My Adoptive Mom

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