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"They were poor people photographs, of those unable to risk wasting a picture, for while all over the world people were now posing with an abandon never experienced by the human race before, here they were still standing x-ray stiff." --Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
In the days before leaving Ahmedabad I visited my neighborhood corners, tipping my "peons" and giving them my spare clothes and kitchen utensils (peon is the title given to most informal service people and laborers, pronounced pyoon...it took me a while to get used to calling people that). These are the guys on my block. They are honest men who work hard for next to nothing. They treated me with great kindness and I'm going to miss them.
Dinesh is my tailor. I buy fabric at a big Muslim market hidden in the webs of the old city and I bring my pieces to Dinesh. He charges a little over two dollars to stitch each one into a shirt.
Umesh is my barber. He takes thirty-five cents for a haircut, and a little more for a shave. I bring my own razors because he reuses his. He's one of the few people in the city who treats me as an equal and doesn't give me any special attention, and for that I've always been especially fond of him.
Nandu is my dhobi. He collects my laundry every few days and returns it clean, dry and ironed (even the socks). He speaks some English and he's a great kid. My monthly bill is always less than ten dollars.
I don't know my cobbler's name, but I call him Caca, which is an affectionate, respectful term for an older man. He looks serious now, but he always smiles when he sees me and shakes my hand. I think he likes me because leather work is for low caste people and some of my (perceived) class won't touch him, or at least won't treat him with the respect he deserves. I've broken my sandals a few times and he charges about ten cents to fix them. I try to tip all of my service guys every time I pay them, but Caca never lets me.
Mr. Mistra is one of my building securtiy guards. He sleeps very soundly in his chair at night. He doesn't wake up when I climb the gate and jump down next to him to unlock it, or when I kick start my motorcycle and ride in. But I live in a good neighborhood and Ahmedabad is very safe.
Mr. L. Singh is our other security guard. He calls me sahib, despite my requests that he stop; I've learned to accept the special treatment and even the deference shown to me by many people here, but it still makes me uncomfortable coming from someone so much my elder. I buy chai at the corner stall and bring it to him and Mr. Mistra, and they let me break my midnight curfew.
The monsoon came last night. Less than ten seconds passed between the first metallic pings against the air conditioner protruding from my window, and a downpour so thick I couldn’t see the jam of cars 100 feet below me. Lightning flickered through the rain every three or four seconds, illuminating it from above, turning an opaque wall of dark water into vast three-dimensional static. As a kid I used to imagine what space looked like before the universe existed—this was pretty much it.
I captured the following video from my balcony during a lull in the torrent:
By the time I called my travel agent only one train line had availability for Kerala—one that was both cheaper and faster than any of the other lines. I hesitated, skeptical of such a seemingly fortuitous circumstance, but after a series of futile hand gestures and reaffirmations of misspoken and misunderstood sentences, I ended up with two seats on the Garib Rath. The next day a coworker translated the name for me as the “Poverty Chariot.” “Poverty Carriage,” apparently, would also have been an acceptable translation. So, a few days later, anticipating a shameful, guilt-ridden ride, Josh and I boarded the Chariot and took in our surroundings.
My first passage on an Indian train, many months earlier, carried me the nine hours from Ahmedabad to Bombay, for three dollars, and involved little more interaction with my coachmates than a brief exchange of shocked stares—me at the eunuch who had aggressively woken me up, demanding money, and they at my refusal to give said money. A begging caste of ostensibly castrated men dressed as women, the eunuchs here are steeped in superstition and myth. They come and go mysteriously, appearing at auspicious events such as births and weddings, fawning over their targets with cynical good hum before walking away with coin-filled pockets. Their curse is dreaded. But while some people certainly give a few rupees out of fear, and some out of religious duty (“It is God’s curse that they are unable to work”), most, I think, give out of compassion. In general Indians are far more generous to beggars than are Americans, and in my observation this stems from the genuine kindness and fraternity that pervades this country and plays through its culture.
I could already tell that the Poverty Chariot would be a more comfortable ride as we pulled out of Bombay. We rolled through the city where even the four-foot narrow strips of earth between the train tracks and the wall are lived on and cultivated. We passed through slums, concrete suburbs, more concrete suburbs, soon a little bit of green and eventually, half a day later, thick tropical canopies along the Arabian Sea. Twenty-five hours after leaving Bombay we reached Cochin, a city best known, strangely enough, for its five-century-old synagogue. Unaccustomed to India’s tourist haunts I felt an initial sense of incredulity—at the rickshaw drivers whose meters all seemed to be broken, at the prices, the preying vendors, the endless travel agencies and restaurants and rental shops, and the many white people in their cargo shorts and safari hats.
Cochin did offer some interesting sights (including a detour through a church backyard wedding reception where elderly sari-clad women snacked on chaat around a stereo blasting Nelly—I’m a sucka for cornrows and manicured toes, Fendi capri pants and Parasucos…andale, andale mami, E.I., E.I., uh-ohhhhhhhhhhh, What’s poppin tonight?) but we found the tourism and the climate stifling, and soon continued south. The bus ride promised to be a hot one, and a few minutes in we were ejected from our seats by a couple of tight-jawed women pointing indignantly at the alleged “Women Only” sign scrawled in Malayalam characters, in sharpie pen, above the window next to us. We squeezed into the aisle, other men’s sweat dripping down our bodies, and vice versa, until the bus broke down, a large-bearded fellow corralled us into the driver’s booth of a new one, and, with the determination of salmon on their way to lay eggs and die, we eventually forced our way off the bus and onto the banks of one of Allepy’s canals.
There we contracted a man to take us on his canoe through the area’s famous backwaters: a saunter through a system of tiny palm-lined canals and bank-side villages that left me wondering how many years it took before the villagers grew accustomed to all us white people, paddled around by brown people, running our fingertips lazily through the water, staring at the villagers going about their cooking and their washing and their gathering up the chickens—or if they were in fact fully accustomed to it even now; a lament at our alienation from the land (this was a state governed by a communist party, after all) after our guide scoffed at our inability to properly identify the vast field we walked through as a rice paddy; and eventually the natural decline into a futile examination of good and evil and truth, Josh a self-proclaimed modernist who wishes he didn’t know that post-modernism is the next logical progression, and me evidently such a post-modernist that “suffering is often bad” was the most definitive conclusion I could come to. And I believe that whole-heartedly.
But the real allure of Allepy was the heritage home guesthouse we stayed in, the Europeans residing there, and the young locals running it. Now, I’ve been living in a dry state for the past six months, so it wasn’t until this trip that I discovered that after a few Indian beers, Bollywood does indeed reflect life. Or maybe the other way around:
And, the beauty of globalization:
The trip was winding down. We had ambitious travel plans, but it was hot, and humid, and the ocean was calling. Our next stop, which turned out to be our last, soon found us at an open air clifftop restaurant overlooking red bluffs and blonde sand, browsing a meat-laden menu with a drink section beyond “mocktails”, listening to good old American rock and roll at a table with fourteen Swedish girls, five iPods and a Kung Fu movie behind us. Now, I’m fairly comfortable and content in Ahmedabad, but I’m a Libra and I need balance in my life, and it was high time to indulge in Ahmedabad’s exact opposite.
In fact, the last trip I had taken began in Junagadh, at a pilgrimage that drew half a million people on its peak day, most of whom were from Gujarat’s villages and had never seen white people before. With three of my (white) coworkers we pushed our way up and down Junagadh’s streets, alongside and in between hundreds of thousands of others who had come to climb ten thousand stairs to the mountaintop temples, to see the naked ascetic sadhus, covered in ash, performing contortionist acts too painful (and graphic) to describe, to drink the traditional milky, marijuana-laced bhang (which we stayed away from, not only because of our coworker’s warning that it would “make us cry for three days”). Hands and bodies touched us, sometimes inappropriately, as we moved through the throngs; when we stopped, staring crowds gathered around us in complete circles, sometimes hundreds of people fencing us into a kind of circus ring, until policemen cleared a path and moved us along.
Later in the day we visited an old fort nearby, where a young boy approached me and asked, in perfect English, “Would you like to talk to me?” We chatted, and he translated for his family. It was the “first or second” time he’d seen foreigners in person. Toward the end of the conversation we introduced ourselves, and I asked what his name meant, as all Indian names seem to mean something pleasant, like “light” or “grace” or “joyfulness”. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It’s just a name.” “But every name means something,” I replied. “Well,” he said, after a thoughtful pause, “what does your name mean?” “Uh, it’s just a name,” I said. “Oh,” he concluded, “then I guess you and me are just the same.” I thought that was pretty poignant.
Exactly four years ago I stood on a cliff in Sagres, Portugal, once thought by Europeans to be the end of the world. There, jagged edges drop hundreds of feet away into only ocean and sky, into the most convincing portrayal of nothingness I’ve ever seen. Varkala, our Keralan clifftop beach town, was not nearly so impressive—but it did feel like coming to the end of one world and entering another. Indeed, tourism had built a new world there, a pristine and artificial one where we travelers felt entitled to our bubble in our little stretch of paradise, and a fair amount of annoyance at the local hawkers or shopowners or onlookers, annoyance at the locals from whom we were slowly sequestering the beach. Yet it was somehow easy to ignore that injustice for three days. It was three days of self-indulgent bliss, and then it was time to leave.
I caught a train back to Cochin, a flight to Bombay, and a train to Ahmedabad. On the way down I had wondered aloud at the rural children who must see four or five trains a day, but still run alongside each one shouting and waving. “Well,” Josh said, “I guess kids in America watch four or five TV shows a day.”
In our first night in Varkala we had managed to get some local flavor, leaving the beach to go see a Temple Festival fireworks show. The crowd milled around, literally dodging falling embers as crackly communist propaganda (so we assumed) blasted from pole-top megaphones reminiscent of the Korean War (so I assumed). On the walk back I struck up conversation with a young Indian fellow, also leaving the show early. He lives in Varkala and practices a healing art that involves channeling energy from a healthy person to an ailing one. Many of his clients come from Europe and stay for weeks at a time for treatment. “So many poor people here,” he mused, vindicated by the meager shacks flanking our road back toward the beach, “and the government spends lakhs of rupees on fireworks.”
India is provocative. I suppose that’s one of the few generalizations that can be made about it. It asks many questions and offers few conclusive answers. It’s difficult to write about. Professionally I write about risk and capacity and community-based disaster management; creatively I write about Spain and Peru, and other places I can begin to wrap my head around. On this blog I exhaust myself trying to offer a glimpse of a fraction of my experience. I haven’t begun to think about how I would describe my daily life in Ahmedabad, the constant juxtaposition of the outrageous against the mundane, of everything against everything else around it. I guess I can’t sum this up nicely. I’m seven months into a particular stream of consciousness, and this note is just picking it up one place and cutting it off at another. I’ll keep trying to package it into little palatable bits, to give you a taste, to help me digest it, and to give fodder to that futile examination of good and evil and truth.
It's winter in Ahmedabad, the coldest in ten years. Throughout the city people are donning long-sleeve shirts and even the occasional sweater by early evening. The streets remain crowded, bustling with human activity, but the monkeys have ceased to show excitement at passing trains, the camels look weary, and the elephants are nowhere to be seen. Wedding season has brought planeloads of NRIs (non-resident Indians) to Gujarat. I wake up in the morning to brass bands parading through the streets, followed by lavishly adorned grooms in horse-drawn silver carriages; I fall asleep to car horns and the crash of fireworks. I recently returned to
Ahmedabad after ten days in Israel. Strangely enough, it felt like coming home.
The state of Bihar in northern India is the birthplace of the first great Indian empire and home to the site where Buddha achieved enlightenment. Its capital Patna was once Pataliputra, said to have been the largest city in the world in its time (around the 4th century BCE). Ravaged by conflict and annual floods, Bihar today sits in the most underdeveloped and impoverished region of India. I traveled with two coworkers to the northern part of the state, just 40 kilometers from the Nepalese border, where a system of rivers branching off the Ganges causes massive flooding every year during monsoon season. We agonized along the busted road north, scattering herds of goats, clinging to the sloping shoulder as we dodged sixteen-wheelers barreling through the night. The 115-mile trip from the airport in Patna to our village took eight hours. In August this area would have been accessible only by boat. The land is flat with few outlets for floodwater, but by November only small, stagnant pools remained along the edges of the fields.
We arrived late at night at a small, walled compound set among vast farmland and scattered Banyan trees, roots stretching down to the earth from branches 30 feet above like strings on a giant loom. The facility served as the headquarters of a local NGO that trains Dalits—the caste most of us know as “Untouchables”—to understand and promote their political rights. The place was rustic as expected, but the food was clean and it had an electrical generator and running water, providing all the comforts we needed. We stretched out across a slab of wood under a thatch roof and fell asleep.
The next morning the director of the NGO was speaking with a woman who’d arrived at the compound seeking refuge from her village—she’d been on the run for a few days, hiding from a group sent to kill her. She came from a nearby village of beggars, their shared livelihood dictated by caste, passed down by generation. After she broke caste tradition by shedding her begging dress for more respectable clothing, and by shunning her ordained occupation in search of one more promising, her fellow villagers had forcibly cut off her hair and confiscated her clothing. She left in the night with three of her five children, quietly slipping away while her husband slept.
My coworker explained the situation to me shortly after the meeting. We sat on a stone in the cool, sunny courtyard watching her wash dishes, a shawl covering her hair, two of her children playing in the shadows and another one clinging to her leg. She looked at me once, across the spacious courtyard, her eyes holding mine for several seconds before turning back to her tub.
Embankments like the one in this picture wind through rural Bihar, serving both as roads and as levees against the annual floods. Opposite the river clusters of mud-and-grass huts nestle against the embankment between sprawling tracts of farmland. During monsoon season the river rises almost to the top of the embankment—as long as the embankment remains intact villages are protected against the floods and can exist alongside the river, their only source of water. Yet every three years or so the flooding is especially severe (a phenomenon amplified lately by climate change producing heavier rains and increased Himalayan glacial melt). The embankment breaks in several places, sending floodwater rushing into the countryside, devastating villages and fields.
When the embankment breaks the swollen river cascades into the countryside. Villagers barely have time to get their children and elderly to safety; everything they own is washed away. As the waters rushed through their homes this year, villagers climbed on top of the remaining embankment, the only dry land in miles. They lived on this small strip of earth for two months, exposed to the elements and to each other. NGOs struggled to reach these areas by boat, providing food, water and temporary shelter where they could until communities could return to their villages.
We drove into the village and parked our motorcycles between two grass huts, half buried in mud, cow manure drying on their roofs to be used for fuel. The sun was low in the sky, its warm rays yielding to Bihar’s wintry evening air. A blanket was laid on the ground for us, and the entire community—about sixty people—quickly gathered around. Men squatted in the front gravely answering our questions; women stood behind them chiming in when their answers merited more indignation than the men would show; dirty-faced children sat to the side staring curiously at our cameras; elders looked austerely on, nodding their heads and scolding children who ventured onto our blanket or whispered too loudly among themselves.
AIDMI and a partner NGO set up a community kitchen here in the months following the floods. Otherwise this village has received little help. A few major international NGOs distributed relief materials in this area, including informational displays on sanitation and hygiene. “How can we worry about cleanliness,” this woman asked, “when we only have one pair of clothes to wear? How can we think about anything else when our stomachs are always half empty?”
These people have nothing. With exactly one pair of clothing each, they have to strip nude to wash their clothes and wait for them to dry. There are not enough blankets to go around; they sleep directly on the earth, which is still damp from the floods. They toil on the land wherever work is available and barely get enough food to survive on, certainly not enough to provide adequate nourishment. At times they’ve had to borrow from local moneylenders in order to eat. Bearing debt with interest rates of ten percent compounded monthly they have almost no hope of repayment and become effectively indentured to the lenders. They have no electricity, and no clean water. Outbreaks of cholera recently killed several children in this village; medical treatment is not available. The nearest schools are at least an hour’s walk away, but in any case their children are denied access to schools because of their caste. The caste discrimination that these and other villagers endure is horrifying: when seeking refuge on higher-caste land they are sometimes physically or sexually assaulted; they have been blatantly turned away from relief stations and shelters; because of traditional caste roles they have been forced to clear dead bodies with no provision of safety equipment and no compensation. The same impoverished communities are devastated by floods time and time again, yet few if any preparedness provisions have been made by people with the power and resources to help them.
We eventually pulled ourselves away, declining an invitation to stay for the night, eager to get off the embankment road before dark. The day didn’t seem at all real. It’s difficult to fathom such tragedy, and impossible, in the end, to cross the space and sympathize completely with these people, to the extent that they suffer, these and others with whom I interact each day—people smiling at me as they clutch to a root on the side of a muddy slope, people who will still be there clutching long after I’m back home looking for a new job or getting married or playing with my grandchildren. I’ve wondered whether that space is only a product of our divergent life experiences and socioeconomic conditions, or if it’s also something I’ve imposed, to protect myself emotionally, to be able to function on a daily basis amidst so much poverty and hardship. Whether or not it’s of my own construction, the space is there, and across it are faces that insinuate with a glance struggle that I will probably never understand.
Bihar is pitch-black by 5:30 and the Milky Way practically leaks out of the sky. On the last night of our stay we leaned wearily against a wooden fence, waiting for our taxi to arrive, watching women lift bundles of sticks onto their heads as they left the fields. The main purpose of our trip to Bihar had been to hold school-based disaster mitigation and capacity-building trainings for school staff in two districts. We had spent the final days of our visit working with teachers and administrators in the rudimentary facilities of partner NGOs in the region. As we waited for our taxi at the conclusion of the last training, we offered a ride to a few straggling teachers whose boarding school was on our way. We took a final look at the stars and the nine of us piled into a five-seater jeep, pulled our luggage on top of us, and clunked reluctantly along the road back to Patna.
When we pulled up to the school an hour later the teachers invited us in. We stepped quietly through the rusty gate into the courtyard where 50 girls sat on the ground having their dinner. Three gentle-faced teachers work year-round to educate, feed and care for these girls in a three-room concrete building. The school is funded by the state government. The students, all of them between the ages of nine and twelve, come from poor, rural villages. None would get an education if they stayed in their villages, but would have to work alongside their families instead. From 5 in the morning until 8 at night they study math, science, English, Hindi, sewing, cooking, civics and history.
After showing us around a teacher asked two of the girls to sing for us. The girls, shy yet poised, their eyes precociously dark, joined in a mournful melody lamenting the hardships of women in the villages, made to marry and leave their parents before they are grown, confined to their homes or to work in the fields. “Why, while the groom holds his head high,” my coworker translated, “must the bride always keep hers bowed?”
Sitting in this small room, audience to the most beautiful thing I’ve yet seen in India, I could barely breathe. I felt as though I had to choose between coughing up my lungs or vomiting up my stomach, and I only had a few seconds to make the decision. Maybe it was the week’s experiences culminating in this moment, the dichotomy of sorrow and hope, perceptions I’d held of humanity being shattered, and vague notions of the world congealing. Maybe it was just my body and mind trying to release something. Whatever the case, nothing was more important than these girls overcoming the enormous forces working against them, making something better of their lives and creating promise for their children. And if they could do that, then maybe things weren’t as bad as they seemed.
* * *
Today I’m in Pondicherry preparing a set of trainings for tsunami-affected schools in Tamil Nadu. I discuss the curriculum with my coworkers as we stand at a clanky streetside booth, sipping South Indian coffee from steel bowls, scooping handfuls of rice and sambar from our banana leaves, pulling handkerchiefs across our brows and brushing mosquitoes from our faces. A few weeks have passed since our last trainings and I feel almost refreshed. It’s been difficult to sort out what I’ve taken away from my visit to Bihar, difficult to get past an immense feeling of hopelessness. I can’t begin to grasp how the villagers of Bihar feel, how they push forward, how they cope. Sticky grains of rice fall through my fingers as I watch my coworkers guide their food expertly into their mouths. They’ve worked among thousands of impoverished, marginalized and disaster-stricken people in India and will work with thousands more. I’ll be here for nine more months.
When I reflect on the village by the embankment I understand that natural calamity is only a minor source of its trauma. Disasters are not just things that happen—they are products of social structures, economic systems and political actions and inactions. Human decisions are equally as responsible for the plight of those villagers as they are for the plight of the woman fleeing her village or the promise of 50 girls striving to take advantage of a rare opportunity. My coworkers nod solemnly as I try to explain this, a reality of which they are already intimately aware. We finish our meals and head off on our motorcycles—last month to the river, today to the ocean.
I’ve posted a few photographs from recent trips to the field with AIDMI. You can access them through the “Collections” link to the right. A few of them have descriptions highlighting some of the work I’m doing here. Unfortunately Vox doesn’t make it easy to organize photos, so you may have to go through all of them to find a description of each site visit. Also, once you’ve opened a specific photo, using the “previous” and “next” buttons can cause you to jump to a photo in a different collection, so better to just use the “back” button on your browser to return to the collection you wish to view. Well, you’ll figure it out.
