Perspective
What I was not prepared for was the absolutely overwhelming poverty.
Millions of people, sunburned and stained black from diesel fumes, were living along main streets throughout the towns. These makeshift, ramshackle cities of the destitute, seemingly made from piles of garbage, greasy plastic sheets hung up to create tents, animals, children, small, smoldering dung fires, neighborhoods without a name, known only by the familiar highways and byways of despair, are where too many people made their home. I wanted to steal the children playing along the pavement in oncoming traffic. There was a little girl, maybe 6, but painfully small for her age, wearily carrying a newborn on her hip, begging for money. A bit of chocolate and a ten rupee note and her smile was impressive, like any other child, but I couldn’t have given her much more than a moment’s reprieve from this, the harshest kind of existence. Jaded tourists say that it is a scam, that the begging waifs are hired by an overlord, who collects a tidy sum at the end of the day, ruthlessly exploiting their big eyes and empty open hands to clutch at our American conscience, but even if it is true, how else are they supposed to live?
At Ranakapur, in the shadow of the most impressive Jain temple, there was an attendant in the ladies room who couldn’t have been older than 5. When I walked in, she gave me a hearty “Hello!” then continued her work, as she swept the dirty water from one end of the filthy tile floor to the other. Standing tall, she barely came to my knee, her hands were lined and rough white from the water, her eyes bright but serious. As I came out of the toilet, she accosted me. She opened her tiny, old lady hand – which was filled with folded 10-rupee notes. I didn’t have any money; I had already given it all away. I said, “I don’t have anything.” And opened my hands wide to show her. She pointed to my empty purse, hanging from my hip. “In purse!” I opened it, and she peered in and when she was satisfied that I was as poor as she, she nodded in sympathy and patted my hand. It is Charles Dickens all over again, but this isn’t the last century, and this isn’t England. It is a touristy stop for Westerners to gawk at the devotion of pilgrims past and pay a high tax to use their video cameras, money enough to feed all the families begging around the complex for maybe two months, hoping the American dollar could stretch just a bit farther, but it won’t – because the folks back home need to be bored by their traveling fool friends’ video recollections.
I was sick the entire time I was gone and for several weeks after. I don’t know why, but it might be because I was kissing babies like a politician, diaperless in their dirty little bundles, with their tiny bird bones and weak heartbeats, eyes and mouths crusted shut with thirst and exposure. I tore off my jacket, pockets filled with cookies and coins, and handed it to a teenaged girl, doing back flips in a busy intersection. She put on the jacket and ate the cookies and flipped back and over again in appreciation. I looked deep into the eyes of little boys, maple sugar brown and sharply intelligent, their skin like teak stretched over their bones, so skinny they had looked as if they’d never eaten. I am afraid there is not enough food in the world to feed them and I am also afraid that not enough people care that they will starve and die, and that even if they die soon it will only be making room for more and even more.
In Agra, at a traffic light, there were three small boys, shirtless in the freezing northern morning fog, using their shirts to wipe the dust from drivers’ windshields, pointing into their mouths as if we needed a visual aid to ascertain that they were starving. I wanted to pull them into my car and take them to the hotel. I wanted to plunge them clothes and all into a steamy, warm bubble bath, make shampoo horns, wash the dirt and the dust and the diesel and the caste off their worn out baby bodies. I wanted to untangle the girls’ long hair with a wide toothed comb, using oil bought at the local chemist, with the picture of the beautiful lady in a sari on the bottle; I’d use some to slick back the boys’glossy black hair into pompadours, with little curls coming down the front. I would add a touch of black eyeliner, as middle class Indian mothers love to do, making the babies eyes smolder with hot baby babyness. I could dress them all in plush footie pajamas, in soft easter egg colors, yellow, lavender. Zip them up to the top and snap the collars shut to make them feel safe. Order banana splits and macaroni and cheese and hot dogs and broccoli and potato chips and grape juice and chocolate milk from room service. Watch Bollywood videos and jump on the bed and then my dream just kind of stops there because these are not my children to bathe or clothe or feed or read to or snuggle or love and they have parents still who would be worried about them and be afraid for them and I have no right to them at all.
Still, I helped as much as I could. Shopping made me sick, and I gave my money to the kids instead. But it wasn’t only kids who needed it. The adults were just as needy, yet they were reluctant to beg unless they were mothers with children or lepers on the marble steps of the temples. Their homeless people make our homeless people look like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie. And unlike our homeless, they are not mentally ill, so they don’t have that hazy wet shine that paranoid schizophrenia gives you to take the edge off living on the street. I am not sure what drugs they do, but unlike America, where drug abuse is a major contributor to the destitute, in India, it is more about dharma.
What I understand of dharma is your life is the lesson, and you are bound to live it. Which sounds simple, but I couldn’t ever have stayed in the life I was born into. It would have killed me. But there, they let it kill them, because they have no choices and they keep on going because that is all there is. And I thought I had problems but I have no problems at all really, since I can eat anything, anytime I want. I have a bed and a home. I can ignore strangers around me for I have no need to ask them for money or food. My clothes are clean and even if I sleep in them tonight they will be clean tomorrow, because my bed is not made of dirt and rocks, and I will not have to keep one eye open and one hand on my cricket bat because no jackals will join me in my bed tonight. There are no ticks on my head burrowing into my scalp. I am never cold at night and I’ve never had a sunburn. I have limbs that are long and strong and money in my pocket that I don’t have to pay the rent with because I am my own landlord and don’t have to pay rent if I don’t want to. I have water that runs hot and cold and even a tv but not TiVo. All the things I have I cannot even begin properly list because there are so many things, so many little luxuries, perks, privileges, extras, etceteras that I can’t remember them, since there are so many taken for granted they have become totally invisible to me.
Before we left, I was depressed, angry, felt sorry for myself because even though I have all this, I am utterly, despicably, ungrateful and even envious of those who have more than me that they don’t even notice because they have so much. Now I know, I am the luckiest motherfucker on the planet…I wish I could click my heels together. Do a jig. Or some really fast crumpin. When I look at the bloated baby nearly dead of starvation, I can’t hold onto my petty thoughts that fill my head constantly…”Elizabeth was such a bitch to me when I saw her and that is bullshit… next time I see her – you know I am going to say something!”– I can’t keep up this ridiculous meaningless chatter in the face of all this need. How dare I think I can do anything to change it? How can I do anything but suffer alongside these children, empty my bags of candy and fruit and coins and pens, give out all the chocolate and money I have, dream of endless banquets of junk food and junk tv, hide them in my roomy and well stocked heart, just lie in my bed at night and turn my wishes into water, clean for drinking, hot for washing, flowing without interruption from gleaming, porcelain taps, white cakes of soap in dishes for them to wash their beautiful faces and too small for their age hands.
I wish them classrooms, good books and nice teachers to teach and read aloud, eyelasses for the ones who need them, operations for those whose are overdue, proper winter clothes where all the buttons button and keep the cold Delhi fog to its lonesome, gloomy self, shoes that fit for running away from the cars that can’t see them, all the hot honeyed gulab jamun and paneer tikka and fresh lime soda and hot mix and vadai sambar and chow mein and fudge cake and quesadillas and fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the world.