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