Month: March 2014

A routine de-stoning

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I had first learned about gallstones in China. When my husband and I showed up to teach English at an obscure college in Jiangxi province, we were promptly taken to an assembly line-style clinic for an extremely comprehensive round of medical examinations. I guess the school figured there was no point in going to the trouble of importing English teachers all the way from America if they were just going to get sick and die on them before the end of the school year. So, our boss accompanied us into each room along the corridor: make a fist for the blood test, pull up your shirt for the EKG, lay on your side for the ultrasound. Her presence was a bit awkward, but her limited English was helpful since no one else at the clinic spoke any, and our Chinese wasn’t good enough yet to understand most of what was happening. When it came to the ultrasound, the nurse rolled the jellied sensor around on my side and then began pointing as the fuzzy image on the screen with apparent concern. She was pointing out the problem to my boss of course, not to me.

“What is it?” I asked. “What is she saying?” My boss furrowed her brow. “Uh… it is a kind of disease. I am not sure how to say in English.” Fear began to gnaw open a space through my stomach, but that didn’t show up on the screen. “Well, what kind of disease?” I asked again. My boss was thinking. “Mmmm… my father has this kind of disease. He is very elderly. I will look up the words and tell you later. Maybe tomorrow.” Maybe tomorrow? We moved onto the next test in the next room, and I worried over whatever terrible thing the nurse thought she had found in my abdomen until the next day when my pestering texts and phone calls finally elicited a response from my boss: gallstones.

That didn’t seem too scary. I left it alone, not convinced that there was any truth behind it anyway. What could they really tell from such a scrambled, nondescript image? ThThen a few months ago I was under the jellied ultrasound wand again, here in India, investigating what seems now to be completely unrelated stomach pain. “Gallstones,” the Indian doctor told me in English. This time he pointed them out to me on the crystal clear image enlarged on the screen in front of me. No getting out of it this time.

I began telling my neighbors about the upcoming operation. Most of them were really worried about it, since nearly everyone knows someone who’s died in hospital. There’s very little understanding of anatomy or healthcare, so the reasons why some operations work and others don’t remain a mystery. Some people wanted to take me to see their doctor and get a second opinion. Others wanted to stay at the hospital with me. “Your husband can just stay home and I’ll be with you every minute while you’re there!” one friend told me. The most restful recovery my Indian friends can imagine is one surrounded by a great cloud of concerned friends and relatives, so the idea of my husband and I “alone” in the hospital pained them. Someone else confidently told me that there was no need for surgery when eating enough papaya would be sufficient to get rid of the stones.

An old grandmother I know took me to meet her son, who promptly took a matchbox from off the shelf and showed me the kidney stone he passed a few months ago. What’s the appropriate response when a stranger shows you the lump of sandstone that he passed through his body? I raised my eyebrows with an appreciative, “Oh,” and inquired about the treatment that had produced this unique keepsake.

Another family had a grandmother visiting from the village who I had never met before. When I told them about the upcoming surgery, she related the story of her sister-in-law’s sister’s somebody who had gotten surgery (though it was unclear by the end exactly what kind of surgery it had been). “She didn’t survive that,” the grandmother concluded with sagely detachment, staring ahead of her. “Nope, she’s dead.” I felt like laughing, but the family seemed embarrassed by their relative’s unsettling anecdote. Her daughter began explaining to the woman what a good friend I was and how long they had known me. Her expression didn’t change, but the grandmother seemed to take the hint. “Pray to God,” she said, turning to me. “If He wills it, all will go well.”

The morning of the surgery, I was feeling a bit nervous in spite of the rational knowledge that this was a fairly safe procedure. A man with a folder in his hand arrived in the waiting room. “Aiye,” he said, and turned to leave. “Come.” We followed. He took us upstairs to the general ward, where two nurses were tasked with “helping” me change clothes: one of them dressed me like an invalid doll, and the other observed. A little while later, another group of nurses and doctors came in to give various shots and start an IV of antibiotics and then glucose. We could communicate well enough in Hindi, but there was rarely explanation or warning of what was coming beforehand. We read books and listened to the sounds of Indian music videos and soap operas wafting through the dividing curtain between my bed and the rest of the ward until eventually, another person appeared at the foot of my bed: “Aiye.” I followed her downstairs, took off my shoes outside of a siding door, walked barefoot into the operating room, and laid down on the table, awake. Watching the surgeons make their final preparations next to me was unnerving. I felt as though the operation was going to start at any moment with me still lying there fully conscious! The anesthesiologist noticed my agitation and asked why I was so nervous. I explained that in my country, the patient never sees the inside of the operating theater because they’re already out cold by that point. He laughed and assured me that I “wouldn’t know anything” while the surgery was going on. I had the irrational fear that the drug might not be able to knock me out of such a hyper-vigilant state, but no sooner had I watched the syringe empty into my arm than my eyes went out of focus and I fell asleep wondering how long it would take to fall asleep.

For some reason, I only spoke in Hindi while I was coming off the anesthesia, even in response to A.’s questions in English. While I was still coming to, the doctor called A. into another room where my gallbladder was sitting in a bowl. The doctor sliced it open in front of him, dug out six gallstones, and handed them to him in a plastic bag.

After a day of painful, nauseous recovery and a night in the ward, we headed back to the slum. I was still feeling too weak to do much of anything, but our neighbors took such good care of us. One family made lunch for us, and after coming to visit in the afternoon, decided to cater our dinner as well. When we tried to protest, the mother put on her stern face and waved away our concerns with her hand as she started resolutely down the stairs to go home and begin cooking. The next day, our landlady downstairs graciously made roti for us since my abs still weren’t up to kneading the flour. “Why shouldn’t I do it? We all live in one house!” she said. We have felt very loved by all the help and the stream of visitors.

And we had joked about what to do with the gallstones, but now it’s become obvious that the real purpose was for show-and-tell. After making their inquiries after my health and dispensing advice on what I should avoid eating or doing while I recovered, people always analyzed the stones in the plastic bag, or if we had forgotten to offer, they would ask to see them. Maybe I need to find a matchbox for them.

 

Scenes from daily life

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After coming back from celebrating the Hindu festival of Holi at a friend’s house on Monday: LOTS of food, and lots of colored powder being thrown around and smeared on everybody’s faces. We missed most of the giant color fight going on outside our hosts’ house, but on the walk home we saw plenty of people who were stained purple, pink, or green from head to toe. The streets are still splashed with color from the craziness.
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Dal, spices, chili peppers, and fruit sitting on our kitchen counter.
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Filling up our water drum for the day. This photo is actually a few months old– these days it’s gotten too hot to wear a shawl, even in the morning!
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Notice the two men at the very top of the photo, changing out the billboard: no ropes, no harnesses… and this photo wasn’t even taken from ground level.
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Sunset over the slum. The small black dots in the sky are kites.

Am I Pretending to be Poor?

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A few days ago I had the uncomfortable experience of traveling back and forth between what felt like two entirely different worlds. During the day, I found myself in the middle of an impromptu and chaotic voter ID registration blitz at a local school, helping to fill out forms for people who can’t read or write and who—in the absence of any birth certificate or school records—may be applying for a document which will legally prove their existence for the first time in their lives. It was noisy, crowded, and disorganized as people scrambled around to get their applications in order, struggling with an inane paper system that could have been easily streamlined with a basic computer, and receiving little information from the disdainful government officials responsible.Then in the evening, I headed over to the upscale shopping district of the city to meet for coffee with another expat. When I spend time with other expats, they often tell me about the places they’ve found to buy imported brands, peanut butter, organic products, and even bacon, of all things. I can’t even remember the last time I ate pork; we gave it up after we decided to move into a Muslim neighborhood (for the sake of relationship rather than for the sake of any kind of ritual purity). But it’s not like I don’t enjoy peanut butter or organic food! If I were still living in the West I would be highly interested in figuring out where to buy organic produce, or stylish shoes, for example. But here, the thought never even crosses my mind. When none of my neighbors can afford to buy anything besides the conventionally-grown vegetables at the local market, when those same fresh veggies are available just walking distance from my house, and when we cook every meal from scratch, how could I possibly afford to travel to another part of the city to buy my food at an expensive, indoor shop where it would cost ten times what it does on the side of the road? And where would I wear jeans or any other article of clothing besides my loose-fitting salwar kameez suits when I have joined a community in which women scarcely leave the house without their heads covered? In this context, jeans would read as a socio-political statement, or maybe worse, as a cry for inappropriate attention. Many foreigners are doing important and compassionate work here in India, and they aren’t living extravagantly; by the standards of their home country, all of these things they buy are extremely cheap and reasonable. Many of them work alongside highly educated, wealthy Indians to whom Western clothing and customs are entirely acceptable. But for me it’s different. That kind of lifestyle would be far out of reach for all of my friends, and it would separate me from them.

After coffee, my husband and I wandered around, enjoying the spacious sidewalks and temperate weather. We passed by huge, glass storefronts with mannequins behind them sporting either Western-style designer ensembles or luxurious saris worth hundreds of dollars, never mind rupees. We walked past the flashy mall which a neighbor had once described to us after a family window-shopping outing as a wonderful place “where it’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter,” and where they had been fascinated by the “moving staircases” but were too terrified to ride them from one floor to another.

The people who milled around us now were likely unimpressed by the escalators inside: they all wore Western clothing, carried smart phones, and drove cars and fancy motorbikes. Probably they were more drawn to the Western labels and fashions which have become status markers in Indian society, helping people to project a cosmopolitan and cultured image. From inside the mall, brightly-lit signs for KFC and Dominoes Pizza welcomed patrons into upscale restaurants which certainly would not be associated with those same signs in the small towns that I remember as pit-stops on the long American road trips of my youth.

In a way, all of this felt familiar—hadn’t I also worn Western clothes, carried an iphone, driven a car, and gone out with friends in my previous life? All of those things had been so normal in America, but here they were alien experiences. I have never shopped at a mall in India. I have lived in this city for a year and a half without ever seeing most of the coffee shops, stores, bars, and restaurants where wealthy, educated Indians in my city hang out. Instead I have been to village weddings and Muslim saints’ graves, outdoor markets and public hospitals, train stations and slums.

It’s ironic, because actually I would rather go out for gelato on a special occasion than spend hours making buffalo biryani at home to celebrate something important. And I don’t particularly enjoy Indian weddings or visiting saints’ graves as a leisure activity, but I accompany my friends to these kinds of places because it’s what they do for fun, on the fairly rare occasions that they go anywhere at all. I’m not Indian, I’m not a Muslim, I’m not from the village, and I come from a wealthy, educated background, so it’s strange when I run into another expat or an Indian coworker at an NGO. They’re wearing Western clothes and talking about the city’s nightlife and checking facebook. They’re puzzled by my bangles and Indian dress, and my apparent ignorance about the city’s restaurants and bars; it’s hard to answer the unspoken questions about why I don’t do all of the “normal” things that they already associate with my culture. Why am I emulating people who are lower-class and “backward”? No one aspires to move into a slum, any more than someone would aspire to move into the projects, or into a trailer park, if they had another option. Am I just putting on some kind of act, pretending to be poor?

It’s a question worth asking, in order to make sure I’m not losing or hiding myself in the midst of all this radical “adjustment” across culture, religion, and socioeconomic class. But I really believe the answer to that question is, No, I’m not pretending to be someone I’m not. I’ve just chosen to make a lot of choices in my life based on a desire to relate to people who are different from me and to meet them on their own turf. That means that the superficial aspects of my life—food, clothing, social habits, etc.–often reflect the culture to which I am adapting rather than my own preferences or sensibilities. It means that what was foreign becomes familiar and what was familiar becomes foreign. But my hope is that the essential core of who I am and what I’m about will remain unchanged; merely translated into a new language, or converted into a new medium.

I know that my choices are strange, but my old life just doesn’t seem normal either, anymore. In America, jeans and English and a high school education don’t make you privileged, but here they do. In India, Western habits and food and clothing are all luxury commodities in themselves; the English language is a status symbol. I feel uncomfortable in the wealthy areas of the city because when I go there, the poor—the people I have lived among for the past two years—are still part of the scene, but as rickshaw pullers, children selling balloons on the side of the road, beggars entreating passing shoppers for change. I have begun learning to see things from their perspective, so it feels strange and wrong when I go to these places and feel that I’m being grouped in again with the wealthy shoppers, unaware and uninvolved, instead of with the poor on the sidelines.

Perhaps the main reason these situations feel uncomfortable for me is that they actually force a sort of crisis of identity: where do I fit, after all? Me, the foreigner with access to nearly limitless resources and opportunity, who owns a laptop and an ipod and a facebook account, but who lives without AC, speaks Hindi, and spends more of her time with illiterate village migrants in a slum than with people of her own race, religion, nationality, or socioeconomic background?

An outsider on the inside, an insider on the outside.

New to India, and yet more acquainted with its harsh realities than most of the middle- and upper-class Indians who have spent their whole lives here.

Integrated into the slum, and yet a total stranger to the worldview that orders my neighbors’ universe.

Sharing in my neighbors’ experiences, and yet completely unversed in the tragedy, suffering, and desperation that has shaped so much of their lives.

I’m still trying to find my place in this society. So my life feels strange to myself, when I bump into my old life unexpectedly in an expat or a wealthy Indian. Yet again, I find that life here forces me to learn more about myself than about anyone or anything else.

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