Home (Sweet?) Home

On the groggy morning after my 40-hour return trip to the USA, I rode to the mall with my mother for some last-minute Christmas shopping.

"Did I tell you I was in line at seven in the morning at Best Buy last week?" she asked.

"No, what was that for?"

"Well, one of Lois's friend's uncles wanted to buy an X-Box 360 for his nephew, and they heard that Best Buy was getting a secret shipment of them that morning. So Lois called me and said, 'Hey Lin, what are you doing Sunday morning?' I said, 'Just going to church.' She said, 'How about before church?' And I was like, 'Okay, what do you want me to do?'"

"Yeah, okay," I said, moving the story along.

"So I woke up Sunday morning at about six, and what did I see in the paper but a big Best Buy ad with the headline, '24 X-Box 360s available starting at 8 AM!!"

"Oh no," I said, out of sympathy for my unselfish, early-rising mother (not for the ill-fated desires of my aunt's friend's uncle's nephew, obviously).

"I ate quickly and drove out there, and here people have ice shanties set up outside the door, they've been there since the night before, and the Best Buy workers have already given out tickets to the first 24 people who were there. They were letting them in one at a time, with security guards at the door and everything. I talked to the guy who got the last ticket and he said that he'd been there since four."

"Oh my god," I said. "If my friends in India heard about this, their heads would explode."

X-Box 360s cost four hundred dollars. Eighteen thousand rupees. Essentially, they're mini computers for playing video games. Those savvy Microsoft engineers have scrapped the frivoloous features of personal computers like word-processing, photo-editing and web-surfing in favor of graphics processors that can simulate sweat on the faces of digital basketball players. Or the smoky haze of a synthesized battlefield. Or the puffy upper-eye bruises of ones-and-zeros prizefighters. Or, perhaps, the palpable disdain on my face, should I ever, sadly, be video-gamified. You get the point.

It's too cliche to calculate what my Calcuttan friends could/would do with four hundred dollars' worth of rupees. I won't do it. I think they'd be more shocked at the idea of people competing in such inane fashion for a mere super-toy. Sure, Indians can be ferocious line-budgers, but only when it's a matter of catching a train or booking tickets to see their national cricket team. They go to rude extremes in order to see their families or to contribute to the athletic heartbeat of the country, not to fry their brains racing digitized sportscars.

And speaking of ice shanties and inanity: the week I came home, at least a dozen ice-fishers' automobiles broke through the ice of local lakes and came to their final resting places amidst schools of trout and retired skipping-stones. As a Ford Ranger pickup slowly sunk on Lake Onalaska, my local newspaper reported, an elderly gentleman peered out from his shanty and gleefully declared, "There she goes!"

The driver of the truck blamed the tragedy on "too many people parking in the same place." Of course it's not his fault for DRIVING A TWO-TON MACHINE ONTO A BARELY-FROZEN BODY OF WATER. It's those other bastards who parked him in.

You've gotta love Wisconsin. Forty-year-olds who rise earlier in the morning for toys than they ever would for work or worship. The supposed injustice of the law of gravity. Oh, and don't forget the mob in Milwaukee who beat a man to within a whisper of death simply because he honked at them. He honked. Now he's barely clinging to life.

Indians have some things backwards too, of course. They can certainly make the simplest public procedures into epic battles against bureaucracy. But at least they know to spend their money on basic living necessities, to keep their vehicles away from bodies of water (ice-covered or not), and to move respectfully out of the way of honking drivers. And bell-ringing bikers. And marching-band-toting wedding processions. And pleading-women-with-thirty-pounds-of-guavas-on-their-heads. And cows.

If not for the Badgers' big win over Auburn in the Capital One Bowl, I might have moved back to Calcutta immediately. Thank you, Barry Alvarez, you modern-day Wisconsin hero, for convincing me to stick it out in this dazed-and-confused dairyland. As long as the men in red are still beating the jambalaya out of self-important Southern boys, I'll be proud to be a cheesehead.

Man, there's nothing like hyper-violent athletics to bring the stingy, provincial American back out of this long-term evacuee.


Loves and tootles,
Brian

Amra Khub Dukkhito

We are very sad. We are suffering a lot. That's what "amra khub dukkhito" means in Bengali. We're flying back to the USA tomorrow, and despite all the exciting white-Christmas revelry awaiting me back in La Crosse, I still can't shake the dukkhito feeling here in Kolkata. I wish Christmas were still three or four months away, perhaps because my body still functions on the school-year timetable and feels that any project that starts in August must end in May. Who knows. Dukkhito, bhalo or otherwise, we'll be home in a blink to move on with the next project.

For me (Brian), it will hopefully be a teaching placement with Teach for America, either in Chicago or Phoenix. For those of you who don't know, Teach for America places young university graduates in struggling urban school districts in the US - school districts with poor facilities, high drop-out rates and few dedicated teachers. After a college career full of international adventures, I feel that it's time to turn my social-justice eyes to the deprived communities in my own country. In many cases, students in these poor school districts in the USA are much worse off than my Indian formerly street-dwelling pupils, believe it or not. Why Chicago and/or Phoenix? Both are big baseball towns, obviously. Plus, Chicago is my favorite big city in the US, and in Phoenix I would be working with a majority of Navajo students (a population I've worked with twice before on brief service trips to AZ). If I don't get accepted to this program, I think I'll round up some musically-inclined friends, form a band and take over the world of rock.

Theresa, so far as I know, will be in Mankato for a short spell, leaving to pursue nursing work once she passes her board exam. I think she wants to put in a couple solid years of hospital work to build her confidence in her nursing skills. It's not really one of those things you can become great at simply by studying books, you know? I know she's also thinking seriously about travelling back to Europe to visit a British girl we worked with in Kolkata and some college friends working over there (Kamman, Casey). I think that this idea is, for the time being, a "serious pipe dream," if that makes sense. She's also hoping to return to South Africa in the not-too-distant future, perhaps as an assistant to the CSB/SJU study abroad program.

As for "us," I think we're going to stay out of each other's hair for awhile, after five solid months of constant companionship. It will be nice to be in the company of a wider variety of fluent English speakers. But just because our hairs are in different places doesn't mean we won't continue to be khub bhalo friends, if you jano what I mane.

(That's what we call Banglish: Bengali-aka Bangla-and English crammed together).

It will be nice to hear Christmas songs, play in the snow, have a couple hundred Wendy's Frostys and see all the loving faces that have been to us for so many years what we've tried to be to the family-less Rainbow girls for this brief spell. Gotta give thanks where thanks is due.

Gotta be true to your school, as the Beach Boys say.

About-to-leave events of note:

1. I donated my bicycle to school. The domestic staff (kitchen workers, carpenters) will use it frequently for their supply-gathering missions. I wanted to give it to my favorite muri-wallah (man who sells delicious puffed-rice, spice, onion and potato snakcs), but he left just a few days ago for his village home.

2. As you may have figured, I bought a guitar here. Yes, it's pretty hard to write songs and/or call oneself a musician without an instrument. It was mega cheap, and unlike my mega cheap Australian guitar, I actually like this one a lot. It's black and really twangy and I put a ton of quintessential stickers of India things on the back (you know, Sachin, Shah Rukh Khan, Shiva, the usual). It basically resonates with the itness of India. So, after hours of painful consultation, Theresa and I decided that I should bring it home. This seems obvious enough EXCEPT for the tremendous packing-space repercussions. One guitar case means one less large piece of luggage means NOT ENOUGH SPACE FOR ALL OUR OTHER STUFF. And, speaking of stuff, that is exactly what we had to do. Our backpacks and suitcases are bursting, and-insert sigh of embarrassment here-we've even removed the strings of my guitar and stuffed the body full of clothes. Hey! That's like two more square feet of storage space!

3. At least we finished packing with two days to spare. That's a new record for me.

4. We've been out to dinner the past four nights, I think. The whole idea of the "farewell dinner" is sweet enough but OH MY GOSH we don't have to treat our stomachs like our suitcases, do we? I felt so sick last night that I had to (amidst sobs) turn away a delicious plate of Bengali-style shrimp and crab, fearing another explosion episode like the one I endured in Jaipur (don't ask). Tonight, Thakur Das and his family are making dinner for us. I haven't eaten a thing all day, hoping that I'll have room (and explosion buffers) enough to handle the onslaught of culinary deliciosity.

I can tell that I'm journalling/blogging as a therapeutic attempt to deal with my sadness about leaving. It's pretty lame, and I'm sure not many of you will make it this far through this post. Shrimp and suitcases - not that interesting, I know.

Sorry. I'm sorry, India, for not being able to give you any more time right now. I'm sorry, family, for making you feel like I don't want to see you. I'm sorry, Mom, for sticking my finger up your nose and making it bleed on your first Mother's Day. I'm sorry, parents, for faking sickness and convincing the babysitter to call the movie theater to have you come home that time you went to see "Ghost." I'm sorry, Theresa, for driving you crazy for five months AND for ruining our blog with this horrendous post.

It's just that I'm totally falling apart with grief... AAH! There goes my right leg... and my head! I cnat relaly see waht i'm typngi anymre.. ahh my lfet arm....... oh nooooooooo

(head explosion).

__________________________
B

Wedding Season

They say there are two seasons in India: monsoon season and wedding season. The rains stopped a couple months ago, and since then the love has been a-flowin' (along with the delicious food, funny outfits and fluorescent marching band processions).

We attended two weddings, looking burnished in our ethnic Indian dress. Feast your eyes on us.

I'm anxiously awaiting the ceremony with two silly second-cousins of the bride.

Theresa's pink Benarasi sari and my blue panjabi-and-dhuti set. Um, all I can say is BOO-YA!

A better look at the Maharani.

Here we're joined by Munu, cousin of the bride and our ever-gracious Calcutta host. She's wearing her 'wedding sari,' in the fancy up-from-behind-the-right-shoulder style. What a good-looking bunch.

B

In the Beautiful Forest

As our last pre-departure adventure, we spent three days on (luxurious) safari in the world's largest delta: the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve. This immense tidal plain/mangrove forest results from the confluence of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and their 10,000+ square-kilometer collision with the Bay of Bengal. The location of rare river dolphins, the world's only man-eating wild tigers, and the tragic cyclone/flood of 1970 that killed 300,000+ inhabitants, the Sundor Bon (beautiful forest) is a region teeming with mystery and hidden danger. (Sorry to be writing like a brochure here... but the place really demands, as Tagore would say, 'words heavy with import.')

Theresa and I spent long hours cruising through the labyrinth of estuarine rivers, sipping Coca-Cola and searching for deadly creatures. We also visited a characteristic rural Bengal village of the tide-lands and several watchtowers placed throughout the reserve. Visitors rarely see tigers here, despite the large population of the beasts. No one from our tour company had seen a tiger in the wild for TWO MONTHS when we came, but...

We saw FOUR.

Just hours before our safari was finished, after waiting for a potentially fate-inspired half hour while our launch-boat was malfunctioning, we spotted a massive tigress and three well-grown cubs in the distance below a watchtower. Theresa and I both had the experience of photographing the Royal Bengal tiger IN THE WILD, an opportunity that not many people (especially from our part of the world) have a chance to do. Boo-ya!

Check out the photos below. They will do a tiny bit of justice to the place, and the BEASTS. If you're really interested, you could read the novel I mentioned in my last post, "The Hungry Tide" by Amitav Ghosh. There, you'll find very informative passages about the river dolphins, tigers, tidal ecosystem and the sad history of dispossession and natural disaster of the Sundarbans inhabitants.

And no, neither of us was eaten by a tiger, unfortunately. We'll have to die in some other, less interesting way, hopefully a long long time from now. We're all disappointed.

Brian "I hope you know I'm being ironic" Heilman

Who knew Theresa would move on with her romantic life so fast? I guess she's into the one-foot-tall hairy bleating type.

White egrets perched in a (to quote Theresa) MAJESTIC location.

The tigress, mega digitally-zoomed. We were at least 150 yards away... way to go photographer Theresa and our camera!

One of the cubs (quite big, huh?) snooping onto us as we snoop onto him. If the forest department hadn't cleared this portion of the forest, we would never have known we were so close to the MAN-EATERS.

This is Theresa, wearing a silly hat with a tiger face on it. I dared her to buy one and wear it for the entirety of our 6-hour boat-and-bus ride home. She did. She got a free soda.

THANKS FOR LOOKING!

My Patients (Sorry HIPPA)

Let me update you on the progress of some interesting patients. Luckily, in India I’m out of the legislative jurisdiction of the HIPPA confidentiality guidelines.

• In one of my previous posts, I described an elderly woman whose foot injury was left untreated for 7 years. Now, almost three months since we first met her, her foot is well on its way to being completely healed.

• Another man came to our village clinic about a month ago with a crater in his foot where his big toe should have been. A year ago, he stepped on something. As the size of his wound increased, he began to lose sensation in his foot and his big toe disappeared into this one-inch deep crater.

Now, his crater is about 1/4 of an inch deep and he has sensations in his foot once more. His sandals were completely worn through, so Rod gave him a new pair of shoes. The old man's eyes were glazed with held-back tears as he accepted them.

• Another interesting long-term patient of ours is a teenager who has spent the last year of his life hidden in his family's straw hut. Due to a soccer injury on his shin that refused to heal, his family confined him to his dark bedroom in shame, believing that he had been affected by black magic. They believed that his injury was not healing because he had wronged the gods in some way.

When we arrived to the village two and a half weeks ago, his father called us to his humble hut and pushed back the curtains to the room where his son was lying on the bed. We examined the wound which was badly infected and concluded that treating his wound on our regular trips to the village wouldn't be enough to heal him. His family was extremely hesitant to allow us to treat him daily, fearing that they would be interfering with the will of the gods if they were proactive in his treatment.

In our first encounter with this man we had to cover his wound with makeshift gel-o-net due to our lack of proper medical supplies (Betadine soaked gauze). As we were bandaging him up, some of the betadine soaked through the clean gauze and turned the saturated areas black. The father spoke frantically in Bengali, and our translator turned to us and said, "He’s scared he has made the gods angry! He thinks black magic is turning the gauze black!"

After repeating the procedure on ourselves with the same black-stained result, we assured the father that Betadine can turn the bandages black. Through much translated conversation and deliberation by his magic-fearing family, he now visits us daily at our clinic at Loreto and his wound is almost healed.

-Theresa

Fireworks, Kaleidoscopes and Other Shining Things

It’s a normal Thursday morning. My co-worker Rod and I walk to the Sealdah train station to make our rounds. During these rounds we treat the station-dwellers’ wounds and hand out packages of rice, lentils, and bread. As always, we encounter the frail but friendly woman who lives on Platform 4. Every day, she sits with her legs crossed under her faded green sari, her lonely eyes watching passers-by. As soon as she sees me, she reaches up with her wrinkled, plastic-thin hands, eager to grasp mine. Receiving her food, she flashes me an equally welcoming toothless grin. Our spirits lightened by this cheerful woman, we move on.

The woman living outside the public toilets wears broken spectacles, their cracks making two-inch fireworks over her eyes. I imagine that her world looks like a kaleidoscope. Today, she stops us before we leave and points to her legs. She has an infected gash on her left knee. We bend down and begin cleaning her wound.

In under a minute, a crowd of thirty men have gathered, watching as if we were dressing the wound for their entertainment. After we finish her dressing, Rod turns to the exponentially-expanding crowd. Temporarily hiding his mischievous smile, he holds out his hand asking, "One rupee! One rupee! C'mon, you watched! One rupee!" The men look at him, bewildered. Unsure of what to do, some of the men reach into their pockets and place a single rupee in his hand.

Rod's smile returns as he hands his 8-rupee profit to the old woman. "Sometimes, being a foreigner has its advantages!" he quips as we continue through the station.

When we arrive on Platform 9, I almost miss seeing a man camouflaged in a filthy blanket lying under a bench. Beneath his blanket he wears only a stiff dust-covered shirt. His skin is stretched thin over his bones, revealing muscle-less legs no thicker than my wrists. As we lift him up into a wheelchair, the smell of stale urine rises up with him. After making our way through the nearly impenetrable station crowd, and take him via taxi to Premdan, one of Mother Teresa's homes for the dying.

* * *

I can't think of many things more fulfilling than seeing the man one week later smiling with his eyes, resting in the home. He had received a bath and haircut, and didn't lose his appreciative glow throughout our entire visit.

Often when we think of helping the poor, images of malnourished children enter our minds. While many children are in dire need of help, we quite often overlook the elderly.

In order to provide the elderly with the same love people often show to the children, Rod's charity, Calcutta Stations Mission, has initiated a sponsorship program for the elderly people just like the old man we found. Donors to this charity directly affect the lives of the destitute elderly inhabitants of the streets and stations, in addition to the village communities and Rainbow children with whom Rod and his other volunteers work.

I know that when I return home, images of these endearing train station characters will stick with me. Even now, I think about them all the time. Doubtless, when I find myself in some fancy-shmancy Minnesota hospital, I will remember how a simple pack of vegetables and a handshake “healed” my Indian patients’ biggest malady: loneliness.

For more information on Rod’s charity, please visit www.calcuttastationsmission.com, email reception@calcuttastationsmission.com or contact me.

-Theresa

13 Days, 13 Thoughts

Yes, 13. That's all we have left. As I've been writing to my friends via e-mail, I'm feeling 93% bummed, 6% excited, and 1% milk. Read on.

• Bodhgaya. The location of Lord Buddha's enlightenment and my recent 4-day jaunt. It was tough to leave Kolkata even for a few days, certainly, but I enjoyed myself very much in this land of monks-on-bicycles and devout-Buddhist-pilgrims-shooing-ants-to-safety. Yes, I meditated under the Bo tree, in the exact location of Buddha's great awakening 2500 years ago. No, I'm not enlightened. I'm quite far actually - I couldn't even participate in any live-in meditation courses (as I had hoped) because I had my guitar with me. Duh, enlightened ones don't sing or play music. Who knew? I guess I'm not destined to be a reclusive Buddhist monk after all. Look out ants.
• Puja and Teresa both failed their English Literature final exam. I'm not going to lie here and give myself and my work a big glittering happy ending. They failed. Teresa will most likely have to repeat Class 8 and Puja might be restricted to studying only Home Science, Bengali and Tailoring. I can say honestly that I prepared them to the best of my abilities. I can also say, biased though I may be for being an American unaccustomed to the Indian memorization-before-knowledge education system, that their exam was ridiculous. I would have scored 70% or less. Some of the questions were simply inconsequential sentences torn from the short stories, with words plucked out and replaced with blanks worth two points each. I'm obviously disappointed, but I know that by my own standards the girls made huge strides in their reading comprehension and study skills, and I will continue to insist this to their teachers and to Sister Cyril.
• As for my confidence in my own teaching skills... Let's just say that I might see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for the third time tonight, hoping it will cheer me up. Then again, with Voldemort back in his body and all, it might bum me out even more.
• I recently finished reading The Hungry Tide, a highly-acclaimed new novel by Amitav Ghosh. It takes place entirely in the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, the enormous tidal plain/mangrove forest at the mouth of the Ganges. The book is very well-informed and suspenseful (in plot terms, anyway), but read too often like an essay masquerading itself as a novel for my likes. BUT! Theresa and I will be in the Sundarbans for a three-day safari this upcoming weekend and the novel has got me primed and extremely excited for the adventure. Yes, mom and dad, this is the only place in the world where the wild tigers eat humans regularly. I'll try to be safe but come on - what a way to go!
• I also read a novel by the British comedian Ben Elton called "Blast from the Past." I have completely forgotten whatever it was that motivated me to spend 110 rupees on a secondhand copy of this crapalicious 360-page horror. It was awfully written and, well, awful all around. Please don't ever even lift this book off a shelf, people.
• These have all been long thoughts. Not this one, or the next two.
• Theory of Tragedy: "You will go America and you will forget us, sir," said Puja.
• Theory of Tragedy: Elliott Smith.
• Back to Bodhgaya. My harsh rejection at the hands of the silence-loving monks had one benefit: I had the time and attention to write three new songs. My little project-within-a-project of writing music while teaching in India has proven successful, and I'm happy to announce that with any luck I will be able to put out a nice album of 12ish songs by my birthday in April. My current album title options: How to Act, Pilgrim Age, Not My Popsicle and Living the Dream. Feel free to vote for your favorite by posting a comment.
• Theory of It-Won't-Be-So-Bad-To-Go-Home: "I'll be over again soon, Grandma," said Brian. "Maybe next week."
• Theory of It-Won't-Be-So-Bad-To-Go-Home: Steve Devereaux.
• Remember the word I created in my last list of thoughts - "itness"? Well, I've come up with both a dictionary definition and list of "India's Top Five Itness Locations." Here goes: it-ness. noun. 1. the degree of quintessence of a location or experience. 2. the sensation of excitement which results from a characteristic or quintessential experience. Ex. I sensed the thrilling itness of Wisconsin as I ate my cheesewurst outside Lambeau Field. INDIA'S TOP FIVE ITNESS LOCATIONS (in no particular order): 1. The ruins of Fatehpur Sikri 2. The atrium of the Loreto Day School, Sealdah, Kolkata 3. Beneath the Bo tree in Bodhgaya. 4. Taj Mahal (duh) 5. The queue outside Eden Gardens cricket pitch on gameday. Ta-da!
• Grand Unified Theory of Itness: Kolkata.

That's that. Grandma and Devereaux aside, I'm still not that happy that the countdown is at 13. But, is it better to feel stuffed after a meal, or to leave a little itch of hunger so that you enjoy the next meal that much more? I know I'll be back to Kolkata, and by then I'll be starved.

Brian

Only in India, Part Two

As our time in India is drawing nearer to a close everyday, we can’t help but reminisce. I (Theresa) have decided to share a few of my memories and experiences in India that make me laugh, smile, or sigh and say: “Only in India!”

• There is a man who sits in a wheelchair outside the sweet shop near our flat. I give him a sweet whenever I go into the shop, but he is happy to see me whether I give him something or not. He never asks me for anything, which is a welcome change from the posse of young girls who live on our block and plead incessantly, “Auntie, one rupee!” or “Chipspenchocolate!” And that’s to say nothing of the several erstwhile suitors-passing-by who ask, “Will you marry me?”

• Everyone pushes and shoves each other out of lines and subway cars. It’s ridiculous. And it’s not just kids, it’s adults – people old enough not to want anyone to know their age. Before exiting the subway trains, they wait with their noses pressed to the door. As soon as the doors open, they burst through the crowd of platform passengers and sprint to the subway gate. Then the battle for first place begins, complete with kindergarten-esque budging, shoving and squeezing. It’s funny how often the madness of the moment makes the mob blind to the unencumbered gate three feet away which I pass through uninhibited.

• Instead of going to the bathroom or someplace private to get rid of phlegm, men and women (phlegm-hacking knows no gender) choose to clear their throats and spit anywhere. The streets, the buses, shops, anywhere. I hate this phlegm-hacking army, so in order to tolerate it, I rate the depth and grossness of the guttural sounds.
Hguaagh...pit-hew: 4.1. Weak. Better luck next time. HGHGHGHHHHHUUUUUAAAHHGGGGHHH! PHITH-EW! Ten! Ten!

• The worst is when they don’t spit. Ew.

• Calcutta’s temperature has been steadily declining (Hallelujah!). Yesterday, the temperature was about 70 degrees, but the students in Brian’s class complained that the classroom was too cold. They demanded that he turn off the fan. The newspaper has warned people that the demand for power (and thus, the chance of blackouts) will increase due to this “nip in the air.” Bring out the winter jacket! Strangely enough, as the Kolkatans were braving the cold air, I got a mild case of heat exhaustion!

• Every day I treat Pinky, a 8-year-old Rainbow girl who has a cut on her middle finger. This morning, she didn’t come to get it bandaged. I assumed that her teacher wouldn’t let her leave class to come up anymore because the cut was healing. As I descended the stairs, Pinky leapt in front of me and thrust her middle finger proudly in the air. I chuckled and resisted the natural urge to feel insulted by this action. What a cutie.

• I had the best shower of my life recently. I was in the Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal, riding an elephant bareback. My showerhead: the elephant’s trunk. You can’t find that kind of luxury at Menard’s!

• While an average businessman of Kolkata wears dress slacks, a shirt and tie, a standard laborer or shopkeeper wears a lungi, which is basically a man-skirt. They’re like sarongs, but in manly tones of blue and black plaid. The lungis themselves are silly by American standards, but when paired with rolled-up, belly-baring tank tops, the image becomes purely hilarious. Who knows, maybe in a couple years the style will hit the USA, and men from Mankato will strut down to Hiniker Pond in a skirt and sports-bra.

• To our delight, the cutest family in the world lives next door to us and looks over us. When we met them, Thakur Das (the father/husband) proudly introduced us to his wife and daughters. “This…mommy!” he said, pointing to his wife, trying mightily to use the correct English vocabulary. Next, he pointed to the twelve-year-old girl next to him. “This… BIG baby!” Finally, his hand shifted to the shy six-year-old hiding behind her sister. “This… LITTLE baby!” We have since learned that Big Baby’s real name is Jaya, but Little Baby remains Little Baby because she is too shy to tell us her real name.

• Due to a shortage of proper public toilets, the men here urinate whenever and wherever they feel the urge. It is uncommon to walk one hundred feet without seeing a man turned towards the wall, doing his business. I will be glad to return home where this isn’t a common sight. Nonetheless, it is amusing to take a picture of a monument, for instance, only to realize after developing the film that I’ve captured anywhere from one to three men having pee-pee time at the entrance gate.

- Theresa

P.S. Thanks for the help, Brian. You are my favorite person on earth, apart from Bobby Richter. Come on, he has a yacht.

A Third Conversation

I know that you remember my post from about a month ago called "Two Conversations." It was the one in which you fell in love with Puja, one of my Class 8 Rainbow students. Yeah, that one: the one that has sent you back to this blog repeatedly hoping to read more about HER and much less about uninteresting me.

Well, I had another sticks-in-the-mind-as-well-as-the-heart-and-refuses-to-leave conversation the other day, and it related to Puja. Allow me to share.

It was the eve of the school's post-Holiday re-commencement, and I was in the school kitchen flipping chapattis over the gas stove. You know, nothing unusual. I recall being particularly proficient that night, flipping with expertise and very rarely burning one of the delicious round discs of unleavened bread. In fact, I made a century that night: a century of chapattis. I finished with 120 chapattis, not out. (And all of you non-cricket-lovers will just have to languish at the fact that you don't get the joke of the last two sentences. HA!)

After my impressive flipping display, Sister Cyril called me into her office to chat. For the girls, Sister's office means big trouble. For me, it usually means another new work assignment. Tonight, however, Sister sincerely just wanted to chat. How nice.

SC: "So, Brian, how is everything going for you here?"

BH: "It's fantastic, Sister! I'm having so much fun. I just made a century of chapatis - I'm on top of the world."

SC: "Great. And how are you coming with your teaching? Who exactly are you with right now?"

BH: "I'm still preparing some Class 8s for their English exams; I've picked up some Class 7 girls who need help in Maths; and of course I'm playing with the Rainbows whenever I get a chance."

SC: "Oh, that's right, you're with Puja Das and Teresa Raphael and them. That's great. How are you finding Puja? How are her studies coming along?"

BH: "Puja works incredibly hard. She takes everything very seriously, and hardly lets a sentence go by without insisting that I make her understand. Moreso than the other girls, Puja really wants to understand, rather than simply to memorize what she needs for the exam."

SC: "Well we think she has some brain damage, you know."

BOOM.

BH: " - incomprehensible muttering - "

SC: "Well you know when we found her she was eating clay. That's how impoverished she was. It was just her and her little brother Toofan. You've met Toofan now, I suppose."

BH: "Yeah, he was here over the holiday."

SC: "Well he was just a baby; Puja was maybe 3 or 4. Their father had gone, and their mother had died giving birth to Toofan. We had no idea how long they had been living like that."

I'm not exactly sure why, but here in India I've had a lot of out-of-body experiences in the middle of conversations like these. You know the feeling - the same one you got in eighth grade the first time you uttered "Will you go out with me?" or "Wanna go steady?" (depending on your era) to your crush. Although it's you saying the words, it feels as if you're hearing them from someone else, watching the scene from a few feet away, reflecting on things as they happen, rather than making them happen. My previous experiences of this sort have all come from being intensely nervous. In India it's not nerves that cause me to float out of my body, but rather the soul-clenching power and importance of the topics in the depths of which I am swimming every day.

SC: “For the first year or so, Puja never said a word. She always mumbled ‘Aaaahh ohhhhh’ and things like this but would not speak with words, even to the other Rainbow girls.”

SC: “You know, when your brain doesn’t get any nourishment at all, there are bound to be problems. We couldn’t figure out how to get her speaking, until finally one night we made a breakthrough.”

Imagine the following scene. I like to.

SC: “I was sitting in my office with some of the Rainbow girls just playing with them. I had out my little Dictaphone, you know, and I was letting them speak into it and hear their voices. They loved it, you know.”

SC: “And then Puja, as determined and feisty as ever, came to the front insisting in her ‘Ahhhs’ and ‘Ohhhs’ that she get her turn to use the recorder. So, I let her speak into it, and she did her usual mumbling, you know, and gave it to me to play back for her.”

Focus now, this is the big moment.

SC: “Brian, you wouldn’t believe it, but when Puja heard herself on that Dictaphone it was like something clicked in her brain. I could see in her eyes that she realized that the noises she made were not the same as those of the other girls. And that was the moment. From then on, she started speaking and improving her vocabulary every day. The words were there inside her, you know, they were just waiting to come out.”

BH: “Wow, that’s incredible. I would never have known. Her English, especially her spoken English, is just as good as her classmates’.”

SC: “Oh, that’s great.”

The words were there inside her, you know, they were just waiting to come out.

I love that image: Puja finding herself there amongst her new brothers and sisters, looking inside and discovering a new way to communicate. And now, almost 12 years later, she’s on the verge of graduating from one of Kolkata’s most well-respected schools – a credential which will undoubtedly (with Puja’s determination) lead her to a life that would otherwise have been pure fantasy.

Phew. I know that a good teacher isn’t supposed to have favorites, but I can’t help the feeling that Puja was the one girl I was destined to meet in India, to transform a library-load of human rights issues into a face, an array of opinions into a person.

I’m getting long-winded (AGAIN). It’s the Brian-story syndrome. I can’t tell any anecdote, no matter how tiny, without a disproportionately huge amount of back story. Not that this is a tiny anecdote, of course.

I still haven’t written about the rest of the conversation, in which Sister explains the following:

• Puja’s older sister’s tragic aneurysm and death. This older sister (whose name escapes me at the moment) appeared shortly after Puja’s entry into Loreto.
• The life-threatening cyst on baby Toofan’s back, the repeated reports from doctors that “He’ll just die anyway,” the subsequent kidney removal surgery that saved him, his incredible talents and Puja’s limitless admiration for him.
• My role as the only “somebody” Puja and Toofan have in their lives (apart from Sister Cyril and everyone at Loreto, of course). Why she will make an exception in her “no individual gifts or preference” policy so that I can write letters and send photos to Puja after I return to the US.

AND

• Why I should write a song and perform it at the Children’s Day festivities on Monday (today – more on that in another post).

After an hour or more of heavy chatting, I realized that I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. I thanked Sister for what I called “a feast of insight” (hey, I’ve gotta stay on her good side) and dashed out to make sure that my chapattis hadn’t all vanished.

Thankfully, there were four left.

-Brian

A Chronicle of my Dreamland Love Affair with Rani Mukherjee

Throughout my travels in India, I've had a lot of success relieving "who the heck are you and why are you in India" awkwardness by showcasing my knowledge of Bollywood films and personalities. I introduce myself to strangers and new students alternately as Shah Rukh, Aamir or Saif Ali Khan, and always insist that I am married to or dating Preity Zinta, Rani Mukherjee or Aishwarya Rai. At the very least, these comments produce laughter and an easing of spirit from my fellow conversants. At the most, they lead to hours-long discussions about favorites-and-not-favorites, who's-dating-whom gossip, sing along sessions and (among the most gullible) the story of how my humble midwestern American life became intertwined with the lives of India's heart-throbs.

All of my students, to my delight, now call me "Shah Rukh Sir." They still insist that I sing or dance to their favorite Hindi film songs every day. But lately, there has been an exciting new development in my faux-Bollywood life... and it is the impetus for this article. I'm having a well-publicized dreamland love affair with the number one heroine of Bollywood, the Bengali-born beauty herself, the one and only Rani Mukherjee.

It's true. Or, it was true. Read on.

At first it was completely innocent. I occasionally mentioned Rani's name when asked if I had a girlfriend, but more often I would profess my love for the younger Preity Zinta, Shah Rukh's love interest in my two favorite Hindi films. Then, while my students went home for the Durga Puja holiday and I jumped off mountains and rode elephants in Nepal, Cupid (or was it Puck?) came to sprinkle my life with a little love-dust. Rani started appearing in my students' dreams. Her mission: to keep them informed of her feelings for me.

November 5th. Dream number one, reported by Joycelyn Rahman:

"Sir, last night Rani came in my dream and she told me that she is in love with you. I'm not telling lies, Shah Rukh Sir. Rani loves you!"

Wowee!!!!!!! I was thrilled. Destiny, for once, was on my side. Hindi film stars don't just pop up in dreams proclaiming their love for Wisconsinite teachers every day; this was big news. I instantly told everyone in the school.

RANI

November 7th. Dream number two, again reported by Joycelyn Rahman:

"Sir, Rani came again last night. She said that she loves you but only if you cut your beard and look like a nice boy. I'm telling true. You need to cut your beard."

Okay, this is obviously influenced by Joycelyn's dislike for my beard, I thought. Rani surely doesn't mind my manly bristle. Right? Right?

Meanwhile, several students informed me that only if a dream comes three times will it come true. Joycelyn, the 15-year-old holder of my hopes and aspirations, needed to see Rani again.

November 8th. Dream number three, reported by Joycelyn Rahman, Teresa Shaw, Natasha Marcelline, and Angela Ryle:

"Rani came, sir. She said she hates you."

Ouch. Big ouch. And to think that I actually believed them the first two times! I thought destiny was speaking to me through the unconscious mental wanderings of my students! I thought Rani and I had a real chance! I had already begun Hindi and Bengali language lessons, dance class and film school. It was meant to be, wasn't it!?

Now I know that all along it was a vicious plot by the student body to crush my soul.

What about the chalkboard game we played, where the phrase "Rani loves Brian" scored 86 points out of 100, the highest score anyone had ever seen!? I know that people think she's actually in love with Abhishek Bachchan, but come on! "Rani loves Abhishek" only scores 80 points!

Today. Dream number four, reported by the entirety of Class 8 Silver and Class 7 Orange:

"Sir, Rani came again. She said she will bomb you."


BOOM. Thanks, girls.


Brian