two-room Indira Awaas unit.
“We still use lanterns as my father cannot afford an electricity connection in our unplastered brick house, where one room has a RCC (reinforced concrete cement) roof and the other is of corrugated asbestos. Piped water supply or LPG connection is still a dream as my mother cooks on firewood and goes out to fetch water from a hand pump near our house,” said Ruby.
But she is not daunted, hoping to use her dream to pull her family out of penury. “I will one day play for India, and build a house for my parents. I’ll do both, soon.”