Day 26: Dramas dramas

Drama with the Dhobi

The drama with the dhobi, Neelam, continues. She had asked us to help her with the phone. Like I said, I didn't know what that meant. Transportation? Filling out forms in English? Paying? So we drove her to the nearest dealer, not too far from her. The driver, who I was told was Brahmin, spoke to her in a very interesting way. It was like a adult talking to a child, speaking loudly but in a friendly way, getting slightly annoyed that she would expectedly not know how to open a car door (she probably had never been in a car), and laughing all the time, probably not always with her. At the store she seemed insistent on getting the Nokia phones, but they were too expensive, phones we wouldn't get for ourselves. We couldn't figure out why she was being so picky. Beggars ain't choosers, but we couldn't understand it. Was it because she heard from friends that Nokias are the best? That it had a camera? Or was this all a con job? She was just using us to get the best phone and, well, sell it? What? I couldn't communicate with her enough to understand why she didn't want the simplest phone. In the end I explained that Nokia was too expensive. Then she seemed to want my phone, though it would be going home with me. And they didn't have my phone there, not that color or model. So in the end we drove back to that infamous Reliance store where we had so much drama with the modem. There we got that phone but then her ID was insufficient. She didn't have proof of residency in Lucknow! I didn't know you need proof for the city you lived in, just the state or some locality. One option was to get her the phone and she can put in a SIM chip later.

With a split second decision, Jennifer offered to get the SIM in her name. That was what we did and Neelam got a new phone! But the drama didn't end there. Jennifer started having second thoughts. She knew getting this phone under her name might be illegal, even with the full cooperation (complicity) of the store. And although she didn't think Neelam was a terrorist plotting something using a phone under this American's name, she didn't want to do anything remotely illegal. And this whole issue of the Nokia (the issue of beggars-ain't-choosers) bothered her as much as it bothered us. We didn't know her that well, really. We put a lot more trust in her than we had realized. And even if she was indeed an honest, innocent person, someone else malicious could take advantage of her and make use of Jennifer's generosity. So with a lot of thoughts we decided to have her return the SIM card to us. (For those who don't know, the SIM card is what allows the phone to connect to the cell phone service and that's the one that is registered to Jennifer.)

It is worth noting that after Jennifer filled out the application for Neelam and doubting whether she was doing the right thing, the sales rep took her aside and warned her about these "people", meaning, poor people who would be scheming to take advantage of innocent and naive foreigners. She thanked him for his concerns but she told him she didn't think Neelam was a bad person.

Drama with Amit

Amit is the one I've been calling "translator/friend". What I haven't mentioned is that he had been the source of "information" regarding Muslims, lower caste, and other people he doesn't like or has stereotypes against. He is the epitome of the a lot of the prejudices perpetuated by the upper caste of this Hindu-dominated country. We learned from him all the evils of the Muslims, their dirtiness, their unwelcome "stay" in this country whose culture today, including its language, would not be the same without the centuries of Muslim rule. His arrogance regarding his pitiful education also reinforced our idea that he is quite hollow. He reminds me of some of the ultra-conservative and racist Christians in the US who profess love for God and Jesus and go to church all the time but end up hating so many people and cultures that don't conform to their beliefs.

And so the drama with Amit started to culminate when another friend told us that Amit had told him that he hadn't been happy with our growing friendship with the dhobi. (Washer person is a much lower caste, one of cleaning, than Amit's, the top one, the one for spiritual leadership.) So we talked to him a little about it, his concerns, but he offered no specific evidence that the dhobi was a bad person, other than that she belonged to a class of servants some of whose members have committed con jobs in the past. We didn't go much further because it's hard to talk to someone who has no evidence but who is fixed in his head about certain deep-seated prejudices.

We ended up talking about his compensation for helping us with the apartment. We didn't remind him that he did a half-ass job with the apartment, for which all he did was installing the AC and having someone haul the refrigerator up to our floor (that's paying $ 0.60 to a rickshaw driver to bike it over and hauling it up the stairs). But we were taken aback not only that the rental agreement was for three months but also that he was expecting his service to be paid for all three months. We got a little emotional and we had to leave it at that because we had another meeting to go to. So the climax of the drama with Amit began in earnest.

Power of a Foreigner in Opening Government Doors?

Amazingly, I was able to call a few government offices for Jennifer and, with my limited Hindi, managed to set up appointments for her that her colleagues had for weeks tried and failed. She further felt confident that she was using the wrong people. We have spent over a month in this city and have only started getting things done now. It was the blistering heat, the bad food, the pathetic infrastructure of the city, and whatever else that beat down our spirit and lowered our energy. But also a major factor had been the incompetence of the people she had hired to do the work, one of whose task was setting up appointments. Maybe it was more than incompetence, maybe when I said in my broken Hindi that I was a researcher from Harvard University (which everyone from any country in the world knows) and obviously being a Westerner, the doors are greased more. In any case, I was proud that after a month my Hindi was good enough to get something done that native speakers had been failing to do.

ASHA Meeting

After the last government meeting we met up finally, the last day we are in Lucknow, with the ASHA people. That's the organization I'd been in contact with since before I left the US. They were my best hope of doing any work with slum children, but because of all the problems mentioned many a times already, I hadn't had the time to meet with them. I met the cousin of the founder and learned a lot not only about the organization, but also a segment of Indian society I hadn't met yet. It's neither the poverty-stricken slum folks or the arrogant Brahmins or the servants that are climbing between the two extremities. They are educated middle-class people who, driven by beliefs of human equality backed by a different kind of spirituality, wanted to lift the spirit of the oppressed and give them a chance to better their own lives. Although some parts of the conversation became too "fruity", too loving, too idealistic, overall it was very refreshing to be talking to people with so much hope and guided by so much hope. We didn't have a lot of time left, but I was struck by the plans they had and the progress they had made. I also understood the education system more, about why it's been so troublesome for the dhobi to send her kids to school. Not only is there the issue of money, but also they couldn't attend public schools for the same reason she was denied a mobile phone: city residency. Moreover, slum people, or poor people with any "unauthorized housing" (a technical phrase for slums), often have to move around and their kids can't attend the same school again. That's not to mention that the kids often have to work. And none of this says anything about the effect on their motivation and desire to integrate into the segment of society that they want to integrate into, a segment that requires that they not be so dirty and stinky, not lice-ridden, and whatever else that marks a slum child. One other thing I want to mention is that the ASHA man emphasized the need to elevate the self-esteem of these children, and adults (through other programs). I'd been thinking about this, actually. When you live in a society that is so stratified and that you are told you're stuck being a low-life in a fast-growing country, and you sometimes even get beaten and often get yelled at, you probably don't think very highly of yourself, don't believe you can ever crawl out of your rut. And some of our Brahmin friends would remind them and everyone else that it's all fate; a servant is fated to be low and his only hope of becoming better is by being "good" enough to be reborn into something higher. ASHA hopes to give people hope to lift themselves up; it's not a charity but a place to help people help themselves, through "asha", the Hindi word for hope.

After meeting them we wanted to work a little at the nearby cybercafe, but, what do you know, no electricity! So we just gave up and went to dinner at this weird, almost exotic place in downtown. It's a hookah smoking joint where men (and later a couple of women joining men) smoked hookah and lounged around, maybe eating some of the expensive food. It was a relaxing end to the day.

But then the day ended with another little drama. There was no electricity in our house either! We had to break out the mosquito nets, but aside from the threat of mosquitos there was also the problem with the heat. No electricity means no AC (or the fan, but then Amit never installed the fan!). Even the marble floor was hotter than the thin mattress. It's crazy. After sleeping for an hour the bedroom light lit up and that's when we realized electricty had returned. It would be a very short night as the next day we would be packing and leaving this dump. (Oh, yes, it's not possible to pack when there is no light.)