Dear dedicated reader,
It is only proper that I begin with the context: a number of the more athletically motivated fellows staff have decided that they are going to run a half marathon in February to raise money for Nanubhai and as a way to keep fit and motivate themselves. While seated around the dinner table in the Bajipura apartment, infected with their raucous enthusiasm, I decided that if my staff could do it, well by golly so could I.
Since that time roughly two weeks ago, the general upheaval which characterizes my life in this country has come in to play and by fate’s roll of the dice I no longer live in our Bajipura apartment and have moved into the downstairs bedroom of our two fellows who live in Surat, the nearest city where we have one site at P.R. Khatiwala High School. Now that I’m located in a city, I have access to all sorts of amenities within a 5 minute autorickshaw ride of the house such as a real grocery store, a mall, a coffee shop, and most of all, a gym.
All of this contributed to the optimism which prompted me to decide to go running in the area surrounding our house.
I start out blissfully content with the morning sun shining down on our porch, the act of stretching bringing on that sense of enlightened anticipation that it always fills me with. With a flick of my finger, my ipod brings the upbeat strains of Natasha Bedinfield into my ears, telling me that not only is this morning beautiful, but ‘no one else could feel it for [me]’ and that I should ‘live my life with arms wide open.’ Sentimental state that I am in, it only heightens my euphoria.
After a brief stretch of the limbs, I set out gently from our porch, jogging my way through gated society and observing the mid-morning activities of our neighbors: hair-brushing, hanging clothes on the line, talking on the phone. I feel almost transported back to the Porter Street hill in Somerville down which I had to go for all my morning and weekend runs, that sense of energy filling my limbs as I strode downhill, until I finally hit the turn onto the main Highland Ave and set off on the real test of endurance. It is like that this morning, hitting the road that leads past Khatiwala High School (which we live behind) until I arrive at the main highway.
The first reservations set in as I observe a group of men sitting shirtless by the side of the road, the pick axes by their side indicating previous intense physical labor, the glistening of their skin the sun corroborating this assumption. As I put one foot in front of the other and naturally speed up as if to prove something, I can’t help but register the absurdity of my running to compensate for me sedentary lifestyle. No matter, I think, push on.
The real uncertainty hits as I realize that I am going about the same speed as a stringy man in a torn shirt ahead of me pushing a loaded down flatbed pushcart to which he is applying all his bodily strength to move its reluctant wagon wheels forward. To avoid comparison, I speed up, which of course leads to my lungs starting to burn and the slowing of my pace as I turn around and head back in the other direction.
Surat, you should know, dear reader, was 7 years ago proclaimed the most polluted city in India. While that title since has been bestowed upon some other hardworking and deserving city, the smog stained buildings and the thick haze hanging over the highway despite the sunny morning make it easy to see how that might have been the case. Like Providence, everyone claims that Surat has come so far, but I can attest that they are a long way from ‘Water-Fire’ like rebirth.
At this point in the run, despite Katy Perry enticing me onwards, I slow to a walk, my lungs really burning and the remnants of last week’s cold blocking my nose. Whether this halt is a result of my general poor level of fitness or Surat’s smog or the rising temperature of India at mid-morning or that cigarette I smoked when I was Thailand, it is hard to know; but at this point I am definitely feeling my optimism begin to curl into a ball and hide behind the cloudiness building up in my head.
According to my rough estimate, I have been running for 10 minutes.
I begin to do a sort of compromised run-walk that pacifies my sense of determination as well as my failing body until through the motivating beats of Jordin Sparks I hear jeering coming from the side of the road. I turn my head in time to see a bus full of private school boys, arms flailing out of the window to catch my attention, urging me onwards. I begin to miss the sweet, adorable faces of my students at Kadod and mentally curse the obnoxiousness of the over-privileged adolescent. Until, of course, I remember that I was one.
The nail in the coffin is a number of Rajasthani women, heads covered with the tails of their saris, giving me a look of horror as I shuffle onward. I smile in a lopsided way and slow to a real walk, turning back down the road to the house in embarrassed defeat and mentally filing this under “Notable experiences” in sub-category “Reasons I need to join a proper gym.”
Best,
Cat
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
Alternative Transport System
Dear dedicated reader,
After many aborted attempts to get my driver’s license so I could buy a motor scooter and zip happily and efficiently between the schools I must visit to observe our Fellows, I must bow to the monolith of Indian bureaucracy and admit defeat. Why I cannot get my license is an overdue story for another time: needless to say, I have discovered another way to jet between schools and it is not the bumbling local bus system.
I stumbled upon the “chakra” system of transportation by accident: I never had any reason to discover it when I lived in Kadod because I never had any reason to travel anywhere that wasn’t regularly serviced by buses. A chakra is an over-sized autorickshaw: basically like a normal auto-rickshaw but with a backseat. I’ve sometimes heard them referred to as tempos in other places around the country. Locally, they are the source of controversy and with reason: I thought it was only my American sensibilities that found the idea of cramming 14 people into space meant comfortably for 7 and watching the driver drive with four men sharing the front seat with him ludicrous, but it turns out the locals feel this way as well. Darshanbhai, Kadod’s local phone booth owner, warned me off the chakras, citing the state of Indian roads: “Driving is crazy! In buses, government will give you money for accident and hurt. Government will give you nothing if you are hurt in chakra!”
Sadly, I must take my chances. The entrepreneurial spirit of the chakra drivers appeals to me and furthermore, the bus only comes about once every one and a half to two hours. To take a chakra is the same price as the bus and they leave much more often. What is the catch, I hear you ask? Well, they drive like maniacs, overcrowd the vehicle to the point of people hanging off of it and they won’t leave until they’ve reached hanging off capacity, which means you could be waiting for the chakra to go almost as long as the bus, depending on the time of day. However, its added modicum of efficiency is enough to convert me to traveling using the system daily.
I found myself waiting today, as I often am, at the Madhi bus station. In order to get from my current residence in Bajipura to visit my old home town of Kadod and the new teachers stationed there, I must change chakras at the Madhi bus stand, which is located in between Kadod and Bajipura since there are no direct chakras that go from Bajipura to Kadod. This change can take anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes, depending on the time of day and the whim/greed of the chakra drivers.
The drivers themselves, despite their insistence on ignoring my pleas to please leave when they have sufficient passengers, have taken an interest in me. Because I’m often at the station by myself in the middle of the day waiting in the back of one or another of their vehicles, in the beginning, they took to standing around at a safe distance and gawking at me. When the word spread that I could speak Hindi (the chakra network updates almost as quickly as Twitter, or so it would seem), they dared to take a step closer and ask me a few questions, mostly predictable: where are you from? Why are you here? Do you know those other girls teaching at Madhi? Do you like India? Etc.
At first, I answered cautiously, unsure of their motivation. I was still new at the system, I hadn’t yet learned which drivers go between which villages and who lives where and who will take you home if you get stuck near nightfall at the Madhi bus station or who will let you pay later if you don’t have a five rupee coin. Each passing day, I’ve learned more: who listens to old hindi music and which drivers like the poppy new versions, who has children, who can read. Each day, they’ve asked me more about myself: why did I come here? Why do we teach in the schools? Do I miss my family? Who is in my family? The camaraderie between myself and these men, young and old, was totally unexpected.
It still won’t get them to leave with only 13 passengers though. Rupee beats relationship, or so it would seem.
Best,
Cat
After many aborted attempts to get my driver’s license so I could buy a motor scooter and zip happily and efficiently between the schools I must visit to observe our Fellows, I must bow to the monolith of Indian bureaucracy and admit defeat. Why I cannot get my license is an overdue story for another time: needless to say, I have discovered another way to jet between schools and it is not the bumbling local bus system.
I stumbled upon the “chakra” system of transportation by accident: I never had any reason to discover it when I lived in Kadod because I never had any reason to travel anywhere that wasn’t regularly serviced by buses. A chakra is an over-sized autorickshaw: basically like a normal auto-rickshaw but with a backseat. I’ve sometimes heard them referred to as tempos in other places around the country. Locally, they are the source of controversy and with reason: I thought it was only my American sensibilities that found the idea of cramming 14 people into space meant comfortably for 7 and watching the driver drive with four men sharing the front seat with him ludicrous, but it turns out the locals feel this way as well. Darshanbhai, Kadod’s local phone booth owner, warned me off the chakras, citing the state of Indian roads: “Driving is crazy! In buses, government will give you money for accident and hurt. Government will give you nothing if you are hurt in chakra!”
Sadly, I must take my chances. The entrepreneurial spirit of the chakra drivers appeals to me and furthermore, the bus only comes about once every one and a half to two hours. To take a chakra is the same price as the bus and they leave much more often. What is the catch, I hear you ask? Well, they drive like maniacs, overcrowd the vehicle to the point of people hanging off of it and they won’t leave until they’ve reached hanging off capacity, which means you could be waiting for the chakra to go almost as long as the bus, depending on the time of day. However, its added modicum of efficiency is enough to convert me to traveling using the system daily. I found myself waiting today, as I often am, at the Madhi bus station. In order to get from my current residence in Bajipura to visit my old home town of Kadod and the new teachers stationed there, I must change chakras at the Madhi bus stand, which is located in between Kadod and Bajipura since there are no direct chakras that go from Bajipura to Kadod. This change can take anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes, depending on the time of day and the whim/greed of the chakra drivers.
The drivers themselves, despite their insistence on ignoring my pleas to please leave when they have sufficient passengers, have taken an interest in me. Because I’m often at the station by myself in the middle of the day waiting in the back of one or another of their vehicles, in the beginning, they took to standing around at a safe distance and gawking at me. When the word spread that I could speak Hindi (the chakra network updates almost as quickly as Twitter, or so it would seem), they dared to take a step closer and ask me a few questions, mostly predictable: where are you from? Why are you here? Do you know those other girls teaching at Madhi? Do you like India? Etc.
At first, I answered cautiously, unsure of their motivation. I was still new at the system, I hadn’t yet learned which drivers go between which villages and who lives where and who will take you home if you get stuck near nightfall at the Madhi bus station or who will let you pay later if you don’t have a five rupee coin. Each passing day, I’ve learned more: who listens to old hindi music and which drivers like the poppy new versions, who has children, who can read. Each day, they’ve asked me more about myself: why did I come here? Why do we teach in the schools? Do I miss my family? Who is in my family? The camaraderie between myself and these men, young and old, was totally unexpected.
It still won’t get them to leave with only 13 passengers though. Rupee beats relationship, or so it would seem.
Best,
Cat
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Poor Substitute
Dear dedicated reader,
I am sorely behind in my accounts to you. I don't make my apology lightly - I think about you almost daily and hope that my anecdotes of daily life here can resume once things become a little more settled. In the meantime, I present the following to you as a poor substitute for my usual detailed updates.
I had an article published in the Indian paper DNA recently that provides a more rounded reflection on my experience than I usually provide. If you are interested, it can be found here:
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/interview_indian-student-works-hard-but-isn-t-prepared-for-jobs_1273822
Best,
Cat
I am sorely behind in my accounts to you. I don't make my apology lightly - I think about you almost daily and hope that my anecdotes of daily life here can resume once things become a little more settled. In the meantime, I present the following to you as a poor substitute for my usual detailed updates.
I had an article published in the Indian paper DNA recently that provides a more rounded reflection on my experience than I usually provide. If you are interested, it can be found here:
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/interview_indian-student-works-hard-but-isn-t-prepared-for-jobs_1273822
Best,
Cat
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Parallel Universe
Dear dedicated reader,
This feeling of déjà vu is unmistakable. It was only a year ago that I lay here in the middle of the night writing on this same cot, pulled out in the center of the room so as to be under the fan (and in the process defying all Western rules of space use which don’t apply in such insidious heat anyway). The feeling, however, is somewhat unwarranted as while the circumstances for laying on this cot might be the same, the difference is that our comfortable house in Kadod which we turned into a home has been completely stripped of everything except for this cot and the massive cupboard which houses our English children’s library. The refrigerator is still here, housing one lone bottle of water which I brought with me from the train. The water is almost gone. Tomorrow I will have to buy more.
Bracketed by returning to Kadod, my experiences of the past two months in the US feel strangely foreign. Is foreign the word I want? Or is it parallel? Like another universe, perhaps.
Vimalbhai, our friend who rents his car and driving services for a living, came to pick me up from the train station, bottle of water and flowers in hand, looking for all the world like my grandparents did at airport when they met me not two months before. “Sister, you are the big boss now!” He exclaimed, making me laugh with embarrassment. He followed this assertion with an insistence that he treat me to some roadside sugarcane juice made by running sticks of sugarcane through a manually operated press that squeezes the juice out. As I took my first sip of the sweet, green colored liquid out of a dubiously clean plastic cup, my mind flashed back to the time that I had spent at the Princeton in Asia orientation last month in order to meet our new Kadod fellows. Sitting in on the ‘Health and Wellness’ session, the head of PIA had detailed how you lose the necessary antibodies to protect you from disease when you leave the country for a few weeks.
Vimalbhai looked at me expectantly. “Tastes like India!” He shouted, partially as a question.
Looking into his expectant face, I gave a hearty “Yes!” and a mental shrug, washing it down with my sugarcane juice.
The drive back to Kadod didn’t feel real until we reached the part of the highway that is only sugarcane fields as far as the eye can see. Amongst this expanse of sturdy, leafy stalks, I knew that somehow I had found my way back here, resisting the siren call of all the major cities on the East coast I had visited while home. As we approached the final stretch of the interior road the leads into the village, I started to see faces that I recognized: Anish, my 9E student on his motorbike, the woman who runs one of the local restaurants at the bus stop next to the man who runs the nearby shop whose t-shirt always reads “Work like a dog; Sleep like a log.” Turning from the main road onto Bazaar street, I felt a sudden pang of anxiety. What if… what if I missed Kadod more than it missed me? What if this was going to be one of those sequels that isn’t as good as the original movie?
I guess I shouldn’t have worried.
Vimalbhai stopped the car in front of the local phone booth and yelled to Darshanbhai to come out. All of a sudden, the car was surrounded by Darshanbhai’s family reaching through the window to grab my hands and say a welcome home. My smile widened until my face couldn’t contain it. It was a feeling that repeated itself often today as I reunited with Kamleshbhai the tailor and his family, Vimalbhai’s wife, daughter and nephew Avinash, Vikrambhai and his family, Taiyaba and her family.
How is it possible to feel so at home when it’s home that I’ve just left?
Best,
Cat
This feeling of déjà vu is unmistakable. It was only a year ago that I lay here in the middle of the night writing on this same cot, pulled out in the center of the room so as to be under the fan (and in the process defying all Western rules of space use which don’t apply in such insidious heat anyway). The feeling, however, is somewhat unwarranted as while the circumstances for laying on this cot might be the same, the difference is that our comfortable house in Kadod which we turned into a home has been completely stripped of everything except for this cot and the massive cupboard which houses our English children’s library. The refrigerator is still here, housing one lone bottle of water which I brought with me from the train. The water is almost gone. Tomorrow I will have to buy more.
Bracketed by returning to Kadod, my experiences of the past two months in the US feel strangely foreign. Is foreign the word I want? Or is it parallel? Like another universe, perhaps.
Vimalbhai, our friend who rents his car and driving services for a living, came to pick me up from the train station, bottle of water and flowers in hand, looking for all the world like my grandparents did at airport when they met me not two months before. “Sister, you are the big boss now!” He exclaimed, making me laugh with embarrassment. He followed this assertion with an insistence that he treat me to some roadside sugarcane juice made by running sticks of sugarcane through a manually operated press that squeezes the juice out. As I took my first sip of the sweet, green colored liquid out of a dubiously clean plastic cup, my mind flashed back to the time that I had spent at the Princeton in Asia orientation last month in order to meet our new Kadod fellows. Sitting in on the ‘Health and Wellness’ session, the head of PIA had detailed how you lose the necessary antibodies to protect you from disease when you leave the country for a few weeks.
Vimalbhai looked at me expectantly. “Tastes like India!” He shouted, partially as a question.
Looking into his expectant face, I gave a hearty “Yes!” and a mental shrug, washing it down with my sugarcane juice.
The drive back to Kadod didn’t feel real until we reached the part of the highway that is only sugarcane fields as far as the eye can see. Amongst this expanse of sturdy, leafy stalks, I knew that somehow I had found my way back here, resisting the siren call of all the major cities on the East coast I had visited while home. As we approached the final stretch of the interior road the leads into the village, I started to see faces that I recognized: Anish, my 9E student on his motorbike, the woman who runs one of the local restaurants at the bus stop next to the man who runs the nearby shop whose t-shirt always reads “Work like a dog; Sleep like a log.” Turning from the main road onto Bazaar street, I felt a sudden pang of anxiety. What if… what if I missed Kadod more than it missed me? What if this was going to be one of those sequels that isn’t as good as the original movie?
I guess I shouldn’t have worried.
Vimalbhai stopped the car in front of the local phone booth and yelled to Darshanbhai to come out. All of a sudden, the car was surrounded by Darshanbhai’s family reaching through the window to grab my hands and say a welcome home. My smile widened until my face couldn’t contain it. It was a feeling that repeated itself often today as I reunited with Kamleshbhai the tailor and his family, Vimalbhai’s wife, daughter and nephew Avinash, Vikrambhai and his family, Taiyaba and her family.
How is it possible to feel so at home when it’s home that I’ve just left?
Best,
Cat
Friday, June 5, 2009
Return At Last
Dear dedicated reader,
Sitting in the Mumbai airport waiting for a dawn departure to the train station en route to Kadod, I finally have time to compose my thoughts to you, dear reader . My lapse in communication these past few months is inexcusable: Over stimulated by my last month in Kadod as a teacher and subsequently overwhelmed with a whirlwind two month visit to the US during which I assumed the responsibilities for my new position with the Foundation, I can tell you that this unaccounted for time left me happy but in turns frazzled, anxious, and unable to write. Know that I have not forgotten you, nor do I intend to as I return to India.
The past 24 hours have had the makings of a most curious transition. The outward markers of my Indian existence which I shed so easily while at home amongst family and friends in the US have been slowly reassumed and the feeling of transformation was most unusual, inextricably linked to the legs of my journey back.
Like transformational waves lapping at the edges of my mind, the first washed gently over me as I sat in front of a chatty Indian girl on the first leg of my flight to Frankfurt. She spoke to her seat-mate, a fellow Philadelphian bound for a German beer festival, of her life growing up in India and what it was like in Bangalore. As I listened distractedly, I felt strangely disconnected from her experience and to soothe and immersed myself in catching up with the blockbuster hits from this past year, feet firmly planted in America.
The next wave was stronger, firmer and more unsettling. I walked through the spidery, dark halls of the Frankfurt International Airport passing an international myriad of hurried and leisurely walkers to my gate (I myself fall squarely in the former category). At the end of the hall, I spotted the sign I had spent half an hour following signs and searching for: C16. Upon turning into the gate, I was greeted by a sea of brown faces peppered here and there with a few foreigners like me. The strange familiarity of this pierced my consciousness – the strength of my recognition and the depth of my discomfort surprised me. However, like pulling on an old pair of jeans folded in the back of the closet, after squirming for a minute of so I found that my discomfort left me and I sat down on a bench to wait for boarding. The recollection of the feeling, however, that definitive shift of mind, stayed poignant.
And then I was fully drenched as yet another wave crashed over me: The airline attendant presented me with my specially ordered vegetarian meal, which on a flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai can only be Indian food. Know, dear reader, that I’ve been on an Indian food ban since I left Kadod, knowing that upon my return this would be my only fare for the next year.
At first, as I peeled back the sides of the aluminum top and revealed the tripartite dish underneath (rice, saag, and rajma arranged like a tiny reproduction of the Indian flag in my easily reheatable airline food container), I reluctantly eyed the contents. Running my eye over the rest of the tray left me feeling similarly disappointed: a small salad with limp, diseased looking lettuce, some suspicious looking raita (yogurt with vegetables mixed in) and a dessert which took my unexercised eye a minute to finally identify as a type of halwa (milky Indian dessert) with pureed pistachio.
I took up my plastic fork with trepidation and for a moment poked idly at the rice in the center of my tray. I took a bite. Not atrocious. I took another. The buttery feeling the rice left on my tongue brought back a picture of the daily blue bowl of rice, sitting on my kitchen table in Kadod. I took another, this time taking a little of the patriotic green saag. Too soon, I decided as I swallowed the spicy bite with distaste and took a bite of my neutral looking roll to soothe my unamused mouth.
Next I decided to turn my delicate attentions to the halwa. My spoon dove gently into the soft mass and brought up a bite. Things were beginning to look up, I decided as my tongue agreeably caressed the spoon, searching for more sugary halwa. For an airline approximation, this was good. I promptly ate half of it and, spurred by this victory, decided to attempt the suspect raita which I also found surprisingly pleasing.
It was then that I spotted the small packet of mango acchar (pickle). Acchar is a commonly used Indian table condiment that is like a spicy jellied fruit that you eat small portions of in conjunction with your main dish for flavor. There are many kinds, but spicy mango is popular and common. Normally, acchar is one of my favorite parts of the meal. However, on this occasion, I found myself twirling the sealed butter packet sized container between my hesitant fingers. My fingers passed over the pull tab that would open the lid. It felt like a . . . . commitment. It was so unarguably Indian and as I watched the oil shift from side to side through the clear plastic packing in time with the ministrations of my fingers, I balked, thought, breathed and pulled back the tab, spreading the contents over the top of my main dish.
The linguistic transition seemed simple after my commitment to the cuisine. Watching Billu Barbar (SRK Bollywood blockbuster from earlier this year) during the latter half of my flight was like splashing on the sandbar compared to the mental steps I’d made over the previous sixteen hours. My mind played with the Hindi phrases in my head, puzzling over some of the more complicated ones and storing others for later use.
And now I have arrived: after being checked diligently for swine flu by men in white breathing masks, fighting eager Indian passengers awaiting their luggage at the belt and changing my money from dollars into rupees, my transformation is complete. I’ve even changed back into Indian clothing thanks to a conveniently located bathroom near customs.
Only two more hours to go till I’m en route to Kadod. I can’t wait.
Best,
Cat
P.S. I just killed my first mosquito.
Sitting in the Mumbai airport waiting for a dawn departure to the train station en route to Kadod, I finally have time to compose my thoughts to you, dear reader . My lapse in communication these past few months is inexcusable: Over stimulated by my last month in Kadod as a teacher and subsequently overwhelmed with a whirlwind two month visit to the US during which I assumed the responsibilities for my new position with the Foundation, I can tell you that this unaccounted for time left me happy but in turns frazzled, anxious, and unable to write. Know that I have not forgotten you, nor do I intend to as I return to India.
The past 24 hours have had the makings of a most curious transition. The outward markers of my Indian existence which I shed so easily while at home amongst family and friends in the US have been slowly reassumed and the feeling of transformation was most unusual, inextricably linked to the legs of my journey back.
Like transformational waves lapping at the edges of my mind, the first washed gently over me as I sat in front of a chatty Indian girl on the first leg of my flight to Frankfurt. She spoke to her seat-mate, a fellow Philadelphian bound for a German beer festival, of her life growing up in India and what it was like in Bangalore. As I listened distractedly, I felt strangely disconnected from her experience and to soothe and immersed myself in catching up with the blockbuster hits from this past year, feet firmly planted in America.
The next wave was stronger, firmer and more unsettling. I walked through the spidery, dark halls of the Frankfurt International Airport passing an international myriad of hurried and leisurely walkers to my gate (I myself fall squarely in the former category). At the end of the hall, I spotted the sign I had spent half an hour following signs and searching for: C16. Upon turning into the gate, I was greeted by a sea of brown faces peppered here and there with a few foreigners like me. The strange familiarity of this pierced my consciousness – the strength of my recognition and the depth of my discomfort surprised me. However, like pulling on an old pair of jeans folded in the back of the closet, after squirming for a minute of so I found that my discomfort left me and I sat down on a bench to wait for boarding. The recollection of the feeling, however, that definitive shift of mind, stayed poignant.
And then I was fully drenched as yet another wave crashed over me: The airline attendant presented me with my specially ordered vegetarian meal, which on a flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai can only be Indian food. Know, dear reader, that I’ve been on an Indian food ban since I left Kadod, knowing that upon my return this would be my only fare for the next year.
At first, as I peeled back the sides of the aluminum top and revealed the tripartite dish underneath (rice, saag, and rajma arranged like a tiny reproduction of the Indian flag in my easily reheatable airline food container), I reluctantly eyed the contents. Running my eye over the rest of the tray left me feeling similarly disappointed: a small salad with limp, diseased looking lettuce, some suspicious looking raita (yogurt with vegetables mixed in) and a dessert which took my unexercised eye a minute to finally identify as a type of halwa (milky Indian dessert) with pureed pistachio.
I took up my plastic fork with trepidation and for a moment poked idly at the rice in the center of my tray. I took a bite. Not atrocious. I took another. The buttery feeling the rice left on my tongue brought back a picture of the daily blue bowl of rice, sitting on my kitchen table in Kadod. I took another, this time taking a little of the patriotic green saag. Too soon, I decided as I swallowed the spicy bite with distaste and took a bite of my neutral looking roll to soothe my unamused mouth.
Next I decided to turn my delicate attentions to the halwa. My spoon dove gently into the soft mass and brought up a bite. Things were beginning to look up, I decided as my tongue agreeably caressed the spoon, searching for more sugary halwa. For an airline approximation, this was good. I promptly ate half of it and, spurred by this victory, decided to attempt the suspect raita which I also found surprisingly pleasing.
It was then that I spotted the small packet of mango acchar (pickle). Acchar is a commonly used Indian table condiment that is like a spicy jellied fruit that you eat small portions of in conjunction with your main dish for flavor. There are many kinds, but spicy mango is popular and common. Normally, acchar is one of my favorite parts of the meal. However, on this occasion, I found myself twirling the sealed butter packet sized container between my hesitant fingers. My fingers passed over the pull tab that would open the lid. It felt like a . . . . commitment. It was so unarguably Indian and as I watched the oil shift from side to side through the clear plastic packing in time with the ministrations of my fingers, I balked, thought, breathed and pulled back the tab, spreading the contents over the top of my main dish.
The linguistic transition seemed simple after my commitment to the cuisine. Watching Billu Barbar (SRK Bollywood blockbuster from earlier this year) during the latter half of my flight was like splashing on the sandbar compared to the mental steps I’d made over the previous sixteen hours. My mind played with the Hindi phrases in my head, puzzling over some of the more complicated ones and storing others for later use.
And now I have arrived: after being checked diligently for swine flu by men in white breathing masks, fighting eager Indian passengers awaiting their luggage at the belt and changing my money from dollars into rupees, my transformation is complete. I’ve even changed back into Indian clothing thanks to a conveniently located bathroom near customs.
Only two more hours to go till I’m en route to Kadod. I can’t wait.
Best,
Cat
P.S. I just killed my first mosquito.
Friday, February 27, 2009
An Exciting Announcement
Dear dedicated reader,
It seems strange to qualify anything that I write to you, dear reader, as ‘personal’ since my account of my experiences here can only be described as personal. But I have a personal update that doesn’t have to do with anecdotes of delightfully incorrect sentence structure or classroom management or even cheating on exams.
I’ll be staying here in India for another year and even better than that: I’ll be staying here in Kadod! Our Foundation is expanding our program model to two additional schools in the surrounding area next year and over the past few months has been discussing the possibility of hiring an India Director to manage its operations in country. I’m happy to share that as of this morning, that person will be me! While the decision to trade in my chalk and duster for a mobile and mobility is my own, it does seem strange to choose a student-less existence after three years of working with students full-time.
Oddly enough, in an unpredictable twist to my own story, it seems I cannot get enough of Gujarat. That, however, will not stop me from returning to the U.S. from April 8th to June 2nd. I will be in Philadelphia, New York and Boston during that time, so if that is in your general direction, let’s connect.
Best,
Cat
It seems strange to qualify anything that I write to you, dear reader, as ‘personal’ since my account of my experiences here can only be described as personal. But I have a personal update that doesn’t have to do with anecdotes of delightfully incorrect sentence structure or classroom management or even cheating on exams.
I’ll be staying here in India for another year and even better than that: I’ll be staying here in Kadod! Our Foundation is expanding our program model to two additional schools in the surrounding area next year and over the past few months has been discussing the possibility of hiring an India Director to manage its operations in country. I’m happy to share that as of this morning, that person will be me! While the decision to trade in my chalk and duster for a mobile and mobility is my own, it does seem strange to choose a student-less existence after three years of working with students full-time.
Oddly enough, in an unpredictable twist to my own story, it seems I cannot get enough of Gujarat. That, however, will not stop me from returning to the U.S. from April 8th to June 2nd. I will be in Philadelphia, New York and Boston during that time, so if that is in your general direction, let’s connect.
Best,
Cat
Sunday, February 15, 2009
You Coming Sister Marriage?
Dear dedicated reader,
I came into my Spoken English class a week ago to find my boys huddled in a group around one bench, whispering feverishly to one another in Gujarati. I heard a snatch of “Melisha ma’am” and “Ketrin ma’am” as they spoke. What were they up to?
The huddle broke as they saw me and I saw Hitesh, my small, rambunctious and usually unprepared student from 9D hide something quickly behind his back. Oh god, I thought, I hope this tete a tete isn’t yet another attempt to scare me with a very realistic looking plastic lizard.
He walked slowly forward and a wide, toothy grin broke out in a shine across his face.
“Miss,” he said in his voice which is surprisingly scratchy for a kid, bringing his hand out from behind his back and presenting its contents to me, “you come in my sister’s marriage?”
I looked down at what he was holding out to me. It was a card upon which “Melissa ma’am and Cathrine ma’am” had been scrawled on the neat blank line designated for names and inside it was full of the Gujarati of a formal wedding invitation: our first.
“Of course,” I replied, delighted.
Apparently, Melissa and I had graduated from crashing weddings with Sejalben to being invited in our own right. Of course, this presented a new problem: were we ready to strike out on our own? I mean, an Indian wedding is not exactly the minute to minute affair of a New York wedding: there is lots of idle time between dinner and the ceremony, sometimes hours, for guests to roam and chat and somehow everyone (except for the clueless American teachers) knows how long this time is supposed to be. How would we fare without our crutches?
It turns out I needn’t have worried.
“We’re going to be late,” I whined as we readied ourselves to leave the house this afternoon for the wedding. As we threw the bolt closed on our front door, I ran my eye over Melissa’s sari and my own bangled arms, hoping we would be up to the measure of the critical Indian aunty’s eye.
We made our way as quickly as we could up the main road of Kadod and back into the neighborhood where Hitesh and his family live. I had often seen him when I was out on my bike, running around his plaid play shirt and school uniform pants. As we reached the road where I knew he lived, I realized I didn’t know where we were supposed to go. As many times as I had threatened to go to his house and tell his father about his Gujarati jokes, his missing text book, his constant lack of a pen, I had never actually done it because of his disarmingly adorable smile and so I didn’t actually know where he lived.
Confused, we stopped just outside the large temple which dominates this part of town and contemplated our next move. Kids and adults in finery were milling around, but there was no sign of any of our students. Melissa and I looked at each other. We were failing our first closed-book cultural test.
Luckily, our cheat sheet arrived.
“Miss!” Hitesh bounded out of a house up the street where a large tent had been set up for the wedding proceedings. He was dressed in a flat pressed blue collar shirt with a sewn in slogan on the back proclaiming ‘No Fear!” and a pair of tight jean pants. His hair had been slicked back and despite his diminutive size he was almost looking fourteen years old (which he is).
He stopped bounding just in front of me. “Hungry? You eat?” He asked me, smiling excitedly with eyes darting back and forth between me and Melissa. He immediately started leading us towards a large gravel yard at the end of the street where long bolts of cloth had been laid in parallel with large platters and bowls made from dried leaves placed in front. He indicated that we should sit, so after a moment of weak hesitation we did, and he plopped down right next to me.
As soon as we sat, the other mass of children who’d started to follow us out of curiosity and it turns out would follow us all night, also sat. By now, eating dinner had gained momentum and adults were following our lead and sitting to receive the portions that were being doled out by local boys (all my students, incidentally) onto the leaf plates.
“Miss,” Hitesh said, catching my attention and pointing, “this is my aunt, and that one, my uncle and that one my grandfather and there my grandmother.” It was the longest English sentence I had ever heard him speak.
“All your relatives are here?” I asked him.
“Yes, miss, and my sister, her marriage, she is in house for beauty parlor!” He said laughing at his own wit. As Mayur, one of his classmates, threw down a large spoonful of unidentified cooked and spiced vegetables onto my platter with a plop, Hitesh pointed at it.“In Gujarati, saag,” he said seriously and I nodded with a smile in appreciation for his identification, watching out of the corner of my eye as the boys who moved down the closely packed line of plates serving food kicked up dust as their shoes shuffled down the row. I then watched it settle on my food, smiled at Hitesh, and dug my fingers into the saag to take a bite.
After dinner, Hitesh took us and the cadre of seven to ten year olds who’d decided that they’re new occupation was trailing American teachers like lemmings to his uncles’ house where his sister was being readied for the wedding. He tried to shoo away the kids but they persisted in staying and staring at us with their big eyes so he merely blocked the stairwell as we made our way up the rickety steps to the second floor where his twenty year old sister Pritee was being adorned with jewels by her best friends. She tried to get up as we entered. “No no!” we insisted as we indicated she should sit. Both her arms were covered from the sleeve of her sari blouse all the way to her finger tips with deep, dark intricate mehndi.
Hitesh, who after a few minutes came running into the room after successfully stopping the onslaught of pre-teens introduced us to his sister as “my American teachers.” After a short congratulations, we left the house. As we got outside he said, “Now I am fresh, miss.”
I stopped, confused I stumbled to put our discarded sandals back on just outside the doorway of his house. “What do you mean?” I asked him.
He threw up his arm and exposed his freshly scented armpit to me. “Full Perfume!” He shouted happily.
“Oh, ah yes,” I said, as the scent of white jasmine floated towards me, “very nice.”
Undeterred by my tepid response, Hitesh charged forward into the street, motioning for us to follow. “She sister marriage nine and coming my house now groom and you see!” He smiled over his shoulder as he marched onwards.
Confused but trusting that he had everything in hand, we followed him (and the seven year olds followed us) out across the street to a house a little further down next to the gravel yard in which we had enjoyed our carefully narrated wedding banquet.
Leaving our sandals at the threshold, we ducked our heads past the low dark doorway and found ourselves in a room full of glittering saris and embroidered kurtas with relatives of the groom inside them. The groom himself lay sprawled out on the floor on a mat in the corner, relaxing but looking nervous. We gave a quick palms together ‘Namaste’ to everyone as moved through the room to the back, following the excitable Hitesh.
Inside the room, an old wrinkled woman in a purple silk sari indicated that we should sit, saying “Please seat yourself,” over and over to us in Gujarati. She came and sat next to us and took Melissa’s arm in her firm grip. One of the clan of seven year olds was sent dutifully for cold drinks.
She began to speak in a rhythmic, slow Gujarati, her tongue caressing each sound carefully. Her care, unfortunately, was lost on us as we looked at her blankly and then at Hitesh, who glancing quickly at the ceiling with a concentrated look, began to try and translate.
“You, married? She ask?” He said. We told her no.
“You… liking India?” His scratchy voice intoned again with intense concentration. This question and answer continued and each time he dutifully translated so the groom’s mother would be able to comprehend our answers.
I was ecstatic, but not because of the conversation or because of India. With every sentence of English Hitesh uttered, I became even more so. Here was a student who never, and I mean never, spoke English in the classroom if it could be avoided. Despite coming to Spoken English class everyday, he’d loll around at his bench, tell me in Gujarati that he didn’t bring a pen, and then after I gave him one wouldn’t open his notebook or follow directions and after it all would look at me sadly and say plaintively, “Miss, outside game?”
This was different, however: perhaps born out of a desire to meet the demanding rules of Indian hospitality and also his happiness at our coming to the event, Hitesh was now presented with a genuine communicative goal. And hence flowed forth the English!
I guess it was all he needed.
Best,
Cat
I came into my Spoken English class a week ago to find my boys huddled in a group around one bench, whispering feverishly to one another in Gujarati. I heard a snatch of “Melisha ma’am” and “Ketrin ma’am” as they spoke. What were they up to?
The huddle broke as they saw me and I saw Hitesh, my small, rambunctious and usually unprepared student from 9D hide something quickly behind his back. Oh god, I thought, I hope this tete a tete isn’t yet another attempt to scare me with a very realistic looking plastic lizard.
He walked slowly forward and a wide, toothy grin broke out in a shine across his face.
“Miss,” he said in his voice which is surprisingly scratchy for a kid, bringing his hand out from behind his back and presenting its contents to me, “you come in my sister’s marriage?”
I looked down at what he was holding out to me. It was a card upon which “Melissa ma’am and Cathrine ma’am” had been scrawled on the neat blank line designated for names and inside it was full of the Gujarati of a formal wedding invitation: our first.
“Of course,” I replied, delighted.
Apparently, Melissa and I had graduated from crashing weddings with Sejalben to being invited in our own right. Of course, this presented a new problem: were we ready to strike out on our own? I mean, an Indian wedding is not exactly the minute to minute affair of a New York wedding: there is lots of idle time between dinner and the ceremony, sometimes hours, for guests to roam and chat and somehow everyone (except for the clueless American teachers) knows how long this time is supposed to be. How would we fare without our crutches?
It turns out I needn’t have worried.
“We’re going to be late,” I whined as we readied ourselves to leave the house this afternoon for the wedding. As we threw the bolt closed on our front door, I ran my eye over Melissa’s sari and my own bangled arms, hoping we would be up to the measure of the critical Indian aunty’s eye.
We made our way as quickly as we could up the main road of Kadod and back into the neighborhood where Hitesh and his family live. I had often seen him when I was out on my bike, running around his plaid play shirt and school uniform pants. As we reached the road where I knew he lived, I realized I didn’t know where we were supposed to go. As many times as I had threatened to go to his house and tell his father about his Gujarati jokes, his missing text book, his constant lack of a pen, I had never actually done it because of his disarmingly adorable smile and so I didn’t actually know where he lived.
Confused, we stopped just outside the large temple which dominates this part of town and contemplated our next move. Kids and adults in finery were milling around, but there was no sign of any of our students. Melissa and I looked at each other. We were failing our first closed-book cultural test.
Luckily, our cheat sheet arrived.
“Miss!” Hitesh bounded out of a house up the street where a large tent had been set up for the wedding proceedings. He was dressed in a flat pressed blue collar shirt with a sewn in slogan on the back proclaiming ‘No Fear!” and a pair of tight jean pants. His hair had been slicked back and despite his diminutive size he was almost looking fourteen years old (which he is).
He stopped bounding just in front of me. “Hungry? You eat?” He asked me, smiling excitedly with eyes darting back and forth between me and Melissa. He immediately started leading us towards a large gravel yard at the end of the street where long bolts of cloth had been laid in parallel with large platters and bowls made from dried leaves placed in front. He indicated that we should sit, so after a moment of weak hesitation we did, and he plopped down right next to me.
As soon as we sat, the other mass of children who’d started to follow us out of curiosity and it turns out would follow us all night, also sat. By now, eating dinner had gained momentum and adults were following our lead and sitting to receive the portions that were being doled out by local boys (all my students, incidentally) onto the leaf plates.
“Miss,” Hitesh said, catching my attention and pointing, “this is my aunt, and that one, my uncle and that one my grandfather and there my grandmother.” It was the longest English sentence I had ever heard him speak.
“All your relatives are here?” I asked him.
“Yes, miss, and my sister, her marriage, she is in house for beauty parlor!” He said laughing at his own wit. As Mayur, one of his classmates, threw down a large spoonful of unidentified cooked and spiced vegetables onto my platter with a plop, Hitesh pointed at it.“In Gujarati, saag,” he said seriously and I nodded with a smile in appreciation for his identification, watching out of the corner of my eye as the boys who moved down the closely packed line of plates serving food kicked up dust as their shoes shuffled down the row. I then watched it settle on my food, smiled at Hitesh, and dug my fingers into the saag to take a bite.
After dinner, Hitesh took us and the cadre of seven to ten year olds who’d decided that they’re new occupation was trailing American teachers like lemmings to his uncles’ house where his sister was being readied for the wedding. He tried to shoo away the kids but they persisted in staying and staring at us with their big eyes so he merely blocked the stairwell as we made our way up the rickety steps to the second floor where his twenty year old sister Pritee was being adorned with jewels by her best friends. She tried to get up as we entered. “No no!” we insisted as we indicated she should sit. Both her arms were covered from the sleeve of her sari blouse all the way to her finger tips with deep, dark intricate mehndi.
Hitesh, who after a few minutes came running into the room after successfully stopping the onslaught of pre-teens introduced us to his sister as “my American teachers.” After a short congratulations, we left the house. As we got outside he said, “Now I am fresh, miss.”
I stopped, confused I stumbled to put our discarded sandals back on just outside the doorway of his house. “What do you mean?” I asked him.
He threw up his arm and exposed his freshly scented armpit to me. “Full Perfume!” He shouted happily.
“Oh, ah yes,” I said, as the scent of white jasmine floated towards me, “very nice.”
Undeterred by my tepid response, Hitesh charged forward into the street, motioning for us to follow. “She sister marriage nine and coming my house now groom and you see!” He smiled over his shoulder as he marched onwards.
Confused but trusting that he had everything in hand, we followed him (and the seven year olds followed us) out across the street to a house a little further down next to the gravel yard in which we had enjoyed our carefully narrated wedding banquet.
Leaving our sandals at the threshold, we ducked our heads past the low dark doorway and found ourselves in a room full of glittering saris and embroidered kurtas with relatives of the groom inside them. The groom himself lay sprawled out on the floor on a mat in the corner, relaxing but looking nervous. We gave a quick palms together ‘Namaste’ to everyone as moved through the room to the back, following the excitable Hitesh.
Inside the room, an old wrinkled woman in a purple silk sari indicated that we should sit, saying “Please seat yourself,” over and over to us in Gujarati. She came and sat next to us and took Melissa’s arm in her firm grip. One of the clan of seven year olds was sent dutifully for cold drinks.
She began to speak in a rhythmic, slow Gujarati, her tongue caressing each sound carefully. Her care, unfortunately, was lost on us as we looked at her blankly and then at Hitesh, who glancing quickly at the ceiling with a concentrated look, began to try and translate.
“You, married? She ask?” He said. We told her no.
“You… liking India?” His scratchy voice intoned again with intense concentration. This question and answer continued and each time he dutifully translated so the groom’s mother would be able to comprehend our answers.
I was ecstatic, but not because of the conversation or because of India. With every sentence of English Hitesh uttered, I became even more so. Here was a student who never, and I mean never, spoke English in the classroom if it could be avoided. Despite coming to Spoken English class everyday, he’d loll around at his bench, tell me in Gujarati that he didn’t bring a pen, and then after I gave him one wouldn’t open his notebook or follow directions and after it all would look at me sadly and say plaintively, “Miss, outside game?”
This was different, however: perhaps born out of a desire to meet the demanding rules of Indian hospitality and also his happiness at our coming to the event, Hitesh was now presented with a genuine communicative goal. And hence flowed forth the English!
I guess it was all he needed.
Best,
Cat
Friday, January 30, 2009
An Overdue Haircut
Dear dedicated reader,
When I first met Mr. Tailor’s androgynous offspring, Krishna, I was stymied.
“Your… child is so cute,” I said, calling out the reserve word I formerly used when making cold calls to parents in the Boston Public School system when I couldn’t determine the sex of their child.
“Oh Thank You!” Kamleshbhai (Mr. Tailor’s true name, or so we’ve discovered) exclaimed with his usual exuberance. No follow up, no pronoun use. I couldn’t ask any questions about the small cute kid now running haplessly around the shop without giving away that I didn’t know his sex and since Krishna is both a girl’s and a boy’s name here, I wasn’t getting any help from that quarter either. So, I simply smiled and nodded emphatically.
Krishna, for his (or was it her?) part, burst into tears on sight of me. I seem to have that effect on small kids around here.
Since that encounter in Mr. Tailor’s crowded and colorful workshop, Melissa and I uncovered the answer to this elusive question through a recent invitation: I had stopped by Mr. Tailor’s shop as I sometimes do to sit in the back near the foot powered sewing machines whose whirring needles punch the fabric in a rhythmic way while Mr. Tailor looks on, now and then stopping to cut a piece of material.
We had been discussing the coming of Narendra Modi and the business acumen of the Gujarati people when he abruptly veered away from these topics.
“You…will…” he began in a sort of stop and start English, struggling to force the language to express his thoughts. I peered at him curiously until he switched into Hindi and the words began to flow. “You will come to our house on Thursday for the babri?”
“Babri – matlab (meaning)?” I asked him, not understanding.
“Er,” he paused, thinking of the best way to say it, “the haircut of my son,” (ah ha!) “he is cutting his hair for the first time.”
“Isn’t he like, two years old?” I said, confused.
“Yes, it is our tradition, no haircut until he is so old and then we will shave his head.” Suddenly, I remembered: I had seen photos of the ceremony at people’s houses and read about it in my religion class in college, but this would be the first time that I would see it for myself.
When we arrived on the appointed day, an awning had been set up over the street, blocking any traffic making the mistake of trying to get through on this special day. Chairs had been set up in rows outside for no one in particular’s use. All the men were simply standing around outside talking to each other while the women sat sequestered on the floor in the small main room of the house. Kamleshbhai smiled widely as he saw us walking up the street: when we arrived under the awning, after some warm ‘namastes’, he motioned for us to go inside with the rest of the women and take our seats. The room was packed wall to wall with women ranging from the beautifully wrinkled faces of old women with crooked teeth and wireless spectacles to young black-haired women bedecked in sparkling bangles and colorful, jeweled saris.
There was one open space on the floor which, after a moment of hesitation, we decided was the perfect size for two American teachers. When Kamleshbhai saw that we had elected to sit on the floor, he motioned to an empty bench in the corner where we could sit comfortably, but since none of the other women were sitting in such a manner, we protested and said that we would be fine on the floor. What we did not realize was that his generosity was not for our benefit but rather for his, since the open space in which we had elected to sit was right in front of the shrine to Ganesha where the family would need to sit for the ceremony. By the time we realized our mistake, it was too late: the arm of Indian hospitality had swung into action and rugs were being pulled from the other room and placed in front of us to give the parents and Krishna somewhere to sit as they performed the necessary pooja. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, but by the time I protested and said we would be happy to move it was far too late. I mentally added it to the ever-growing list of faux-pas by the American teachers.
Kamleshbhai and his wife sat on either side of small Krishna, whose hair had been loosed from the pony tail holder that usually keeps it out of his face in a tight sprout from the top of his head. When the priest began to chant, Kamleshbhai smiled down at his tiny son and put his hands together in a gesture of prayer; Krishna followed suit, straightening his tiny fingers into a gesture of piety, looking up at his father for approval.
The ceremony itself was merely a prelude to the big show which followed: once the rice had been powdered and thrown at the shrine of Ganesh-ji and two one rupee coins had been pasted to the wall using ghee, Kamleshbhai’s sister, as per tradition, grabbed a lock of Krishna’s hair and used a large blessed pair of shears to cut off a huge hunk of Krishna’s hair. Looking at the hair in her hands, Krishna began to loudly cry and was taken outside where the rest of his hair was shorn short so that it would be easier to shave.
The guests followed and I watched as both of Krishna’s parents had to physically restrain him as the barber brandished his sharp razor over Krishna’s screaming head. I gasped and bit my lip with nervousness each time the razor was brought towards his head:
Krishna was wildly bucking and kicking in his parents arms, screaming a frenzied plea to all the delighted adults assembled to watch. Despite his parents cooing, and promises of forthcoming chocolate, he raged on; meanwhile, I found myself impressed by the skillfulness of the barber who always seemed to move the razor away from his rearing scalp at just the right moment, averting potentially bloody accidents left and right. The poor kid had cut hair covering every part of his exposed face, his neck, his arms. I would have bucked and screamed too, in that situation.
Just after the barber ran the razor artfully down the last curve of Krishna’s scalp, leaving him completely bald, Krishna was whisked away in the arms of his aunt inside to have the stray hair washed from his face and to have his clothes changed. When he emerged again, this time clad in a golden colored kurta pyjama, he was still bawling in her arms, refusing the comfort of all his well meaning relatives. When a sympathetic aunt handed him a Cadbury chocolate bar, he screamed even louder and threw the chocolate bar with all his might back at her face, narrowly missing her nose.
Perhaps as a way to distract from the ill-mannered reception of the his first haircut, Kamleshbhai drew our attention away from Krishna and his adoring relatives with an invitation of lunch. Two runners had been laid down on the street under the awning upon which, as with many feasts we have been to here, we were to sit. The rocky, gravelly street did not make for the most comfortable vantage point for eating lunch; however, I did not want to offend Kamleshbhai, so I maneuvered my legs around in my sari so that I could sit and eat the thali-style meal which was being served to us by jean-clad teenage boys (a theme for feasts here).
Just as everyone had gotten settled in neat rows of hands digging into food and mouths chewing thoughtfully at their Gujarati delicacies, an unexpected visitor arrived to partake in the proceedings. I looked up from my plate, hand poised in front of my mouth to deliver a tasty portion of papad when I saw a large cow with overgrown horns sauntering right into the middle of the tent.
For a moment, everyone just stared at it and for the briefest of seconds I thought it was going to be allowed to walk as it pleased through the tent. It stopped, looked, and then swung its head dangerously towards the left and stuck out its large, hammy tongue dripping with oozing saliva to indulge in some sabzi from the platter of a woman sitting across from me. She leapt up with a scream of fright and Melissa and I started back as well, thinking the scream would force it to head in our direction. Immediately, the men descended upon it, thwacking it and making clicking noises until it was run out from under the tented awning and made to promenade itself back up the street.
As we savored our meal, Krishna, tears freshly dried and smiling now as if all was indeed forgiven (I have my suspicions about the role the chocolate may have played in this decision), made is way in the company of his cousins down the row of guests, smiling and gurgling attentively as the perfect host. His newly bald head shone in the noon sunlight and as he passed me, he even put out a little hand.
As strange as the whole thing seemed at the time, on reflection, how natural is it to dress up male babies in white dresses and sprinkle water on them? I’m just saying, is all.
Best,
Cat
When I first met Mr. Tailor’s androgynous offspring, Krishna, I was stymied.
“Your… child is so cute,” I said, calling out the reserve word I formerly used when making cold calls to parents in the Boston Public School system when I couldn’t determine the sex of their child.
“Oh Thank You!” Kamleshbhai (Mr. Tailor’s true name, or so we’ve discovered) exclaimed with his usual exuberance. No follow up, no pronoun use. I couldn’t ask any questions about the small cute kid now running haplessly around the shop without giving away that I didn’t know his sex and since Krishna is both a girl’s and a boy’s name here, I wasn’t getting any help from that quarter either. So, I simply smiled and nodded emphatically.
Krishna, for his (or was it her?) part, burst into tears on sight of me. I seem to have that effect on small kids around here.
Since that encounter in Mr. Tailor’s crowded and colorful workshop, Melissa and I uncovered the answer to this elusive question through a recent invitation: I had stopped by Mr. Tailor’s shop as I sometimes do to sit in the back near the foot powered sewing machines whose whirring needles punch the fabric in a rhythmic way while Mr. Tailor looks on, now and then stopping to cut a piece of material.
We had been discussing the coming of Narendra Modi and the business acumen of the Gujarati people when he abruptly veered away from these topics.
“You…will…” he began in a sort of stop and start English, struggling to force the language to express his thoughts. I peered at him curiously until he switched into Hindi and the words began to flow. “You will come to our house on Thursday for the babri?”
“Babri – matlab (meaning)?” I asked him, not understanding.
“Er,” he paused, thinking of the best way to say it, “the haircut of my son,” (ah ha!) “he is cutting his hair for the first time.”
“Isn’t he like, two years old?” I said, confused.
“Yes, it is our tradition, no haircut until he is so old and then we will shave his head.” Suddenly, I remembered: I had seen photos of the ceremony at people’s houses and read about it in my religion class in college, but this would be the first time that I would see it for myself.
When we arrived on the appointed day, an awning had been set up over the street, blocking any traffic making the mistake of trying to get through on this special day. Chairs had been set up in rows outside for no one in particular’s use. All the men were simply standing around outside talking to each other while the women sat sequestered on the floor in the small main room of the house. Kamleshbhai smiled widely as he saw us walking up the street: when we arrived under the awning, after some warm ‘namastes’, he motioned for us to go inside with the rest of the women and take our seats. The room was packed wall to wall with women ranging from the beautifully wrinkled faces of old women with crooked teeth and wireless spectacles to young black-haired women bedecked in sparkling bangles and colorful, jeweled saris.
There was one open space on the floor which, after a moment of hesitation, we decided was the perfect size for two American teachers. When Kamleshbhai saw that we had elected to sit on the floor, he motioned to an empty bench in the corner where we could sit comfortably, but since none of the other women were sitting in such a manner, we protested and said that we would be fine on the floor. What we did not realize was that his generosity was not for our benefit but rather for his, since the open space in which we had elected to sit was right in front of the shrine to Ganesha where the family would need to sit for the ceremony. By the time we realized our mistake, it was too late: the arm of Indian hospitality had swung into action and rugs were being pulled from the other room and placed in front of us to give the parents and Krishna somewhere to sit as they performed the necessary pooja. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, but by the time I protested and said we would be happy to move it was far too late. I mentally added it to the ever-growing list of faux-pas by the American teachers.
Kamleshbhai and his wife sat on either side of small Krishna, whose hair had been loosed from the pony tail holder that usually keeps it out of his face in a tight sprout from the top of his head. When the priest began to chant, Kamleshbhai smiled down at his tiny son and put his hands together in a gesture of prayer; Krishna followed suit, straightening his tiny fingers into a gesture of piety, looking up at his father for approval.
The ceremony itself was merely a prelude to the big show which followed: once the rice had been powdered and thrown at the shrine of Ganesh-ji and two one rupee coins had been pasted to the wall using ghee, Kamleshbhai’s sister, as per tradition, grabbed a lock of Krishna’s hair and used a large blessed pair of shears to cut off a huge hunk of Krishna’s hair. Looking at the hair in her hands, Krishna began to loudly cry and was taken outside where the rest of his hair was shorn short so that it would be easier to shave.
The guests followed and I watched as both of Krishna’s parents had to physically restrain him as the barber brandished his sharp razor over Krishna’s screaming head. I gasped and bit my lip with nervousness each time the razor was brought towards his head:
Krishna was wildly bucking and kicking in his parents arms, screaming a frenzied plea to all the delighted adults assembled to watch. Despite his parents cooing, and promises of forthcoming chocolate, he raged on; meanwhile, I found myself impressed by the skillfulness of the barber who always seemed to move the razor away from his rearing scalp at just the right moment, averting potentially bloody accidents left and right. The poor kid had cut hair covering every part of his exposed face, his neck, his arms. I would have bucked and screamed too, in that situation. Just after the barber ran the razor artfully down the last curve of Krishna’s scalp, leaving him completely bald, Krishna was whisked away in the arms of his aunt inside to have the stray hair washed from his face and to have his clothes changed. When he emerged again, this time clad in a golden colored kurta pyjama, he was still bawling in her arms, refusing the comfort of all his well meaning relatives. When a sympathetic aunt handed him a Cadbury chocolate bar, he screamed even louder and threw the chocolate bar with all his might back at her face, narrowly missing her nose.
Perhaps as a way to distract from the ill-mannered reception of the his first haircut, Kamleshbhai drew our attention away from Krishna and his adoring relatives with an invitation of lunch. Two runners had been laid down on the street under the awning upon which, as with many feasts we have been to here, we were to sit. The rocky, gravelly street did not make for the most comfortable vantage point for eating lunch; however, I did not want to offend Kamleshbhai, so I maneuvered my legs around in my sari so that I could sit and eat the thali-style meal which was being served to us by jean-clad teenage boys (a theme for feasts here).
Just as everyone had gotten settled in neat rows of hands digging into food and mouths chewing thoughtfully at their Gujarati delicacies, an unexpected visitor arrived to partake in the proceedings. I looked up from my plate, hand poised in front of my mouth to deliver a tasty portion of papad when I saw a large cow with overgrown horns sauntering right into the middle of the tent.
For a moment, everyone just stared at it and for the briefest of seconds I thought it was going to be allowed to walk as it pleased through the tent. It stopped, looked, and then swung its head dangerously towards the left and stuck out its large, hammy tongue dripping with oozing saliva to indulge in some sabzi from the platter of a woman sitting across from me. She leapt up with a scream of fright and Melissa and I started back as well, thinking the scream would force it to head in our direction. Immediately, the men descended upon it, thwacking it and making clicking noises until it was run out from under the tented awning and made to promenade itself back up the street.
As we savored our meal, Krishna, tears freshly dried and smiling now as if all was indeed forgiven (I have my suspicions about the role the chocolate may have played in this decision), made is way in the company of his cousins down the row of guests, smiling and gurgling attentively as the perfect host. His newly bald head shone in the noon sunlight and as he passed me, he even put out a little hand.
As strange as the whole thing seemed at the time, on reflection, how natural is it to dress up male babies in white dresses and sprinkle water on them? I’m just saying, is all.
Best,
Cat
Thursday, January 29, 2009
The Oral Test
Dear dedicated reader,
I sat in the wooden chair that is present in each and every classroom behind the small wooden desk where I usually rest my teaching materials for the brief half hour that I have to make an impression on each class during a normal teaching day. Teaching while seated is acceptable here, but I just can’t do it: I always teach standing, moving frequently in between the benches if I can and trying to keep the students engaged by having to track me with their eyes.
However, today, from my new vantage point in this chair, I looked up into the eyes of 9th standard girl who was so nervous I could see the sweat beading on her forehead (though this could easily be attributable to the 80 degree average that Kadod seems to run regardless of the season). Pushing a piece of stray hair behind her ear and then quickly returning her hand to crossed arms tightly hugging the front of her body, her eyes nervously flitted to mine and then to the back of the classroom and then out the classroom door. She chewed on her lip, then stamped her foot, impatient with herself. Finally she shook her head. “No, miss,” she said, defeated.
I looked at her reassuringly. “It’s okay,” I said. “Can you recite an essay for me? On any topic?”
The girl launched in on an essay entitled “My Favorite Game”: “There are many types of games,” she began, “but they are mostly indoor games like playcards, karam, or chess. Outdoor games include football, volleyball and cricket. Cricket is a sport played with 11 players to a team, it –“
“That’s fine, thank you, you may sit,” I told her. What I had just heard was a regurgitated version of an essay I had taught (ie. been forced to write on the board while the students copied into their notebooks) several months back. Before that, I had asked this girl, roll number 39, to recite one of the poems from the book for me. Next to her roll number I noted a terse “poor” under the poem heading and “good” underneath the essay heading, just as Tabussum had showed me to do earlier.
“Roll number 40?” I called out, looking up across the classroom which was a buzzing sea of moving lips and hands in ears as each girl stared down intently at her textbook to try and do last minute practice before their fateful number was called.
My tendency towards melodrama is getting away from me. The results of this oral exam in actuality is not that ‘fateful’, thanks the seedy underbelly of the Kadod High School exam scheme. The way the system works is thus: The students take their second trimester exams, the teachers give them marks out of 40. After this, the students are required to take an “oral exam” to determine their competency in spoken English. What this really means is that they are required to recite a poem of their choice from the textbook and memorize an essay on a topic of their choice, also to be recited.
Wanting to actually play the part of a real teacher, I asked Tabussum to let me administer the oral exams in my classes and she obligingly taught me how to do it. She told me to take down their scores as “poor”, “average”, “good” or “very good” and informed that later she would ‘translate’ this into marks.
When I pushed her to let me just assign them marks, she blushed and explained what this ‘translation’ actually entailed. She would look at the rating that I gave the girls and assign a mark based out of ten to the rating I had given them, except in the case of the girls who had failed in the exam. In their case, she would simply give them the requisite number of marks to pass.
“You see,” she said, “They need seventeen marks to pass. So that girl who has taken ten marks, I will give her seven marks,” she said with an embarrassed smile.
On seeing my look of horror, she blushed even further. “I know it’s not right,” she said. “But if the girls fail, it’s a difficult for us, later.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, still shocked.
“There is so much paperwork,” she explained, “if the students fail. It’s not good, I know, but teachers do like this.” She shrugged.
After a tense moment during which I could see her awaiting my reaction, I raised my eyebrows and gave her one of my what-will-be-will-be smiles. It was no use arguing: even if I think it’s wrong, what do I know about these things? The whole exam system is so beyond my comprehension that what use is it to fight even this one cog in the system? She and I had already disagreed when I’d tried to get her to agree to let me give them a real oral exam.
“Why don’t we just ask them questions? Like the kind they’d encounter in a real conversation or that I ask them in class?” She’d shaken her head and argued that Sejalben had already told them how we’d testing them on the exam: strict memorization and recitation only.
So, as I sat in my chair and looked up at roll number 40 (otherwise known as Priyanka) in her nicely pressed blue jumper, knitting her fingers together while she looked into the distance and recited “The Rain, The Beautiful Rain” I hoped that perhaps one day someone asked her a question to which she could reply:
“Thunder crashing / rain slashing / brings the rain, the welcome rain!”
Best,
Cat
I sat in the wooden chair that is present in each and every classroom behind the small wooden desk where I usually rest my teaching materials for the brief half hour that I have to make an impression on each class during a normal teaching day. Teaching while seated is acceptable here, but I just can’t do it: I always teach standing, moving frequently in between the benches if I can and trying to keep the students engaged by having to track me with their eyes.
However, today, from my new vantage point in this chair, I looked up into the eyes of 9th standard girl who was so nervous I could see the sweat beading on her forehead (though this could easily be attributable to the 80 degree average that Kadod seems to run regardless of the season). Pushing a piece of stray hair behind her ear and then quickly returning her hand to crossed arms tightly hugging the front of her body, her eyes nervously flitted to mine and then to the back of the classroom and then out the classroom door. She chewed on her lip, then stamped her foot, impatient with herself. Finally she shook her head. “No, miss,” she said, defeated.
I looked at her reassuringly. “It’s okay,” I said. “Can you recite an essay for me? On any topic?”
The girl launched in on an essay entitled “My Favorite Game”: “There are many types of games,” she began, “but they are mostly indoor games like playcards, karam, or chess. Outdoor games include football, volleyball and cricket. Cricket is a sport played with 11 players to a team, it –“
“That’s fine, thank you, you may sit,” I told her. What I had just heard was a regurgitated version of an essay I had taught (ie. been forced to write on the board while the students copied into their notebooks) several months back. Before that, I had asked this girl, roll number 39, to recite one of the poems from the book for me. Next to her roll number I noted a terse “poor” under the poem heading and “good” underneath the essay heading, just as Tabussum had showed me to do earlier.
“Roll number 40?” I called out, looking up across the classroom which was a buzzing sea of moving lips and hands in ears as each girl stared down intently at her textbook to try and do last minute practice before their fateful number was called.
My tendency towards melodrama is getting away from me. The results of this oral exam in actuality is not that ‘fateful’, thanks the seedy underbelly of the Kadod High School exam scheme. The way the system works is thus: The students take their second trimester exams, the teachers give them marks out of 40. After this, the students are required to take an “oral exam” to determine their competency in spoken English. What this really means is that they are required to recite a poem of their choice from the textbook and memorize an essay on a topic of their choice, also to be recited.
Wanting to actually play the part of a real teacher, I asked Tabussum to let me administer the oral exams in my classes and she obligingly taught me how to do it. She told me to take down their scores as “poor”, “average”, “good” or “very good” and informed that later she would ‘translate’ this into marks.
When I pushed her to let me just assign them marks, she blushed and explained what this ‘translation’ actually entailed. She would look at the rating that I gave the girls and assign a mark based out of ten to the rating I had given them, except in the case of the girls who had failed in the exam. In their case, she would simply give them the requisite number of marks to pass.
“You see,” she said, “They need seventeen marks to pass. So that girl who has taken ten marks, I will give her seven marks,” she said with an embarrassed smile.
On seeing my look of horror, she blushed even further. “I know it’s not right,” she said. “But if the girls fail, it’s a difficult for us, later.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, still shocked.
“There is so much paperwork,” she explained, “if the students fail. It’s not good, I know, but teachers do like this.” She shrugged.
After a tense moment during which I could see her awaiting my reaction, I raised my eyebrows and gave her one of my what-will-be-will-be smiles. It was no use arguing: even if I think it’s wrong, what do I know about these things? The whole exam system is so beyond my comprehension that what use is it to fight even this one cog in the system? She and I had already disagreed when I’d tried to get her to agree to let me give them a real oral exam.
“Why don’t we just ask them questions? Like the kind they’d encounter in a real conversation or that I ask them in class?” She’d shaken her head and argued that Sejalben had already told them how we’d testing them on the exam: strict memorization and recitation only.
So, as I sat in my chair and looked up at roll number 40 (otherwise known as Priyanka) in her nicely pressed blue jumper, knitting her fingers together while she looked into the distance and recited “The Rain, The Beautiful Rain” I hoped that perhaps one day someone asked her a question to which she could reply:
“Thunder crashing / rain slashing / brings the rain, the welcome rain!”
Best,
Cat
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Obamarama
Dear dedicated reader,
The Obama-fever has reached all the way to our village where everyone wants to stop me and congratulate me on the ascension of our new president. “Obama, yeah, he is good man,” Sagar, one particularly outspoken student in my Spoken English class, commented yesterday while making the Gujarati sign of approval, interrupting an activity that had nothing to do with the current president or his personal merits.
“Uh, thanks for that contribution, Sagar,” I said dryly while trying to get the class back on track. His strangely timed comment merely reflects the prevailing mood around here: Obama is featured daily on the front of both English and Gujarati newspapers and while I’m sure the level of coverage is nowhere near the frenzy that it must be at home, the hunger for knowledge about this man has led the students and our friends in Kadod to stop and grill us for information. One student even stole my biography of Michelle Obama off my desk when I wasn’t looking so he could take it home and show the pictures to his family.
As I walked into my 11th standard class on the day after the inauguration which Melissa and I watched from the comfort of the principal’s office (which in one corner conveniently houses a big screen TV under a crocheted dust-cover), I could hear the murmurs of the seemingly hallowed name under the breath of the students. The class clown, Bhavin, suddenly shouted, “Teacher! OBAMA!”
I smiled at him. “Yes,” I said after I reached the front of the class and the students had finished their ritual “Good morning teacher” and sat down, “it is the beginning of a new age in America, I guess.”
Earlier in the month, we had spent some class time diverging away from the fascinating topics the curriculum has to offer, such as excerpts from a 12th century poem and a nonsensical story about a boy with a stammer who enters a debate competition, in order to read an op-ed from The Indian Express comparing America and India’s human rights legacy and history of minorities in political offices. India came out very favorably in the comparison and so I thought it would be nice amidst all the hype for the students to read something to make them proud of their own country. Along the way, I had to explain the history of slavery in the US, the Jim Crow laws and the current racial dynamics of the US in English, none of which I’m sure was faithfully translated into student understanding, but the students did have some thoughtfully worded opinions to express about the subject after we finished the reading and so all in all it seemed like a worthy exercise.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons that the students seemed particularly excited to discuss the inauguration speech. “Did you watch?” I asked them, incredulously
“Yes, ma’am,” a good portion of the room replied. I was surprised. So many of these young men and women cared about the swearing in of this president on the other side of the world?
“And you understood it?” I continued, trying not to sound dubious.
“Not all, ma’am. Ma’am, please explain?” They looked at me pleadingly.
And so I found myself scrapping my lesson and being charged with the daunting task of making accessible to these students the eloquent words of our new president. The students, prone to chatting and side conversation, sat very silently with an intense kind of gaze as I tried to remember his speech and make it understandable to them point by point. I left out some things which had little do with Kadod, but overall, they seemed to catch the meaning.
The maturity with which the 11th standard students approached gaining knowledge could not be expected from my ninth standard boys, who, aside from stealing my books when I am not looking and passing them around excitedly to look at pictures of Sasha and Malia, have become obsessed with the similarity between “Obama” and “Osama”.
“Obama! Osama! Teacher!” They shouted at me as they hung around after school waiting for our Spoken English class to begin.
“Teacher,” one student with a relatively high level of Spoken English said, “Obama is a killed Osama.”
“Uh, what?” I said, puzzled.
“Obama Osama is killed,” he tried again. Try saying that five times fast.
Hitting him on the arm, his friend called him an idiot in Gujarati and tried again on his behalf. “Teacher, Osama say he kill to Obama.”
“Osama wants to kill Obama,” I repeated, becoming ever more confused. “Or Obama wants to kill Osama?”
“Ah, yes teacher,” they nodded, “like this.”
“Well,” I replied with a shrug, “I guess that makes sense.”
The obsession has escalated to the point where it is present even in our Spoken English dialogues. Our unit this week is focusing on formal/informal speech and polite ways of saying things versus impolite ways. I asked the boys to create a dialogue in which a famous person is invited to their house and they serve them tea and breakfast.
After much huddled whispering and a refusal to show me their Spoken English notebooks before performing, I and the rest of the Spoken English class were subjected to the following:
Student 1: (pretends to knock on door)
Student 2: Ah, come in, is it you, Osama?
Student 1: (enters, wearing two handkerchiefs tied around his face and head so only his eyes are visible) Oh yes, it is me, Obama.
Student 2: Please sit down. May I offer you some chai or chocolates?
Student 1: No, please. No chai.
Student 2: You are come to visit me. Is dangerous. You bring a pistol?
Student 1: No pistol I bring. This time.
Student 2: You wanted man.
Student 1: Yes, I am a wanted man. Okay, I go now.
Student 2: Okay, goodbye Osama.
Student 1: Goodbye, Obama!
Fin.
Let’s hope such a Dr. Seuss-esque meeting never occurs.
Best,
Cat
The Obama-fever has reached all the way to our village where everyone wants to stop me and congratulate me on the ascension of our new president. “Obama, yeah, he is good man,” Sagar, one particularly outspoken student in my Spoken English class, commented yesterday while making the Gujarati sign of approval, interrupting an activity that had nothing to do with the current president or his personal merits.
“Uh, thanks for that contribution, Sagar,” I said dryly while trying to get the class back on track. His strangely timed comment merely reflects the prevailing mood around here: Obama is featured daily on the front of both English and Gujarati newspapers and while I’m sure the level of coverage is nowhere near the frenzy that it must be at home, the hunger for knowledge about this man has led the students and our friends in Kadod to stop and grill us for information. One student even stole my biography of Michelle Obama off my desk when I wasn’t looking so he could take it home and show the pictures to his family.
As I walked into my 11th standard class on the day after the inauguration which Melissa and I watched from the comfort of the principal’s office (which in one corner conveniently houses a big screen TV under a crocheted dust-cover), I could hear the murmurs of the seemingly hallowed name under the breath of the students. The class clown, Bhavin, suddenly shouted, “Teacher! OBAMA!”
I smiled at him. “Yes,” I said after I reached the front of the class and the students had finished their ritual “Good morning teacher” and sat down, “it is the beginning of a new age in America, I guess.”
Earlier in the month, we had spent some class time diverging away from the fascinating topics the curriculum has to offer, such as excerpts from a 12th century poem and a nonsensical story about a boy with a stammer who enters a debate competition, in order to read an op-ed from The Indian Express comparing America and India’s human rights legacy and history of minorities in political offices. India came out very favorably in the comparison and so I thought it would be nice amidst all the hype for the students to read something to make them proud of their own country. Along the way, I had to explain the history of slavery in the US, the Jim Crow laws and the current racial dynamics of the US in English, none of which I’m sure was faithfully translated into student understanding, but the students did have some thoughtfully worded opinions to express about the subject after we finished the reading and so all in all it seemed like a worthy exercise.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons that the students seemed particularly excited to discuss the inauguration speech. “Did you watch?” I asked them, incredulously
“Yes, ma’am,” a good portion of the room replied. I was surprised. So many of these young men and women cared about the swearing in of this president on the other side of the world?
“And you understood it?” I continued, trying not to sound dubious.
“Not all, ma’am. Ma’am, please explain?” They looked at me pleadingly.
And so I found myself scrapping my lesson and being charged with the daunting task of making accessible to these students the eloquent words of our new president. The students, prone to chatting and side conversation, sat very silently with an intense kind of gaze as I tried to remember his speech and make it understandable to them point by point. I left out some things which had little do with Kadod, but overall, they seemed to catch the meaning.
The maturity with which the 11th standard students approached gaining knowledge could not be expected from my ninth standard boys, who, aside from stealing my books when I am not looking and passing them around excitedly to look at pictures of Sasha and Malia, have become obsessed with the similarity between “Obama” and “Osama”.
“Obama! Osama! Teacher!” They shouted at me as they hung around after school waiting for our Spoken English class to begin.
“Teacher,” one student with a relatively high level of Spoken English said, “Obama is a killed Osama.”
“Uh, what?” I said, puzzled.
“Obama Osama is killed,” he tried again. Try saying that five times fast.
Hitting him on the arm, his friend called him an idiot in Gujarati and tried again on his behalf. “Teacher, Osama say he kill to Obama.”
“Osama wants to kill Obama,” I repeated, becoming ever more confused. “Or Obama wants to kill Osama?”
“Ah, yes teacher,” they nodded, “like this.”
“Well,” I replied with a shrug, “I guess that makes sense.”
The obsession has escalated to the point where it is present even in our Spoken English dialogues. Our unit this week is focusing on formal/informal speech and polite ways of saying things versus impolite ways. I asked the boys to create a dialogue in which a famous person is invited to their house and they serve them tea and breakfast.
After much huddled whispering and a refusal to show me their Spoken English notebooks before performing, I and the rest of the Spoken English class were subjected to the following:
Student 1: (pretends to knock on door)
Student 2: Ah, come in, is it you, Osama?
Student 1: (enters, wearing two handkerchiefs tied around his face and head so only his eyes are visible) Oh yes, it is me, Obama.
Student 2: Please sit down. May I offer you some chai or chocolates?
Student 1: No, please. No chai.
Student 2: You are come to visit me. Is dangerous. You bring a pistol?
Student 1: No pistol I bring. This time.
Student 2: You wanted man.
Student 1: Yes, I am a wanted man. Okay, I go now.
Student 2: Okay, goodbye Osama.
Student 1: Goodbye, Obama!
Fin.
Let’s hope such a Dr. Seuss-esque meeting never occurs.
Best,
Cat
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Visit to the Ivory Tower
Dear dedicated reader,
A ten minute walk, a 2 hour bus ride and a half hour rickshaw ride from the Surat bus station led Tabussum (our co-teacher), Melissa and me to the desk of the Surat University Library yesterday. A supposed academic power-house of Gujarat, the campus itself was made up of the same concrete style buildings that characterize the prevalent architectural style here (reminiscent of the riot-proof American university buildings constructed on many campuses in the 1970s). The campus had an unkempt feel: the gardens were slightly overgrown, the paving stones askew, the piles of rubble from various construction projects spilling out into the campus pathways. It may only have felt that way because of the emptiness: no students could be seen anywhere, likely because of Monday’s being Republic Day (the anniversary of the day that the Indian Constitution was adopted) and thus a long weekend.
Outside the library on the steps, two middle-aged men sat idly reading Gujarati periodicals. As we approached, they glanced at us over the tops of their newspapers carelessly, then, did a double-take and put their newspapers down. As we moved to walk past them, they held out a hand to stop Tabussum.
“Where are you going?” They asked her in Gujarati with a look of concern.
The purpose of our visit was to become visiting members of the Surat University Library. Recently, I’d been expressing my desire to Tabussum to conduct some research on teacher training approaches in India and she had taken the initiative to ask her former professor in her B.Ed program (the equivalent of a certificate program in the US) to recommend some books and how we could obtain them. This type of initiative is one of the things I appreciate most about Tabussum: unlike many of the other teachers at the school, she has an avid interest in her own continuing education. “I have an interest in wanting to learn EVERYTHING,” she once told me. “I feel that I just don’t know very much.” She laments the few opportunities that there are at the school for her to improve her practice and it was because of this that she brought our attention to a small newspaper clipping about a research conference taking place in Ahmedabad in a few weeks on approaches to English language teaching.
“We will go, I think, if the principal gives us his permission?” She asked excitedly.
“Definitely!” I said. “The Foundation would love for us to attend a conference of this type.”
“But” she said fretfully knitting her fingers, “what if the principal does not gives us the money for the fee? Then I think we will pay with our own money, all right?”
“Tabussum,” I said reassuringly, “don’t worry about it. I’m sure the Foundation will be interested in the conference and want to sponsor the fees.”
“Even for me?” She said dubiously.
“Especially for you,” I replied with a smile. As it turned out, the principal did have some objections to our attending a research conference though the Foundation was able to smooth things over in this regard and now all the remains is for us to write a research paper to present. Thus, a trip to the University library and as an added bonus, a meeting with Tabussum’s “sir” as she calls her former B.Ed professor who is now the head of the M.Ed program at Surat University.
Tabussum gave a much shortened version of the following account to the man holding out his hand to stop us on the steps of the library. He listened with a skeptical expression and took up his newspaper again, a sign which we took as meaning that we’d gained admission into the hallowed hall.
As we entered the high-ceilinged room, I glanced around at the bare walls and the few small glass cases that housed announcements and thought about the differences between this and the Rockefeller Library which I worked at as an undergraduate. There was nothing that I recognized as the collegiate atmosphere here, but hopefully that didn’t mean there were no useful books. I could see behind the wooden desk at the opposite end of the room that the doorway opened up into a large, dark room with shelf upon shelf of books. We began to walk towards the stacks when we were stopped by the man behind the front desk.
“Where are you going?” A favorite question, it would seem.
Tabussum explained why we were there, to take a visiting membership with the library. The man began to shake his head violently.
“It is the 4th Saturday of the month,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
I looked at him blankly, unsure what this information had to do with anything, but Tabussum slapped her forehead in a gesture indicating some kind of slip of the mind. She turned to look at me and said, with some embarrassment, “It is the fourth Saturday of the month, Miss Cat. I forgot it.”
“And?” I prompted, still looking confused.
“We cannot take membership on the 4th Saturday of the month. Or the 2nd Saturday.”
“Oh, well… of course,” I said mildly. “That makes perfect sense.” I turned to the man behind the counter. “When is the library open?” I asked him, thinking perhaps we could come back another time.
“It’s open every day, from 9 am to 9 pm,” he told me in halting English.
“I see,” I said. “Every day?”
“Yes.”
“Saturdays too?”
“Oh no, ma’am. On Saturdays it is open from 11 am to 5 pm.”
“And Sundays?”
“The same time as Saturdays, ma’am,” he answered quickly.
I kept myself from pointing out the obvious contradiction. “I see,” was all I said. It turned out that we actually could not take membership on any Saturday because even if the man who usually processes members was there, he would be busy with other work. I agreed in as unironic tone as I could manage that naturally of course that would be the case. We left feeling defeated to make our way over to see Tabussum’s former professor.
Her professor’s office was located in a similarly box-like concrete building up a flight of dusty stairs, down a long, bare hall that opened into chipped paint classrooms on either side. At the end of the hall, there was a temporary wall dividing a larger room into three small shoe-box sized offices, in which plastic chairs and a plastic table had been placed. Seated behind this plastic table covered in papers, was Tabussum’s sir.
Tabussum had spent many words on telling us about how inspiring she found Professor Ansari in college and it was easy to see why. Tall, with a sharp, angled face and somewhat dark skin, he extended a breezy hand to greet us and with a charming smile motioned for us to sit down. His manner made one feel immediately at ease and I could see why Tabussum reported that he had been all the students’ favorites.
I wasted no time in asking him the questions about his M.Ed program that I had been thinking about on hearing that we were to have this meeting. I peppered him with questions about the course of the program, the details, the students, the expectations. He dutifully outlined their program and pointed me to a number of resources where I could learn more. One of the more interesting things on which he commented was how he had to conduct himself with the students.
“Here in India,” he said, “the teacher is held up like a kind of god.” He shook his head. “I have to watch my conduct all the time. If I were to sit in my office here and smoke a cigarette, it would be something like front page news. So, I am careful, especially with my students. You see,” he continued, leaning forward, “I can only meet with my students in large groups. Because, if I were to meet with them in small groups, people might suspect me of something.”
“Partiality?” I supplied.
“No, not partiality, exactly. But rather, some special,” he paused, “relationship. You understand?” I nodded. “Even if I am meeting in this office with a student one on one with the door open, there will be some talk of oh, what is he doing there with that student. So, I only advise them in groups of five and must be careful to conduct myself appropriately. Because here,” he said, “people cannot envision the type of professional relationship between student and teacher that you have in the US. If there is a boy and a girl, they will talk because they can only see them as lovers.” He sighed. “It’s not good.”
Tabussum nodded emphatically and agreed that it was for this reason that they had to keep their association as former student and teacher a secret. To hear them describe it made me harken back to my first days here when the principal described the “gap” that should be there between students and teachers. It seemed that it operated on all levels.
Despite our disappointment about not becoming library members, the afternoon was well spent in the company of Professor Ansari and he offered to mail us the forms that were necessary in order to take membership of the library. As we left the university and walked past the weedy gardens and piles of construction materials, I couldn’t help but think how fortunate Melissa and I were to have a co-teacher like Tabussum. I still don’t know what exactly it’s been about her life experience that has made her so much more open than the other teachers, but I suspect that this professor has had something to do with it.
How many other students or even fellow educators are missing out on such personal inspiration because of the concerns that Professor Ansari detailed before? One has to wonder...
Best,
Cat
A ten minute walk, a 2 hour bus ride and a half hour rickshaw ride from the Surat bus station led Tabussum (our co-teacher), Melissa and me to the desk of the Surat University Library yesterday. A supposed academic power-house of Gujarat, the campus itself was made up of the same concrete style buildings that characterize the prevalent architectural style here (reminiscent of the riot-proof American university buildings constructed on many campuses in the 1970s). The campus had an unkempt feel: the gardens were slightly overgrown, the paving stones askew, the piles of rubble from various construction projects spilling out into the campus pathways. It may only have felt that way because of the emptiness: no students could be seen anywhere, likely because of Monday’s being Republic Day (the anniversary of the day that the Indian Constitution was adopted) and thus a long weekend.
Outside the library on the steps, two middle-aged men sat idly reading Gujarati periodicals. As we approached, they glanced at us over the tops of their newspapers carelessly, then, did a double-take and put their newspapers down. As we moved to walk past them, they held out a hand to stop Tabussum.
“Where are you going?” They asked her in Gujarati with a look of concern.
The purpose of our visit was to become visiting members of the Surat University Library. Recently, I’d been expressing my desire to Tabussum to conduct some research on teacher training approaches in India and she had taken the initiative to ask her former professor in her B.Ed program (the equivalent of a certificate program in the US) to recommend some books and how we could obtain them. This type of initiative is one of the things I appreciate most about Tabussum: unlike many of the other teachers at the school, she has an avid interest in her own continuing education. “I have an interest in wanting to learn EVERYTHING,” she once told me. “I feel that I just don’t know very much.” She laments the few opportunities that there are at the school for her to improve her practice and it was because of this that she brought our attention to a small newspaper clipping about a research conference taking place in Ahmedabad in a few weeks on approaches to English language teaching.
“We will go, I think, if the principal gives us his permission?” She asked excitedly.
“Definitely!” I said. “The Foundation would love for us to attend a conference of this type.”
“But” she said fretfully knitting her fingers, “what if the principal does not gives us the money for the fee? Then I think we will pay with our own money, all right?”
“Tabussum,” I said reassuringly, “don’t worry about it. I’m sure the Foundation will be interested in the conference and want to sponsor the fees.”
“Even for me?” She said dubiously.
“Especially for you,” I replied with a smile. As it turned out, the principal did have some objections to our attending a research conference though the Foundation was able to smooth things over in this regard and now all the remains is for us to write a research paper to present. Thus, a trip to the University library and as an added bonus, a meeting with Tabussum’s “sir” as she calls her former B.Ed professor who is now the head of the M.Ed program at Surat University.
Tabussum gave a much shortened version of the following account to the man holding out his hand to stop us on the steps of the library. He listened with a skeptical expression and took up his newspaper again, a sign which we took as meaning that we’d gained admission into the hallowed hall.
As we entered the high-ceilinged room, I glanced around at the bare walls and the few small glass cases that housed announcements and thought about the differences between this and the Rockefeller Library which I worked at as an undergraduate. There was nothing that I recognized as the collegiate atmosphere here, but hopefully that didn’t mean there were no useful books. I could see behind the wooden desk at the opposite end of the room that the doorway opened up into a large, dark room with shelf upon shelf of books. We began to walk towards the stacks when we were stopped by the man behind the front desk.
“Where are you going?” A favorite question, it would seem.
Tabussum explained why we were there, to take a visiting membership with the library. The man began to shake his head violently.
“It is the 4th Saturday of the month,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
I looked at him blankly, unsure what this information had to do with anything, but Tabussum slapped her forehead in a gesture indicating some kind of slip of the mind. She turned to look at me and said, with some embarrassment, “It is the fourth Saturday of the month, Miss Cat. I forgot it.”
“And?” I prompted, still looking confused.
“We cannot take membership on the 4th Saturday of the month. Or the 2nd Saturday.”
“Oh, well… of course,” I said mildly. “That makes perfect sense.” I turned to the man behind the counter. “When is the library open?” I asked him, thinking perhaps we could come back another time.
“It’s open every day, from 9 am to 9 pm,” he told me in halting English.
“I see,” I said. “Every day?”
“Yes.”
“Saturdays too?”
“Oh no, ma’am. On Saturdays it is open from 11 am to 5 pm.”
“And Sundays?”
“The same time as Saturdays, ma’am,” he answered quickly.
I kept myself from pointing out the obvious contradiction. “I see,” was all I said. It turned out that we actually could not take membership on any Saturday because even if the man who usually processes members was there, he would be busy with other work. I agreed in as unironic tone as I could manage that naturally of course that would be the case. We left feeling defeated to make our way over to see Tabussum’s former professor.
Her professor’s office was located in a similarly box-like concrete building up a flight of dusty stairs, down a long, bare hall that opened into chipped paint classrooms on either side. At the end of the hall, there was a temporary wall dividing a larger room into three small shoe-box sized offices, in which plastic chairs and a plastic table had been placed. Seated behind this plastic table covered in papers, was Tabussum’s sir.
Tabussum had spent many words on telling us about how inspiring she found Professor Ansari in college and it was easy to see why. Tall, with a sharp, angled face and somewhat dark skin, he extended a breezy hand to greet us and with a charming smile motioned for us to sit down. His manner made one feel immediately at ease and I could see why Tabussum reported that he had been all the students’ favorites.
I wasted no time in asking him the questions about his M.Ed program that I had been thinking about on hearing that we were to have this meeting. I peppered him with questions about the course of the program, the details, the students, the expectations. He dutifully outlined their program and pointed me to a number of resources where I could learn more. One of the more interesting things on which he commented was how he had to conduct himself with the students.
“Here in India,” he said, “the teacher is held up like a kind of god.” He shook his head. “I have to watch my conduct all the time. If I were to sit in my office here and smoke a cigarette, it would be something like front page news. So, I am careful, especially with my students. You see,” he continued, leaning forward, “I can only meet with my students in large groups. Because, if I were to meet with them in small groups, people might suspect me of something.”
“Partiality?” I supplied.
“No, not partiality, exactly. But rather, some special,” he paused, “relationship. You understand?” I nodded. “Even if I am meeting in this office with a student one on one with the door open, there will be some talk of oh, what is he doing there with that student. So, I only advise them in groups of five and must be careful to conduct myself appropriately. Because here,” he said, “people cannot envision the type of professional relationship between student and teacher that you have in the US. If there is a boy and a girl, they will talk because they can only see them as lovers.” He sighed. “It’s not good.”
Tabussum nodded emphatically and agreed that it was for this reason that they had to keep their association as former student and teacher a secret. To hear them describe it made me harken back to my first days here when the principal described the “gap” that should be there between students and teachers. It seemed that it operated on all levels.
Despite our disappointment about not becoming library members, the afternoon was well spent in the company of Professor Ansari and he offered to mail us the forms that were necessary in order to take membership of the library. As we left the university and walked past the weedy gardens and piles of construction materials, I couldn’t help but think how fortunate Melissa and I were to have a co-teacher like Tabussum. I still don’t know what exactly it’s been about her life experience that has made her so much more open than the other teachers, but I suspect that this professor has had something to do with it.
How many other students or even fellow educators are missing out on such personal inspiration because of the concerns that Professor Ansari detailed before? One has to wonder...
Best,
Cat
Friday, January 23, 2009
Narendra's Flower Girl
Dear dedicated reader,
A week ago, we were looking at the face of Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, on the kites that we were flying over the roofs of Kadod. Today, we were looking into his face directly while shaking his hand in front of 50,000 people.
How did this come to pass? Even I am still wondering, to use an Indian-English turn of phrase. From what Melissa and I can piece together retroactively, a strange chain of events seem to have set each other off and aligned perfectly to produce this moment.
The chain begins last week with Mayuri, the daughter of a friend of the principal’s who recently has married an NRI from the US and will be moving there in a matter of months. She wanted to practice her English and hang out, we needed to run errands and so we decided to combine the two into an afternoon in Bardoli that, because of Mayuri’s easy-going personality, was a huge success.
We were on our way back to the bus stop when Sureshbhai, the President of the school who previously took us on a tour of his farmhouse (a tour best remembered for the part where he demonstrated how to flush his western style toilet) saw us and offered to give us a ride home. Piling into his rather luxurious car, he insisted that he buy us some bananas before returning to Kadod. We protested: it really wasn’t necessary to get us bananas, but he strongly insisted and wore our protesting down. As he negotiated with the banana seller out of the car window, he caught sight of a poster just behind her head. He pointed at it.
“You see that?” he said to us in his shaky English. “That is Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat.”
“Ah yes,” I said, “I’ve heard of him.” And had I heard of him. My friends from my time in college in Delhi had compared him to an Indian Hitler. Representing the BJP, or Hindu nationalist party of India, his name was widely linked with a series of religious riots that took place early in his term as Chief Minister. He’d been blamed for inciting a lot of the violence towards innocent Muslim families at this time which some called a genocide. While this is a rather extreme view, I had also heard Tabussum, our Muslim co-teacher, talk about how he “was not good for her community.” However, aside from Tabussum, on probing into the politics of families in the area, Hindu and Muslim alike, I found that they took a very positive view of the Chief Minister’s time in office.
“He is all about progress, you can say,” Sejalben, the principal’s daughter-in-law, told me when I asked her about it. “He has so much self-confidence.”
“He is never married,” Daybalben told me, “because he is married to his work. No wife, no kids, nothing to distract him from the government and also no one for his enemies.”
Needless to say, when Sureshbhai told us that he was coming for the celebration of the birthday of Subash Chandra Bose (an Indian freedom fighter) to Haripura, a very small village one kilometer away from Kadod, my interest was piqued. I wasn’t the only one. All anyone could talk about this week (besides the inauguration of Barack Obama) was the imminent arrival of the Chief Minister and the construction of a helipad in the open field next to the petrol station. It was being said that as many as 100,000 people would attend from all over Southern Gujarat.
Melissa’s and my loose plans to attend were contingent on the rumors of school closing early on that day being true. We’d heard this rumor floating around the school and it was confirmed later in the week by not the principal, but rather by Darshanbhai and his father who run the local phone booth and have no children in Kadod High School. Once again, I found myself puzzled by the circuitous route by which Melissa and I receive information.
The tailor, Kamleshbhai, whose shop is across the street from the phone booth, had come over to discuss the CM’s coming and invited us to go with him on his motorbike.
We probably would have too had the principal not called us onto his porch later in the week, smiling broadly at us as we took our seats in the weathered plastic chairs with which we’ve become so familiar during our time here.
“Sureshbhai has called to me,” he began as he rocked gently back and forth from his seat on the porch swing, “and you are to present a bouquet to our Chief Minister, Narendra Modi when he comes at Haripura tomorrow.” Anyone could see his eyes were brimming with excitement at being able to relay this news to us.
For our part, we were completely speechless. “Uh,” I began, trying to give my brain a chance to catch up, “this is such an honor, sir,” I began.
“You will go on the stage and shake his hands!” The principal cut in excitedly and I smiled widely to show that I shared his excitement, though inside my mind had already jumped towards thinking about the thousands of things that could go wrong. How would we hand him a bouquet? Would we have to sit on the stage? What if I dropped the bouquet?
“What should we wear?” was all I could get out.
“Anything you like,” the principal said airily. “You should wear American clothes!”
“Er,” I looked at him, thinking about my closet and the t-shirt and jeans folded there that represented all that was left of my “American” wardrobe, “we can just wear saris, I guess. I mean, we are teachers, after all.”
“As you wish,” the principal said with an amiable head bob. “And if he asks you anything, you say you are from Kadod High School, Kadod, because he will know we are a good school and ours is a good school despite being in a small village and we try very hard and he will want to know how you have come to teach there.”
And hopefully not deport us for violating our visas, I thought to myself. I had never seen the principal so excited; he was practically gushing, pushing his English to its outermost limit in his excitement. “We will definitely mention the high school, if he speaks to us,” I assured him.
“But, he probably will not have time,” the principal warned suddenly, as if coming back to earth. I nodded; knowing Indian ceremony, we would probably be two of fifteen people to present him with bouquets.
The principal told us to be ready at 7:30 am, so in the warming new daylight, we stood on our porch as Sureshbhai’s driver drove in through school gates to pick us up the next day. He hurried us into the car where we were taken to Sureshbhai’s house to be briefed on what we would need to do when presenting the bouquets which were then entrusted to us to be carried into the giant tent on arriving at the event. The bouquets were bulky and lotus shaped as a tribute to the BJP’s emblematic logo. After all the criticism that I had levied at the BJP in my papers in college, I couldn’t help but feel the irony that I would now present a major BJP powerhouse with the logo of his own controversial party.
The security wasn’t as intense as I had expected, though in India security does tend to leave something to be desired (I once traveled from Delhi to Mumbai with a knife in my bag that I had forgotten about and only remembered after disembarking). Three separate police officers ran a metal detecting wand over my bouquet and then with a shrug and the type of strange glance reserved for white people in saris, let us in. The tent itself was a massive affair and surprisingly, air-conditioned. Huge sections were set behind crowd control barriers for women and children to be seated on the ground; behind this, some chairs for men and then a large standing room only area for the overflow. On the sides were couches set up in rows for VIP seating. Carrying our giant bouquets of flowers and with passes pinned to our saris, we qualified (completely undeservedly) for this upgraded cushioning of our behinds. Large screens to simulcast the event had been set up in all sections and though we had a perfectly good view of the stage from our second row seats, a large wall sized screen ensured that we wouldn’t miss a moment of what was promising to be quite a to-do.
Suddenly, my attention was drawn to the simulcast screens as the CM’s helicopter was shown touching down on the newly constructed helipad and he was loaded into a fancily decorated bullock cart to travel to the tent in the same manner that Subash Chandra Bose himself had some sixty years before. It seemed that only a moment passed before he was entering the tent and everyone was standing and cheering. As he raised an arm to the crowd in a gesture that incited more cheers and screams, I felt a dryness in my throat and a familiar pounding resounding in my chest that I haven’t felt since first learning public speaking in high school. Was I nervous? To hand a bunch of flowers to politician? It had suddenly occurred to my subconscious just how much I had heard about the political endeavors of this man and all the scenarios of potential mishap that I’d played out in my head while talking to the principal came rushing back into my mind.
I forced myself to take a breath. He was just another person, I told myself, and besides which he wasn’t even my Chief Minister! Would I get this worked up about meeting Ed Rendell?
We’d been told to follow the lead of Sureshbhai’s son, an NRI from San Diego named Dharmesh who along with his wife who had been more than happy to show us her $15,000 diamond ring in the car while cracking her gum, was presenting a bouquet to the prime minister. After Narendra Modi took a seat, he moved forward toward the staging area and we followed nervously behind him. I almost tripped on my sari as I got up.
Before I knew it, we were climbing the stairs towards the long table on the stage while Modi was sitting with other dignitaries. The silence in the hall as the crowd watched us was overwhelming. As we reached the top of the stairs, I heard the announcer, a youngish women with a silky voice, say into the microphone, “A bouquet from Dharmeshbhai, his wife Debbie, and a bouquet from Spoken English Teachers Miss Melissa and Miss Catharine.”
At the sound of our names, the reign of silence was broken with a large number of voices loudly cheering and whooping from the very back of the hall. As I took my first step forward across the stage, I couldn’t look to see where it had come from, but my mind was suddenly transported back to my high school graduation, taking my first step forward to get my diploma while my family looked on and screamed their support. Actually looking into Narendra Modi’s eyes, shaking his hand, and saying ‘Thank you’ are all a blur to me compared to that cheer, one that didn’t go up for anyone else who came across that stage. It was like a validation; a message from Kadod saying “you’re a part of us now,” and really, that feeling couldn’t be topped.
Best,
Cat
A week ago, we were looking at the face of Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, on the kites that we were flying over the roofs of Kadod. Today, we were looking into his face directly while shaking his hand in front of 50,000 people.
How did this come to pass? Even I am still wondering, to use an Indian-English turn of phrase. From what Melissa and I can piece together retroactively, a strange chain of events seem to have set each other off and aligned perfectly to produce this moment.
The chain begins last week with Mayuri, the daughter of a friend of the principal’s who recently has married an NRI from the US and will be moving there in a matter of months. She wanted to practice her English and hang out, we needed to run errands and so we decided to combine the two into an afternoon in Bardoli that, because of Mayuri’s easy-going personality, was a huge success.
We were on our way back to the bus stop when Sureshbhai, the President of the school who previously took us on a tour of his farmhouse (a tour best remembered for the part where he demonstrated how to flush his western style toilet) saw us and offered to give us a ride home. Piling into his rather luxurious car, he insisted that he buy us some bananas before returning to Kadod. We protested: it really wasn’t necessary to get us bananas, but he strongly insisted and wore our protesting down. As he negotiated with the banana seller out of the car window, he caught sight of a poster just behind her head. He pointed at it.
“You see that?” he said to us in his shaky English. “That is Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat.”
“Ah yes,” I said, “I’ve heard of him.” And had I heard of him. My friends from my time in college in Delhi had compared him to an Indian Hitler. Representing the BJP, or Hindu nationalist party of India, his name was widely linked with a series of religious riots that took place early in his term as Chief Minister. He’d been blamed for inciting a lot of the violence towards innocent Muslim families at this time which some called a genocide. While this is a rather extreme view, I had also heard Tabussum, our Muslim co-teacher, talk about how he “was not good for her community.” However, aside from Tabussum, on probing into the politics of families in the area, Hindu and Muslim alike, I found that they took a very positive view of the Chief Minister’s time in office.
“He is all about progress, you can say,” Sejalben, the principal’s daughter-in-law, told me when I asked her about it. “He has so much self-confidence.”
“He is never married,” Daybalben told me, “because he is married to his work. No wife, no kids, nothing to distract him from the government and also no one for his enemies.”
Needless to say, when Sureshbhai told us that he was coming for the celebration of the birthday of Subash Chandra Bose (an Indian freedom fighter) to Haripura, a very small village one kilometer away from Kadod, my interest was piqued. I wasn’t the only one. All anyone could talk about this week (besides the inauguration of Barack Obama) was the imminent arrival of the Chief Minister and the construction of a helipad in the open field next to the petrol station. It was being said that as many as 100,000 people would attend from all over Southern Gujarat.
Melissa’s and my loose plans to attend were contingent on the rumors of school closing early on that day being true. We’d heard this rumor floating around the school and it was confirmed later in the week by not the principal, but rather by Darshanbhai and his father who run the local phone booth and have no children in Kadod High School. Once again, I found myself puzzled by the circuitous route by which Melissa and I receive information.
The tailor, Kamleshbhai, whose shop is across the street from the phone booth, had come over to discuss the CM’s coming and invited us to go with him on his motorbike.
We probably would have too had the principal not called us onto his porch later in the week, smiling broadly at us as we took our seats in the weathered plastic chairs with which we’ve become so familiar during our time here.
“Sureshbhai has called to me,” he began as he rocked gently back and forth from his seat on the porch swing, “and you are to present a bouquet to our Chief Minister, Narendra Modi when he comes at Haripura tomorrow.” Anyone could see his eyes were brimming with excitement at being able to relay this news to us.
For our part, we were completely speechless. “Uh,” I began, trying to give my brain a chance to catch up, “this is such an honor, sir,” I began.
“You will go on the stage and shake his hands!” The principal cut in excitedly and I smiled widely to show that I shared his excitement, though inside my mind had already jumped towards thinking about the thousands of things that could go wrong. How would we hand him a bouquet? Would we have to sit on the stage? What if I dropped the bouquet?
“What should we wear?” was all I could get out.
“Anything you like,” the principal said airily. “You should wear American clothes!”
“Er,” I looked at him, thinking about my closet and the t-shirt and jeans folded there that represented all that was left of my “American” wardrobe, “we can just wear saris, I guess. I mean, we are teachers, after all.”
“As you wish,” the principal said with an amiable head bob. “And if he asks you anything, you say you are from Kadod High School, Kadod, because he will know we are a good school and ours is a good school despite being in a small village and we try very hard and he will want to know how you have come to teach there.”
And hopefully not deport us for violating our visas, I thought to myself. I had never seen the principal so excited; he was practically gushing, pushing his English to its outermost limit in his excitement. “We will definitely mention the high school, if he speaks to us,” I assured him.
“But, he probably will not have time,” the principal warned suddenly, as if coming back to earth. I nodded; knowing Indian ceremony, we would probably be two of fifteen people to present him with bouquets.
The principal told us to be ready at 7:30 am, so in the warming new daylight, we stood on our porch as Sureshbhai’s driver drove in through school gates to pick us up the next day. He hurried us into the car where we were taken to Sureshbhai’s house to be briefed on what we would need to do when presenting the bouquets which were then entrusted to us to be carried into the giant tent on arriving at the event. The bouquets were bulky and lotus shaped as a tribute to the BJP’s emblematic logo. After all the criticism that I had levied at the BJP in my papers in college, I couldn’t help but feel the irony that I would now present a major BJP powerhouse with the logo of his own controversial party.
The security wasn’t as intense as I had expected, though in India security does tend to leave something to be desired (I once traveled from Delhi to Mumbai with a knife in my bag that I had forgotten about and only remembered after disembarking). Three separate police officers ran a metal detecting wand over my bouquet and then with a shrug and the type of strange glance reserved for white people in saris, let us in. The tent itself was a massive affair and surprisingly, air-conditioned. Huge sections were set behind crowd control barriers for women and children to be seated on the ground; behind this, some chairs for men and then a large standing room only area for the overflow. On the sides were couches set up in rows for VIP seating. Carrying our giant bouquets of flowers and with passes pinned to our saris, we qualified (completely undeservedly) for this upgraded cushioning of our behinds. Large screens to simulcast the event had been set up in all sections and though we had a perfectly good view of the stage from our second row seats, a large wall sized screen ensured that we wouldn’t miss a moment of what was promising to be quite a to-do.
Suddenly, my attention was drawn to the simulcast screens as the CM’s helicopter was shown touching down on the newly constructed helipad and he was loaded into a fancily decorated bullock cart to travel to the tent in the same manner that Subash Chandra Bose himself had some sixty years before. It seemed that only a moment passed before he was entering the tent and everyone was standing and cheering. As he raised an arm to the crowd in a gesture that incited more cheers and screams, I felt a dryness in my throat and a familiar pounding resounding in my chest that I haven’t felt since first learning public speaking in high school. Was I nervous? To hand a bunch of flowers to politician? It had suddenly occurred to my subconscious just how much I had heard about the political endeavors of this man and all the scenarios of potential mishap that I’d played out in my head while talking to the principal came rushing back into my mind.
I forced myself to take a breath. He was just another person, I told myself, and besides which he wasn’t even my Chief Minister! Would I get this worked up about meeting Ed Rendell?
We’d been told to follow the lead of Sureshbhai’s son, an NRI from San Diego named Dharmesh who along with his wife who had been more than happy to show us her $15,000 diamond ring in the car while cracking her gum, was presenting a bouquet to the prime minister. After Narendra Modi took a seat, he moved forward toward the staging area and we followed nervously behind him. I almost tripped on my sari as I got up.
Before I knew it, we were climbing the stairs towards the long table on the stage while Modi was sitting with other dignitaries. The silence in the hall as the crowd watched us was overwhelming. As we reached the top of the stairs, I heard the announcer, a youngish women with a silky voice, say into the microphone, “A bouquet from Dharmeshbhai, his wife Debbie, and a bouquet from Spoken English Teachers Miss Melissa and Miss Catharine.”
At the sound of our names, the reign of silence was broken with a large number of voices loudly cheering and whooping from the very back of the hall. As I took my first step forward across the stage, I couldn’t look to see where it had come from, but my mind was suddenly transported back to my high school graduation, taking my first step forward to get my diploma while my family looked on and screamed their support. Actually looking into Narendra Modi’s eyes, shaking his hand, and saying ‘Thank you’ are all a blur to me compared to that cheer, one that didn’t go up for anyone else who came across that stage. It was like a validation; a message from Kadod saying “you’re a part of us now,” and really, that feeling couldn’t be topped.
Best,
Cat
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Back in Action
Dear dedicated reader,
School has begun again and after not wearing a sari in so many days, it is surprisingly pleasant to be back in one again. I forget sometimes that it is still shocking for those outside of the school to see us wear them: for Melissa and I, the wrapping and wearing process has become as second nature as brushing our teeth. It occurred to me recently while I was riding my bike through town yesterday afternoon that we still aren’t the everyday fixtures in Kadod that we somehow hoped we’d become. For any family who lives farther from the school than a five minute walk, they rarely see us on any regular basis and our appearance is still, for them, fodder for comment and occasionally giggles and stares.
For the students and teachers, however, our presence has become simple and unremarkable fact. I had hoped that this meant for the English teachers that some of the initial intimidation factor had gone, but in this it turns out I would be wrong.
“Rashmikaben,” I found myself asking one of the 8th standard English teachers in the staff room yesterday, “I have a question about the 9th standard exam paper.”
The students second set of exams are school exams in the sense that they are made by teachers in the school as opposed to their annual exam which is made by the government education board and taken at the end of the year. On the surface, this sounds remarkably like a regular U.S. system of trimester based exams; however –
“Yes,” she said, looking unsettled and quickly ruffling around in her massive pile of papers to retrieve the exam in question which she had herself had written.
“Oh, that’s okay it’s not necessary- “ I tried to put her at ease and let her know it was really a simple -
“What is your question?” She continued, cutting me off anxiously after locating the paper.
“Well,” I began, feeling somewhat anxious now myself, “I reviewed the paper answers with 9B (one of the sections I take) yesterday and the girls had some questions about certain answers which seemed all right to me, given the question.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Is this about the ‘snacks’ question?”
The 9th standard exam consists of a number of different sections. First, there is reading comprehension in which the students are given a passage that they have read during the trimester about which they answer some simple open response or multiple choice questions. Here is an example from the most recent exam:
Q-1: ‘Experiment’ means:
a) test b) trial c) judgment
Needless to say, I was scratching my head as the girls asked me, “But ma’am, is it a or b?”
The second part of the exam is a postage stamp sized picture which has been made grainy by the photocopier. In it, one can vaguely discern that some children are outside of the school. Some of the children in the background play on a playground and some in the foreground are eating something out of a tin. A paragraph describing the picture is provided and the students must fill in the appropriate blanks. It was about this exercise (which is alluded to nowhere in the curriculum) that I had a question:
“Well, yes, it is actually about the snacks question,” I said carefully. “You see, I was wondering if you were taking multiple answers for that question.”
The question was the following sentence. “The children are eating ______.”
Rashmikaben looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand,” she said.
I tried again, using a simpler sentence structure. “Is only snacks correct?” I asked.
“The answer is snacks,” she told me in English. She looked at me to see if this had satisfied me but seeing my hesitation she became frustrated. “I can’t explain in English,” she told me honestly.
“It’s okay, feel free to speak in Hindi,” I said.
“You see,” she began, “in the question, they are looking for what type of food, yes? So the students cannot answer breakfast because that is what you eat in the morning, or lunch, because that is the food of the afternoon and dinner is the food of night. So the students are eating this during their school free time, so the answer must be ‘snacks’.”
“But,” I asked, “how do you know what time of day it is from this picture?” The students could have been eating this during the designated long break at the school which would make ‘lunch’ the associated word in their minds.
“You don’t,” she said, “that’s why it must be snacks.”
“I, uh, see,” I said, though I did not. I thought about all the times that I had been offered ‘breakfast’ in Kadod even at 5, 6, or 7 o’clock at night. The word was an accepted alternative for light snacks and the picture was so ambiguous that the only truly incorrect answer given the context would be dinner.
Rashmikaben looked satisfied with my acceptance of her explanation and went back to her paper grading. I, however, couldn’t help but sit in my plastic chair at our blocky wooden staff room table and continue to ruminate over our conversation. If this was the type of rigidity with which the exams were graded, how could I win? The goal of these so-called assessments does not seem to be to test the students comprehension of English or knowledge of vocabulary since even students who understand the subtleties of the words in question wouldn’t necessarily follow the same logic which I had just been presented with, a logic that at best was one woman’s subjective opinion. How are the students who study hard in this subject being rewarded? With confusing and misleading information based on a teacher’s own confused understanding. Don’t get me started on the fact that she couldn’t justify her own answer in English.
I could go on to detail some other problems that I found in the exam, which was riddled with typos, misleading directions and other such traps, but what would be the point? The real point is that the disconnection between what is taught and what is actually tested is so complete that I’m not sure that even if I were to teach to the test through the syllabus, which I devoted more time doing this semester, that it would have any appreciable difference in student marks. I taught the students the meaning of the word ‘experiment’, spending much more time this trimester focusing on vocabulary acquisition than in the previous trimester. However, never could I have prepared them for a question like the one they found on their exam, which ostensibly is how we are measuring the students’ success in our English-only classes.
Fine. To hell with the exam. I’m just going to keep teaching them English.
Best,
Cat
School has begun again and after not wearing a sari in so many days, it is surprisingly pleasant to be back in one again. I forget sometimes that it is still shocking for those outside of the school to see us wear them: for Melissa and I, the wrapping and wearing process has become as second nature as brushing our teeth. It occurred to me recently while I was riding my bike through town yesterday afternoon that we still aren’t the everyday fixtures in Kadod that we somehow hoped we’d become. For any family who lives farther from the school than a five minute walk, they rarely see us on any regular basis and our appearance is still, for them, fodder for comment and occasionally giggles and stares.
For the students and teachers, however, our presence has become simple and unremarkable fact. I had hoped that this meant for the English teachers that some of the initial intimidation factor had gone, but in this it turns out I would be wrong.
“Rashmikaben,” I found myself asking one of the 8th standard English teachers in the staff room yesterday, “I have a question about the 9th standard exam paper.”
The students second set of exams are school exams in the sense that they are made by teachers in the school as opposed to their annual exam which is made by the government education board and taken at the end of the year. On the surface, this sounds remarkably like a regular U.S. system of trimester based exams; however –
“Yes,” she said, looking unsettled and quickly ruffling around in her massive pile of papers to retrieve the exam in question which she had herself had written.
“Oh, that’s okay it’s not necessary- “ I tried to put her at ease and let her know it was really a simple -
“What is your question?” She continued, cutting me off anxiously after locating the paper.
“Well,” I began, feeling somewhat anxious now myself, “I reviewed the paper answers with 9B (one of the sections I take) yesterday and the girls had some questions about certain answers which seemed all right to me, given the question.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Is this about the ‘snacks’ question?”
The 9th standard exam consists of a number of different sections. First, there is reading comprehension in which the students are given a passage that they have read during the trimester about which they answer some simple open response or multiple choice questions. Here is an example from the most recent exam:
Q-1: ‘Experiment’ means:
a) test b) trial c) judgment
Needless to say, I was scratching my head as the girls asked me, “But ma’am, is it a or b?”
The second part of the exam is a postage stamp sized picture which has been made grainy by the photocopier. In it, one can vaguely discern that some children are outside of the school. Some of the children in the background play on a playground and some in the foreground are eating something out of a tin. A paragraph describing the picture is provided and the students must fill in the appropriate blanks. It was about this exercise (which is alluded to nowhere in the curriculum) that I had a question:
“Well, yes, it is actually about the snacks question,” I said carefully. “You see, I was wondering if you were taking multiple answers for that question.”
The question was the following sentence. “The children are eating ______.”
Rashmikaben looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand,” she said.
I tried again, using a simpler sentence structure. “Is only snacks correct?” I asked.
“The answer is snacks,” she told me in English. She looked at me to see if this had satisfied me but seeing my hesitation she became frustrated. “I can’t explain in English,” she told me honestly.
“It’s okay, feel free to speak in Hindi,” I said.
“You see,” she began, “in the question, they are looking for what type of food, yes? So the students cannot answer breakfast because that is what you eat in the morning, or lunch, because that is the food of the afternoon and dinner is the food of night. So the students are eating this during their school free time, so the answer must be ‘snacks’.”
“But,” I asked, “how do you know what time of day it is from this picture?” The students could have been eating this during the designated long break at the school which would make ‘lunch’ the associated word in their minds.
“You don’t,” she said, “that’s why it must be snacks.”
“I, uh, see,” I said, though I did not. I thought about all the times that I had been offered ‘breakfast’ in Kadod even at 5, 6, or 7 o’clock at night. The word was an accepted alternative for light snacks and the picture was so ambiguous that the only truly incorrect answer given the context would be dinner.
Rashmikaben looked satisfied with my acceptance of her explanation and went back to her paper grading. I, however, couldn’t help but sit in my plastic chair at our blocky wooden staff room table and continue to ruminate over our conversation. If this was the type of rigidity with which the exams were graded, how could I win? The goal of these so-called assessments does not seem to be to test the students comprehension of English or knowledge of vocabulary since even students who understand the subtleties of the words in question wouldn’t necessarily follow the same logic which I had just been presented with, a logic that at best was one woman’s subjective opinion. How are the students who study hard in this subject being rewarded? With confusing and misleading information based on a teacher’s own confused understanding. Don’t get me started on the fact that she couldn’t justify her own answer in English.
I could go on to detail some other problems that I found in the exam, which was riddled with typos, misleading directions and other such traps, but what would be the point? The real point is that the disconnection between what is taught and what is actually tested is so complete that I’m not sure that even if I were to teach to the test through the syllabus, which I devoted more time doing this semester, that it would have any appreciable difference in student marks. I taught the students the meaning of the word ‘experiment’, spending much more time this trimester focusing on vocabulary acquisition than in the previous trimester. However, never could I have prepared them for a question like the one they found on their exam, which ostensibly is how we are measuring the students’ success in our English-only classes.
Fine. To hell with the exam. I’m just going to keep teaching them English.
Best,
Cat
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Let's Go Fly a Kite!
Dear dedicated reader,
I’ll never forget the image: Kadod’s villagers atop their sloping corrugated roofs, faces to the sun squinting into its rays to follow the unpredictable swooping of the lines which they fed from spools in their hands, the ends of which were attached kites of all colors flooding the sky and dancing blithely in the wind. Popular Bollywood tunes pounded from giant black speakers rented for the occasion and hauled up to the top of the houses to amplify the atmosphere.
The festival of Uttarayan is much anticipated: on almost every house tour that we’ve taken in our many visits here in Kadod, this festival has been detailed as we reach the roof terrace or the top floor of the house. “This,” the family giving us the tour will announce with pride, “is where we fly kites in January.” In the morning, the family prepares a special dish of sesame seed ladoos and take these, along with a special berry-like fruit called boor to the temple to offer up to God in celebration of the beginning of the time in which the sun starts moving to the North (I had to look this up on Wikipedia as no one explained this to me). Then, everyone climbs to the topmost turret of their houses and flies kites.
Melissa and I had been awaiting this with the same bitten finger-nail anticipation as our students as we watched every business in town set up an array of multi-colored paper and plastic kites outside their shops. I watched the hostel boys make some careful purchases one day, turning the kites over in their hands before selecting ten or fifteen kites to buy.
“Why so many?” I asked one of them, as he walked away with his precious purchase wrapped in newspaper.
“Teacher,” he said, as if it were obvious, “I need them if the others get cut.”
The seemingly innocent diversion of flying kites from roof tops does indeed have a darker, competitive side and one which the boys and grown men of Kadod gravitate towards: the spools of cord which tether the kites to their adept fliers have been carefully embedded with shards of ground glass such that, when skillfully maneuvered into position by their owners, they can rub against the string of another unsuspecting kite in the sky and break the string, freeing the kite to waft at the mercy of the winds through the air until it finds a final resting place upon a palm frond or in a street gutter. The gutters of the Kadod streets have been running hot pink and deep purple and electric blue leading up to the festival as students take their kite strings to be ‘colored’ by a local expert who sits on the side of the street with a rickety wheel like contraption which reminds me of what you use to wind yarn into a ball before knitting a sweater. He runs the string carefully through pink or blue or purple dye stained fingers, dipping them periodically into a rusted can full of dyed water like a potter at his wheel, turning the white threads the intense shade of the student’s choice.
Our hosts for the festival were Darshanbhai and his family who run the local STD/ISD/PCO booth (the Indian equivalent of the payphone) from which Melissa and I make all our calls overseas. The frequency of our visits have kindled a friendship with this family who speak with us in a mix of English, Hindi and Gujarati. Darshanbhai et al are part of what I like to think of as Kadod’s party squad: a number of younger couples who live on the main bazaar road who make it a point every festival to do things up right. Loud music, dancing, and as Darshanbhai told Melissa in a melodramatic whisper a few days ago when he invited us to the roof party, “drinks” (a definitely hush-hush off the menu item in the dry state of Gujarat).
To my relief, we were not asked to take part in any such illegal activity, though as we carefully made our way onto the roof made of planks of corrugated iron or steel or some such thing this morning, we saw that despite the early hour, the party was in full swing. Men, wives, teenage boys and small kids looked up into the sky as they loosely held running spools or tensely controlled kite strings, causing their kites to dive low to snag an unsuspecting soul on another roof or to fly high above the reach of others' strings.
Darshanbhai, along with his younger brother, took it upon himself to teach us to fly. The first few attempts were soon aborted by the quick cutting string of their next door neighbor who’d cut their kites down as a joke as soon as they’d launched. After a heated but well meaning shouting match between roofs, the neighbor left well enough alone and we were finally able to get some air between us and the kite, which was toned a patriotic shade of orange and green and emblazoned with a picture of a smiling Narendra Modi (Chief Minister of Gujarat).
As soon as the kite was up, Darshan’s brother handed me the spool and instructed me how to hold it so the thread would run easily off and the kite could be let out as far as the wind would take it. Darshan himself controlled the kite’s movements, ducking it down or raising it up or frantically pulling in a jerky, sawing fashion as he went in for the kill on another kite string.
I found myself lulled into a semi-trance regarding the looping and soaring of our kite. Against the back drop of the cloudless blue sky, I had to squint to see which way the string moved and my eyes worked over time trying to pick our kite out of the plethora of moving bodies across the skyline. All of a sudden, I was jolted back to reality by what can described as nothing less than a piercing war-cry followed by a high pitched scream. I looked over to see Darshan and his brother rejoicing with an arm-flailing dance and their young neighbor Parth still screaming his congratulations at a pitch that made my ear beg for mercy.
“We cut a kite! We cut a kite!” They told me hurriedly as they refocused and went in for a second kill. This pattern continued until three, then four, then five, then six kites had been cut, all followed by the requisite screaming. I came to understand through watching this ritual repeated that the whooping was not only self-congratulatory: it also served the important purpose of letting the unfortunate soul (always located on a roof-top within hearing distance) who exactly had been victorious. This was then followed with an affectionate exchange of trash talk as the loser reached for the next kite in his arsenal.
Then, all of a sudden, our kite began to drop. We pulled in the slack in the hope that we could jerk it back into the air, but as we frantically tried, I noticed a similar phenomenon across all of the roofs in Kadod. That was when it hit me: the wind, fickle as it was, was dying. The collapse of the kites was valiantly fought as I watched men and boys try for the next two hours to try and get their kites back up in the air; however, their efforts were in vain and eventually they turned their energy towards shouting between roofs and dancing wildly.
When darkness set in, the dancing didn’t stop, but Melissa and I decided it was time to head home. Our kites, unflown as they were, were still intact, waiting for another day when we will climb to the roof our humble guesthouse and attempt to make them air-worthy.
Best,
Cat
I’ll never forget the image: Kadod’s villagers atop their sloping corrugated roofs, faces to the sun squinting into its rays to follow the unpredictable swooping of the lines which they fed from spools in their hands, the ends of which were attached kites of all colors flooding the sky and dancing blithely in the wind. Popular Bollywood tunes pounded from giant black speakers rented for the occasion and hauled up to the top of the houses to amplify the atmosphere.
The festival of Uttarayan is much anticipated: on almost every house tour that we’ve taken in our many visits here in Kadod, this festival has been detailed as we reach the roof terrace or the top floor of the house. “This,” the family giving us the tour will announce with pride, “is where we fly kites in January.” In the morning, the family prepares a special dish of sesame seed ladoos and take these, along with a special berry-like fruit called boor to the temple to offer up to God in celebration of the beginning of the time in which the sun starts moving to the North (I had to look this up on Wikipedia as no one explained this to me). Then, everyone climbs to the topmost turret of their houses and flies kites.
Melissa and I had been awaiting this with the same bitten finger-nail anticipation as our students as we watched every business in town set up an array of multi-colored paper and plastic kites outside their shops. I watched the hostel boys make some careful purchases one day, turning the kites over in their hands before selecting ten or fifteen kites to buy.
“Why so many?” I asked one of them, as he walked away with his precious purchase wrapped in newspaper.
“Teacher,” he said, as if it were obvious, “I need them if the others get cut.”
The seemingly innocent diversion of flying kites from roof tops does indeed have a darker, competitive side and one which the boys and grown men of Kadod gravitate towards: the spools of cord which tether the kites to their adept fliers have been carefully embedded with shards of ground glass such that, when skillfully maneuvered into position by their owners, they can rub against the string of another unsuspecting kite in the sky and break the string, freeing the kite to waft at the mercy of the winds through the air until it finds a final resting place upon a palm frond or in a street gutter. The gutters of the Kadod streets have been running hot pink and deep purple and electric blue leading up to the festival as students take their kite strings to be ‘colored’ by a local expert who sits on the side of the street with a rickety wheel like contraption which reminds me of what you use to wind yarn into a ball before knitting a sweater. He runs the string carefully through pink or blue or purple dye stained fingers, dipping them periodically into a rusted can full of dyed water like a potter at his wheel, turning the white threads the intense shade of the student’s choice.
Our hosts for the festival were Darshanbhai and his family who run the local STD/ISD/PCO booth (the Indian equivalent of the payphone) from which Melissa and I make all our calls overseas. The frequency of our visits have kindled a friendship with this family who speak with us in a mix of English, Hindi and Gujarati. Darshanbhai et al are part of what I like to think of as Kadod’s party squad: a number of younger couples who live on the main bazaar road who make it a point every festival to do things up right. Loud music, dancing, and as Darshanbhai told Melissa in a melodramatic whisper a few days ago when he invited us to the roof party, “drinks” (a definitely hush-hush off the menu item in the dry state of Gujarat).
To my relief, we were not asked to take part in any such illegal activity, though as we carefully made our way onto the roof made of planks of corrugated iron or steel or some such thing this morning, we saw that despite the early hour, the party was in full swing. Men, wives, teenage boys and small kids looked up into the sky as they loosely held running spools or tensely controlled kite strings, causing their kites to dive low to snag an unsuspecting soul on another roof or to fly high above the reach of others' strings.
Darshanbhai, along with his younger brother, took it upon himself to teach us to fly. The first few attempts were soon aborted by the quick cutting string of their next door neighbor who’d cut their kites down as a joke as soon as they’d launched. After a heated but well meaning shouting match between roofs, the neighbor left well enough alone and we were finally able to get some air between us and the kite, which was toned a patriotic shade of orange and green and emblazoned with a picture of a smiling Narendra Modi (Chief Minister of Gujarat).
As soon as the kite was up, Darshan’s brother handed me the spool and instructed me how to hold it so the thread would run easily off and the kite could be let out as far as the wind would take it. Darshan himself controlled the kite’s movements, ducking it down or raising it up or frantically pulling in a jerky, sawing fashion as he went in for the kill on another kite string.
I found myself lulled into a semi-trance regarding the looping and soaring of our kite. Against the back drop of the cloudless blue sky, I had to squint to see which way the string moved and my eyes worked over time trying to pick our kite out of the plethora of moving bodies across the skyline. All of a sudden, I was jolted back to reality by what can described as nothing less than a piercing war-cry followed by a high pitched scream. I looked over to see Darshan and his brother rejoicing with an arm-flailing dance and their young neighbor Parth still screaming his congratulations at a pitch that made my ear beg for mercy.
“We cut a kite! We cut a kite!” They told me hurriedly as they refocused and went in for a second kill. This pattern continued until three, then four, then five, then six kites had been cut, all followed by the requisite screaming. I came to understand through watching this ritual repeated that the whooping was not only self-congratulatory: it also served the important purpose of letting the unfortunate soul (always located on a roof-top within hearing distance) who exactly had been victorious. This was then followed with an affectionate exchange of trash talk as the loser reached for the next kite in his arsenal.
Then, all of a sudden, our kite began to drop. We pulled in the slack in the hope that we could jerk it back into the air, but as we frantically tried, I noticed a similar phenomenon across all of the roofs in Kadod. That was when it hit me: the wind, fickle as it was, was dying. The collapse of the kites was valiantly fought as I watched men and boys try for the next two hours to try and get their kites back up in the air; however, their efforts were in vain and eventually they turned their energy towards shouting between roofs and dancing wildly.
When darkness set in, the dancing didn’t stop, but Melissa and I decided it was time to head home. Our kites, unflown as they were, were still intact, waiting for another day when we will climb to the roof our humble guesthouse and attempt to make them air-worthy.
Best,
Cat
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Queue Strategy
Dear dedicated reader,
After an extended trip to Bangalore and a late night trip back on the public bus, the exploits of which included extended arguing with the man at the Surat station inquiry window at the and delicate negotiation of the water-logged station bathroom, I am happy to be back in Kadod. The anonymity of being “outside” (as they refer to it here) was replaced immediately with the home-town affection as some boys hanging around on their doorstep late at night greeted us with a warm “Hello madam!” as the rickety bus pulled away.
The students are still in exams, which is how I am able to afford the luxury of a few days away. Wandering outside of Kadod, despite having traveled pretty widely in India, always brings new revelations as I am able to size up my travel destinations against the security that I find in the village. This particular journey made me realize that, on account in living here in Kadod, my cultural growth in a particularly important area has been somewhat retarded and I will have to give more effort in the future toward its development, as simply a matter of survival. The area of which I speak, is of course, plain uninhibited pushiness.
This quality is essential in a country where queues (as lines are termed in British-cum-Indian English) exist merely in the realms of abstraction. I don’t have much opportunity to wait in lines in our sleepy town – there isn’t much to wait around for. As a result, my Westernized “queue strategy” (so termed by the popular comedian Eddie Izzard) has no cultural relevance in this context. To put this in perspective, let me share the recent experience that for me brought this new revelation sharply into focus:
While in Bangalore, I thought I’d entertain myself one morning by going to the movies, a luxurious waste of time that I sorely miss living two hours from the nearest theater. The latest Hindi film blockbuster “Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi” was punctuated with an intermission typical of all movies shown in India (even Western ones which don’t share the same Indian penchant for length). I decided to take advantage of the time given for a bathroom break as I knew it would be at least an hour and a half till I’d have another such opportunity.
The bathroom itself was unremarkable: stalls set up in neat rows down a good-sized room. There weren’t enough, obviously, but there never are, and as a result of the intermission and the lack of supply there were a good number of women standing around waiting in what looked to me to be a short line. I stepped in behind the two women standing in this fashion and waited with patience as stall doors opened and one of the women disappeared into the now empty stall.
All of a sudden, I felt a rush of air by me as a stylish looking girl in skinny jeans and a vest whooshed in just as the next stall door opened and occupied it as soon as it was empty. Then a few other girls swooshed in, right past what I regarded (foolishly!) as the line and began to camp outside of stall doors, knocking every so often as if to tell the people inside that time was of the essence and what right did they have to be taking so long anyway?
I looked around puzzled, my sense of order somewhat shaken. Just at that moment, the woman standing in front of me whom I had previously regarded as my ally in holding our queue ground abandoned me to this mass chaos as her friend emerged from a now opened stall that was snatched up by one of these recent intruders. I now saw that my Western eyes had interpreted the scene quite differently than how the landscape of this innocent bathroom appeared to the casual Indian observer.
Well, what was there to do but woman up out of necessity? As soon as there was an unoccupied opening outside a door stall, I staked it out, trying to look as aggressive as the others, punctuating my defense with some half-hearted door knocking (though for me, this gesture felt a little ingenuine and a result I think did not carry the same punch as that of these seasoned veterans).
My power play for stall space worked and I was soon back inside the movie, using the remaining minutes of the intermission to contemplate wryly how even the smallest of social conventions require the eye of cultural translation. And of course, once my eyes had been opened in this way, I started seeing the analog everywhere: In the way that I had to push my way towards the counter at the Barista on MG Road (equivalent of Starbucks), holding my money in my outstretched hand in a menacing and obvious way as if to say yes, I do actually have the means to purchase my order and I will fight for my right to do so; or in the way that, on going out for dinner at what most Americans would term a hole in the wall but is actually a quite well respected and famous Bangalorean dosa haunt, my boyfriend and I were instructed by the man at the entrance to literally camp out over a table, hovering until the coffee came and then sitting down at the table, squeezing in to the bench before the current table residents had even finished sipping at their filtered coffee or paying the bill.
On our journey back to Kadod came the culmination of this lesson, my assessment of what I had learned as it were: trying to fight for our right to ride the public bus back to Kadod. We’d been waiting for an hour to catch 9 pm bus which would put us back in Kadod around 11 pm. When the time for departure came, the locals were crowding in around the bus door with seasoned skill that Melissa and I could hardly negotiate with our large backpacks until I made a strategic cut in front of a pushy man holding a large box that got us the opening onto the bus stairs and ensured our ability to board the standing room only bus. Relieved that we’d made it, I felt we’d passed the test with flying colors.
Perhaps we would have gotten away with it to if we hadn’t fallen for a different social convention: plain old well-meaning polite helpfulness. Just as we’d secured our place standing near the door of the bus, we saw the helpful inquiry window man who’d laboriously gotten us to this point motioning for us to get off and talk with him. Assuming it must be important, we relinquished our places in the now completely full bus, with hoards of hopefuls still pushing to get on behind us and stepped off.
“What is it?” We asked, somewhat flustered.
“I just wanted to tell you that there’s another bus at 9:45 pm,” he said, patting the side of a bus parked parallel behind him and smiling. “In case you wanted to take that instead.”
I let out a low, frustrated groan as I looked at him incredulously and watched the mass of people pushing into the 9 pm bus. We tried to push in as well, but it was hopeless.
“Drats.” Turns out I still have so much to learn.
Best,
Cat
After an extended trip to Bangalore and a late night trip back on the public bus, the exploits of which included extended arguing with the man at the Surat station inquiry window at the and delicate negotiation of the water-logged station bathroom, I am happy to be back in Kadod. The anonymity of being “outside” (as they refer to it here) was replaced immediately with the home-town affection as some boys hanging around on their doorstep late at night greeted us with a warm “Hello madam!” as the rickety bus pulled away.
The students are still in exams, which is how I am able to afford the luxury of a few days away. Wandering outside of Kadod, despite having traveled pretty widely in India, always brings new revelations as I am able to size up my travel destinations against the security that I find in the village. This particular journey made me realize that, on account in living here in Kadod, my cultural growth in a particularly important area has been somewhat retarded and I will have to give more effort in the future toward its development, as simply a matter of survival. The area of which I speak, is of course, plain uninhibited pushiness.
This quality is essential in a country where queues (as lines are termed in British-cum-Indian English) exist merely in the realms of abstraction. I don’t have much opportunity to wait in lines in our sleepy town – there isn’t much to wait around for. As a result, my Westernized “queue strategy” (so termed by the popular comedian Eddie Izzard) has no cultural relevance in this context. To put this in perspective, let me share the recent experience that for me brought this new revelation sharply into focus:
While in Bangalore, I thought I’d entertain myself one morning by going to the movies, a luxurious waste of time that I sorely miss living two hours from the nearest theater. The latest Hindi film blockbuster “Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi” was punctuated with an intermission typical of all movies shown in India (even Western ones which don’t share the same Indian penchant for length). I decided to take advantage of the time given for a bathroom break as I knew it would be at least an hour and a half till I’d have another such opportunity.
The bathroom itself was unremarkable: stalls set up in neat rows down a good-sized room. There weren’t enough, obviously, but there never are, and as a result of the intermission and the lack of supply there were a good number of women standing around waiting in what looked to me to be a short line. I stepped in behind the two women standing in this fashion and waited with patience as stall doors opened and one of the women disappeared into the now empty stall.
All of a sudden, I felt a rush of air by me as a stylish looking girl in skinny jeans and a vest whooshed in just as the next stall door opened and occupied it as soon as it was empty. Then a few other girls swooshed in, right past what I regarded (foolishly!) as the line and began to camp outside of stall doors, knocking every so often as if to tell the people inside that time was of the essence and what right did they have to be taking so long anyway?
I looked around puzzled, my sense of order somewhat shaken. Just at that moment, the woman standing in front of me whom I had previously regarded as my ally in holding our queue ground abandoned me to this mass chaos as her friend emerged from a now opened stall that was snatched up by one of these recent intruders. I now saw that my Western eyes had interpreted the scene quite differently than how the landscape of this innocent bathroom appeared to the casual Indian observer.
Well, what was there to do but woman up out of necessity? As soon as there was an unoccupied opening outside a door stall, I staked it out, trying to look as aggressive as the others, punctuating my defense with some half-hearted door knocking (though for me, this gesture felt a little ingenuine and a result I think did not carry the same punch as that of these seasoned veterans).
My power play for stall space worked and I was soon back inside the movie, using the remaining minutes of the intermission to contemplate wryly how even the smallest of social conventions require the eye of cultural translation. And of course, once my eyes had been opened in this way, I started seeing the analog everywhere: In the way that I had to push my way towards the counter at the Barista on MG Road (equivalent of Starbucks), holding my money in my outstretched hand in a menacing and obvious way as if to say yes, I do actually have the means to purchase my order and I will fight for my right to do so; or in the way that, on going out for dinner at what most Americans would term a hole in the wall but is actually a quite well respected and famous Bangalorean dosa haunt, my boyfriend and I were instructed by the man at the entrance to literally camp out over a table, hovering until the coffee came and then sitting down at the table, squeezing in to the bench before the current table residents had even finished sipping at their filtered coffee or paying the bill.
On our journey back to Kadod came the culmination of this lesson, my assessment of what I had learned as it were: trying to fight for our right to ride the public bus back to Kadod. We’d been waiting for an hour to catch 9 pm bus which would put us back in Kadod around 11 pm. When the time for departure came, the locals were crowding in around the bus door with seasoned skill that Melissa and I could hardly negotiate with our large backpacks until I made a strategic cut in front of a pushy man holding a large box that got us the opening onto the bus stairs and ensured our ability to board the standing room only bus. Relieved that we’d made it, I felt we’d passed the test with flying colors.
Perhaps we would have gotten away with it to if we hadn’t fallen for a different social convention: plain old well-meaning polite helpfulness. Just as we’d secured our place standing near the door of the bus, we saw the helpful inquiry window man who’d laboriously gotten us to this point motioning for us to get off and talk with him. Assuming it must be important, we relinquished our places in the now completely full bus, with hoards of hopefuls still pushing to get on behind us and stepped off.
“What is it?” We asked, somewhat flustered.
“I just wanted to tell you that there’s another bus at 9:45 pm,” he said, patting the side of a bus parked parallel behind him and smiling. “In case you wanted to take that instead.”
I let out a low, frustrated groan as I looked at him incredulously and watched the mass of people pushing into the 9 pm bus. We tried to push in as well, but it was hopeless.
“Drats.” Turns out I still have so much to learn.
Best,
Cat
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Welcome New Year
Dear dedicated reader,
Happy New Year!
As the watchman rang the bell at midnight, Melissa and I found ourselves fighting the deadened silence with our cries of “Happy New Year” in a deserted school courtyard. Here in Kadod, 2009 was ushered in with less pomp and more circumstance as Diwali and Eid represented the true new year for the majority of the residents. Our noise-makers sounded like noses blowing underneath the silent, starry sky. For a moment, a pack of dogs started to sing a dirge in honor of the passing of 2008 so we listened respectfully, and then went back inside the house to sleep so we could get up and teach this morning as January 1 is not a holiday here.
The coming of the new year predictably leads one to reflection on the time that has passed since the bell tolled on the last New Year’s Eve and the journey that brought me from South Boston to Kadod has been an eventful one that you’ve followed dear reader as I’ve adjusted to my life here in this village. The trail has been inevitably forged with successes and failures. I felt some satisfaction yesterday as I looked around my classroom and realized that I had a roomful of students whose names I know busily engaged in productive exam preparation (since, now knowing the format of the exams, I can actually prepare fruitful practice for them). The perseverance it has taken to accumulate all of this knowledge and amalgamate into anything resembling effective teaching has taken Melissa’s and my combined and sustained effort over these past seven months.
This feeling of satisfaction was short-lived as a few students lolled about at their desks, no notebook, no pen, no decorum and after plentiful warnings coupled had to be thrown out of the room, where they continued to create a ruckus, jumping in and out for attention and distracting the other boys. After the class, Tabussum and I took three of the instigators to the male supervisor, who screamed at them in Gujarati and slapped them across the face so hard that I could only look down at the ground, bite my lip, and wonder what the right thing to do actually is.
The feeling of satisfaction returned as we walked around the village after school and we stopped to talk to the regulars: the previously taciturn fruit man who has warmed to our onslaught of inquiries about his health, family, origin etc; the triumvirate of families who run the phone booth, the general store, and the infamous tailor’s shop; Gitaben and her English-mincing son Manishbhai who informed us excitedly that he has just applied for a job in America (though he doesn’t know where it is); the students whose houses we pass and the small children who scream “Ms. Ivins!” every time they see Melissa’s smiling face (since she teaches the fourth standard, the small kids really have a thing for her). Yogeshbhai, whose son built a telescope from scratch, gave us a friendly wave on his way to Surat with the telescope in the back of a truck, the vegetable-wala who sits in the main square by the temple smiled and said “Namaste, teacher”, and the crew of kids who play at the temple and ran and screamed and tried to scare us by jumping out of dark corners as we passed by on our way home to the gates of the school.
As we passed inside the gates, a large black-faced monkey bounded from the roof of the prinicpal’s house, shimmied down a school drain pipe and then ran to freedom through the streets of Kadod. The small children screamed with nervous laughter and fear.
It was this quiet existence that stood with us in the silence at midnight as the sound of the midnight bell died away: this settled pace of our everyday life. As Melissa and I listened to the dogs howl and the crickets chirp in the first minutes of 2009, it felt right that these routines which have become etched into my internal clock, my sense of place and my orientation would usher us into the new year.
Best,
Cat
Happy New Year!
As the watchman rang the bell at midnight, Melissa and I found ourselves fighting the deadened silence with our cries of “Happy New Year” in a deserted school courtyard. Here in Kadod, 2009 was ushered in with less pomp and more circumstance as Diwali and Eid represented the true new year for the majority of the residents. Our noise-makers sounded like noses blowing underneath the silent, starry sky. For a moment, a pack of dogs started to sing a dirge in honor of the passing of 2008 so we listened respectfully, and then went back inside the house to sleep so we could get up and teach this morning as January 1 is not a holiday here.
The coming of the new year predictably leads one to reflection on the time that has passed since the bell tolled on the last New Year’s Eve and the journey that brought me from South Boston to Kadod has been an eventful one that you’ve followed dear reader as I’ve adjusted to my life here in this village. The trail has been inevitably forged with successes and failures. I felt some satisfaction yesterday as I looked around my classroom and realized that I had a roomful of students whose names I know busily engaged in productive exam preparation (since, now knowing the format of the exams, I can actually prepare fruitful practice for them). The perseverance it has taken to accumulate all of this knowledge and amalgamate into anything resembling effective teaching has taken Melissa’s and my combined and sustained effort over these past seven months.
This feeling of satisfaction was short-lived as a few students lolled about at their desks, no notebook, no pen, no decorum and after plentiful warnings coupled had to be thrown out of the room, where they continued to create a ruckus, jumping in and out for attention and distracting the other boys. After the class, Tabussum and I took three of the instigators to the male supervisor, who screamed at them in Gujarati and slapped them across the face so hard that I could only look down at the ground, bite my lip, and wonder what the right thing to do actually is.
The feeling of satisfaction returned as we walked around the village after school and we stopped to talk to the regulars: the previously taciturn fruit man who has warmed to our onslaught of inquiries about his health, family, origin etc; the triumvirate of families who run the phone booth, the general store, and the infamous tailor’s shop; Gitaben and her English-mincing son Manishbhai who informed us excitedly that he has just applied for a job in America (though he doesn’t know where it is); the students whose houses we pass and the small children who scream “Ms. Ivins!” every time they see Melissa’s smiling face (since she teaches the fourth standard, the small kids really have a thing for her). Yogeshbhai, whose son built a telescope from scratch, gave us a friendly wave on his way to Surat with the telescope in the back of a truck, the vegetable-wala who sits in the main square by the temple smiled and said “Namaste, teacher”, and the crew of kids who play at the temple and ran and screamed and tried to scare us by jumping out of dark corners as we passed by on our way home to the gates of the school.
As we passed inside the gates, a large black-faced monkey bounded from the roof of the prinicpal’s house, shimmied down a school drain pipe and then ran to freedom through the streets of Kadod. The small children screamed with nervous laughter and fear.
It was this quiet existence that stood with us in the silence at midnight as the sound of the midnight bell died away: this settled pace of our everyday life. As Melissa and I listened to the dogs howl and the crickets chirp in the first minutes of 2009, it felt right that these routines which have become etched into my internal clock, my sense of place and my orientation would usher us into the new year.
Best,
Cat
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