Many buildings are still cracked

The scars are everywhere. One school building had collapsed completely. The rest was back in use - but almost every wall was snaked with cracks, roughly patched over with cement.

So how were the girls coping? The teachers said a survey they had carried out had shown the girls to be abnormally anxious and depressed.

So did they encourage them to talk about the earthquake, about their feelings? The teachers looked surprised. Oh no, but they had introduced meditation classes and that helped enormously.

Meditation or not, it is hard to feel normal again when the world is still in ruins.

No aid

Two sisters took me back home with them after school. We walked into a tent city in the centre of town, an open waste ground lined with rows of canvas tents, now grimy and battered.

Washing hung from makeshift lines. Ragged children whipped tyres like hoops and chased the pigs snuffling around in the dirt.

The girls' mother was squatting outside a tent maybe eight feet square - washing tin plates in a bucket.

Her husband was a civil servant, she said, and the government had promised them help.

Those still in crisis were the ones who had believed the government when it promised to help

But although they had filled in form after form, they had not had a penny. The hardest thing, she said, was the cold all winter and a whole year without running water.

A walk through old Bhuj was just as depressing. Some parts looked as if the earthquake had just hit - houses with fronts ripped off, leaving staircases and doorframes hanging.

Piles of rubble hunched up against broken walls or pitching forward into courtyards. There is no sign of rebuilding anywhere.

The mood has changed. I remember the numbness in the city in those first days after the earthquake hit, the horror of turning into side streets and stumbling across mass cremations, bodies piled up at one side, more being brought every few minutes on carts and barrows.

But the shock deadening people's eyes - that's gone. The normal traffic of business and trading is back, even if it is against a backdrop of rubble.

Model village

The villages are doing far better. We saw a model village which had been totally devastated, but was declared rebuilt last month.

Three hundred cement houses had been handed over, all identical, sitting in neat rows like a holiday camp.

The village elders were brimming with glee. They had not been consulted about the new houses beforehand, they said, but they are much better than the ones they had before.

The village had a smart new primary school - freshly painted. Rows of children were sitting on the porch in the sunshine, chanting their numbers together and making shaky chalk marks on slate.

The quake left hundreds of thousands homeless

Here too there had been suffering that aid couldn't help - 37 people had been killed, including the mother of the two small boys pointed out to us.

When they meandered home for lunch, it was just their grandfather waiting there - but at least it was in a comfortable home with running water.

Driving through the countryside, we saw construction under way almost everywhere - much of it paid for by the massive emergency response, from both inside India and round the world.

It is a stark contrast - some say the towns have been hampered by bureaucracy, laborious urban planning, land disputes and vested interests.

Villages are much more manageable, explained one aid worker. It's easier to get consensus and quick results.

Broken promises

Several people told me those still in crisis were the ones who had believed the government when it promised to help.

The best-off had simply rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. One in that category is a teenager I met who lost his leg in the earthquake.

When he had wept, he said, his uncle had told him to stop it. What's happened has happened, he'd said, you'd better be brave and face it.

Now the youngster is an expert in artificial legs in the way most boys his age know about cars or motorbikes.

He scans the internet for the best brands and explains eagerly why an electronic leg is better than a hydraulic one, and, of course, how much they all cost.

His present artificial leg was all right, he told me screwing up his face a bit, but when he played cricket, he couldn't really run.