Reporting from the Delhi airport, on route to home.
I didn’t imagine myself crying as I left Kolkata.
Although it has been a privilege to experience India, I must
admit that I have been counting down the days to returning to a world in which
I can fully express myself and more easily control certain aspects of my life.
I’m not saying such control is a good thing…or even that it truthfully ever
exists for any of us, but when I had no control over what I ate, rarely knew where
I was going if a taxi driver veered off a main road, and had a lot of trouble
telling him that I knew that he was meandering to get more money out of me, the
idea of getting up in the morning, making a cup of coffee then wandering
through my beautiful little Bloomington (at night!) and hanging with my
community sounded awfully, awfully enticing. Plus, I’ve been missing all of you
fine people and I longed to sit in Colleen and Will’s living room and shoot the
shit with my community about life and God and Will’s hatred of certain soccer
teams.
But its not as if I didn’t have a community, or at least a
little family in Kolkata. Aside from my beautiful friends Sryia and Laura who
opened their lives (and in Sriya’s case, her family) to me, I had a mother in
Kolkata who I fell in love with and who took care of me with so much more joy
and concern than I could imagine someone giving to someone they’ve only known
for a couple of months. Sandhya is my Indian mother. She adopted me from the
first week of my trip, making me tea and bringing it to me in the afternoons,
preparing me delicious food, and patiently trying to decipher what I meant with
my broken Bangla so that we could develop a connection with one another.
She is who I picture sitting in the airport and the reason I
find myself crying, despite how excited I am to return to the States, its
comforts (yes, I’ll admit I’m excited about the comfort of clean running water
and opening my mouth in the shower) and my family and friends. I can’t help but think about our nearly
daily tea time. At some point in the summer, maybe three weeks in, Sandhya
started bringing her own tea in the afternoons when she brought mine. She would
sit in my room and we would talk over tea about all kinds of things: husbands,
her work, her daughter, her fights with her daughter, the importance of
education, the best Bengali foods, the festivities during Durga Puja…and then
the really personal, really-real stuff. One day, she told me she had previously
lost two children in childbirth and that she still thinks about them on their
birthdays. I shared Jack’s life with her.
What a gift to bear sorrow with another. What a gift to have
learned Bangla so we could share in grief and understanding that night.
This week tea time each day with Sandhya was particularly
long. We were trying to get the most out of our time together. As I do with my
mama back home, we grew closer over caffeinated beverages and we spent the week
talking about how much we were going to miss one another and made plans for
future visits so we didn’t have to be sad today.
And like my mama back home, she was always worried about how
I was feeling and was excellent at treating her sick kids. When Travis visited,
he had some tummy troubles in the middle of the night one evening. His mom
always gives him ginger tea when he is feeling ill, but I don’t have access in
the house to the kitchen, so I knew I would have to wake up Sandhya at 2am to
get some boiled water. I felt terrible waking her up, but all I had to say was
that Travis was sick and needed hot water and she shot into action. Then she
spent the next few days making him rice and tea and bringing home mishit doyie
(sweet yogurt…it sounds like it would make a stomach worse, but somehow it
makes it better), and then bossing him around and telling him how to take care
of himself…you know, like any good mom.
Just this morning as Travis and I had a final skype session before I
left, Sandhya was hanging out in my room.
TJ mentioned that his lungs had been bothering him, and she immediately
issued a stream of warnings and commands: go to the doctor and get medicine,
you’ve been changing environments and it can make you very sick and if your
chest is congested you can get very ill, so go to the doctor today! He tried to
explain that he didn’t need to go and she just said, “No! You’ll go”.
Although the house owners I stayed with were astoundingly
good to me, and very, very generous, and although they both had purposely hired
Sandhya and her older brother so that they could all stay together in the house
and not be separated—a more generous consideration than many homeowners might
have--Sandhya was markedly different around them. Its entirely possible that
they were all just playing out cultural roles and power dynamics that I
couldn’t understand, and that they were all totally comfortable with, as an
outsider looking in, it seemed like Sandhya sort-of shut down around them. She
stood at attention during dinner time when they were there, but with me, she
would sit at the table and talk.
But of course, she would never eat with me. She and her
family members ate separately upstairs.
I thought that perhaps this practice of seperation is no different from
two families in America eating separately, but I don’t think that’s all that is
going on. I believe there are some pretty deeply engrained class divisions
being played out in the separation of dinner tables. When Travis was visiting we
decided it would be fun to eat a meal with Sandhya and her family, and nice to
give Sandhya a night off from cooking for us and her family. So we planned to
bring some food from a restaurant on an evening when her homeowners were gone. I bought Sandhya’s favorites: chow mein,
chili chicken and prawns from a really tasty Chinese joint.
Sandhya seemed excited about the “secret” dinner at first,
but as the day neared, she started to act very nervous about it. Then, when the
homeowners changed plans and were still there when Travis and I arrived with
lunch, she was very nervous, almost jittery, when we showed up with the food.
We whispered in the kitchen and she begged me to bring the food into our room
and eat it separately and then bring the food up to them when we were done. In
the end, I realized that we were actually asking a lot of Sandhya and her
family, and in some ways we were disrespecting lots of cultural norms. For one
thing, hospitality is an extremely big deal. There is a lot of shame wrapped up
in being inhospitable. If the homeowners had learned that we had a dinner
separately from them, they would have thought that we thought they were inhospitable—either
to us or to the people that worked for them—and it would have caused conflict
between us and the homeowners. I wasn’t too worried about that, although I was
nervous too when I saw that they were home. But more importantly, we were asking
Sandhya to disrespect her bosses, which could have had really dire consequences
for her. While I don’t at all
agree with the class seperations functioning throughout Indian society (or my
own), I had irresponsibly put Sandhya in danger, and I realized we just
couldn’t shared that meal together if there was any chance at all of the
homeowners seeing us. What might
be fun, even self-indulgent, stint in generousity for Travis and I, what a
danger to Sandhya and her family’s terms with the homeowners and possibly a
threat to her job. As Travis
observed, sharing a table is just to revolutionary of an act. When you share a meal with someone, you
let them into your social world, into your family; and when you eat with them
you might even let a little of them (their spit and dirt ) into you. The open
table is a revolutionary idea. I, of course, couldn’t help but think of the
Eucharist.
So the only food Sandhya and I ever shared together was
tea. But she gave me a lot of
food, and not just all the delicious chicken curry, payeesh, dal, okra, chicken
stew, or “Italian” chicken she made me. She told me that when a stomach is
happy a heart or soul is happy, which is why she likes to cook. Everyday she
would ask if my stomach and heart were happy and I would tell her that she made
them so. The item I am bringing home with me that I will cherish more than any
other is a bag of the tea leaves that Sandhya uses to make tea. There is a very
sweet story accompanying her giving it to me.
Over our last tea time, Sandhya was pointing out everything
in my room that wasn’t packed yet so that I was sure not to forget it. She
pointed out a 10 rupee note that was sitting on the window ceil. I had left it
because it was torn and I have learned that most stores or drivers won’t accept
torn notes. So I told Sandhya this and she asked if she could have it to try to
use it in the market. I felt like a little shit watching her smooth out the
note. For me, that note had become garbage but for her 10 rupees (that is a
sixth of a dollar) was worth saving and trying out. A few moments later, I gave
Sandhya a small gift, hardly enough to repay what our relationship has given
me, and in all honesty I should have probably just given her an envelope full
of money to help her with the costs associated with her daughter’s education
(the only reason I didn’t was that I totally forgot to stop by the ATM on my
way home and missed the banks before they closed). I bought her some nice fabric to make a shalowar kameez top
and bottom set. It was pink- her favorite color- and had some nice stitch work,
but I could have given her so much more. I bought Rakesh, her nephew, a new shirt, and I tried to hand
it to him, but he wouldn’t take it. He said thank you, but made his mom take
it; it struck me that a little 9 year kid, when offered a present, wouldn’t
eagerly grab for it. It was almost as if he didn’t think it was right to take
it.
When I gave Sandhya her present, she looked at and touched
the fabric with such an expression of love. She told me I had paid too much and
then she just stared at the fabric and stroked it and then patted my knee. An hour later she was back from the bazaar
bearing gifts of food—the language of love that she speaks in best (because I
don’t need any translating maybe?). She had purchased a 100 rupee bag of tea
leaves, dried beans and all the spices to make Travis’ favorite bean dish and
then she told me the recipe for both.
I know she spent at least 150 rupees on the gift, which is a lot, and I
wonder if she used the rupee note she saved from my carelessness. I told her I
would make the tea as soon as I got home and think about her all the while.
This morning, the homeowners slept in, but Sandhya got up
early and made me an extra big breakfast to fill my tummy up for my long two
days of journeying. (I forgot to mention that last night she made me my
favorite meal of chicken stew, mangos and ice cream that she purchased from the
ice cream vendor across the street from the house—the Kwality Walls,
Travis!). Rakesh and Pinkey also
woke up, even though it was their day off from school. Then the whole family,
including Sandhya’s brother who carried my very heavy bag full of
un-necessities down three flights of stairs, walked me to the car downstairs. I
gave Sandhya a big hug and she held me for a long time. Then she walked me to
my car, opening the door and then sticking her fingers through the open window
so we could touch one more time. Pinkey and Rakesh stood outside the other
window waving. This is exactly the scene when a family member leaves their
family. It felt like that much love.
I didn’t improve my Bangla enough to do my dissertation
research without a translator, which was my goal for going this summer. But as
the program went forward, I realized that as long as I could speak and
understand enough Bangla to connect with Sandhya, that’s all I really cared
about. But at the same time, Sandhya
taught me more than anyone the rarity and privilege of the kind of education I
have received. I have had years and years of school at some of the best places,
and traveled to India and Bangladesh, and I haven’t really paid for any of it.
My parents and various institutions and governmental grants have given me that privileged. Sandhya didn’t ever get to go to
school. She had 6 brothers and sisters and her parents simply couldn’t afford
to feed her, so at the age of 7 she left her home and traveled 6 hours away to
live and work in Kolkata in middle class homes. She told me that the greatest
sorrow in her life (and she has had plenty) is the fact that she didn’t get to
go to school and, as a result, cannot do much better than work in the house she
is working at. So what do I do with my, basically, unearned privilege? I can’t
be drowned in self-indulgent guilt but do something that turns my blessings
into blessings for others. I don’t know what that looks like, but I am called
to remain open to God’s call to do something with what I’ve been given. That is
the knowledge I return home with. Sandhya didn’t get what I have. She doesn’t
get to go home to all of the opportunities and freedoms and luxuries I will go
home to. And that had lit a fire under me. How do I live to do something good
with the things Sandhya should have been given to.
On the flight from Kolkata to Delhi, I cracked open my copy
of The Irresistible Revolution to the section in which Shane Claiborne
discusses his time in Kolkata at the Sisters of Mercy Mission and the leper
community founded by Mother Teresa. He talks about his own adoptive
family. He talks about the love of
Christ being available to everyone and about seeing Christ in his adoptive
family and them seeing Christ in him, and he says that this happens when we
simply love another with God’s love. Sandhya shared Christ with me and I think
I shared Christ with her with every cup of tea and every pat on the leg and
every head nod. I hope I can share
the love Sandhya has given me with my community, my family, my friends and
those I encounter.
And that’s why I’m crying in the Delhi airport.
Postscript:
Thank you all for all of your prayers, support and positive thoughts. I am home safe and healthy and feeling incomparably blessed--thank you, thank you, thank you!
also, I can't stop paying with my right hand, nodding my head and saying "Ha" instead of yes.
I love you,
ashlee
