Going Away Feet

The last two days have been stressful. This is the month of Ramzan and the children are being called to attend a daily 'Qayda' or religious instruction class that clashes with our class timings. All our star students either arrive very late for class, panting, or miss class completely. The kite-mad boys who have to be dragged to school make little attempt to attend, because their more serious friends are not coming. And Laxmi and I wait anxiously in the afternoon hours, fanning ourselves in days that have turned humid and hot once again, waiting with maps and the precious football, to explain night and day on planet earth, where Faizabad is, and the intricacies of the solar system.

We have encountered the complications of sustaining any attempt at educating first-generation learners.

Farida, short of thirteen, has decided she is in love with a boy called Chhotu and has no use for a class where teachers tell girls to first become strong and financially independent before they get married. Rahela and her sisters and brother are notable absentees. Our most loyal follower, Razia, most noticed for her big front teeth, is absent too - she is running a fever. We joke with the children, hand out work, pat heads for good effort, but all the time our eyes return to the gate. Is anyone else going to show up? I secretly feel a pang for Pratibha Miss. She is the Anganwadi helper who used to go to the children's homes to shepherd them for half an hour of Hindi and English alphabets before they began attending our undoubtedly more glamorous class. Now I know how she must have felt!

Our children are going away from us all the time, all over the place, and there's precious little we can do to stop it.

Then I notice that someone has left their footwear behind. Typically, it is a slipper each of two different pairs, exactly what a rag-picker manages to assemble from daily foragings. For no explicable reason, the sight brings me comfort. They will be back. Of course. And I had better learn to manage the extremes of a heart that fills with liquid love every time I see mis-matched slippers.

Phulshan

The children were delirious with joy. We had bought them a football. In the first indication of their natural sporting talent, the older boys kicked the football in straight, shooting arcs that made me fear for the neighbouring windows. Since the class of rag-picker children I teach with my assistant Laxmi has moved to a tin shed in my home here in Faizabad, I have to be careful of what family members and neighbours will say about our more abandoned efforts.

Anyway, the football reminded them that they were after all Bengali/Assamese kids, with football in their blood. So grateful were they for this gift, that they volunteered to trim our overgrown lawn the next day. "We will cut the grass and carry it away," said Hashim. "We will clear up the whole garden," said Al-ameen. I didn't really set too much store by their promises, but there they were the next day, all of them, busily trimming the grass, carrying away bricks and stones that littered their playing area. I had gone out and arrived to find them busy at work under Laxmi's watchful eyes.

"What hard-working children!" I exclaimed. "Have they cleared up all this?" I marveled, noticing a new boy, a small, dark child with chipped front teeth. "Who is this?" I asked, smiling at the boy. "He is bad!" said Razia. "Don't let him come to your school!" "What?" I said. "How can he be bad?" "He will say 'Randi!" said Ramisa. "Oh, he actually worked the hardest of all," said Laxmi. "He came along with them, and began working. I don't even know his name, but he's really sweet."

"No, he's not!" protested Mumtaz. "He's bad, and he won't come to your school, just see. You will give him a bag and books, and he will just disappear." "We'll see," I said. Losing a litle of our investment evey now and then with some child who drops out is an occupational hazard with our class, we have found. Families move to different neighbourhoods, parents decide that even the two hours their child spends away from sifting garbage is too costly for the family, children get too used to being unfettered on the street...there's plenty of reasons to lose our students.

"What's your name," I asked the chipped-toothed kid. "Phulshan," he replied, a name I had never heard before, and had to have repeated several times. "If he begins coming to school, I will stop coming," said Hashim darkly. I was perplexed. What had the little kid done to inspire such dislike among the whole class of them?

Over the next few weeks, Phulshan became one of our favourite figures among the littlest ones. Always dressed in the same drab grey clothes, he showed great happiness at being part of the class, got over his hurt at the other children's rejection of him, and seemed to be getting along fine. Then he missed school for a few days.

When we were going to celebrate Independence Day on the 15th of August, I told all the children to bring along every one who had ever come to our class. "Tell Phulshan!" i reminded them, and sure enough, Phulshan came to our Independence Day function wearing a new, turquoise blue vest and shorts. When I had the children fight with toy swords in pairs, he had to be dragged to the front, he was so shy at coming out before all the children. And yet, surprisingly, he fought with great finesse, almost like a true fencer. "A big hand for Phulshan!" I said, and all the kids clapped. When we were distributing sweets, his elder brother came forward and took some too. "Phulshan will attend regularly from tomorrow," he promised. "And I will come too."

But that was the last we saw of them both.

'Randi!'

In the fourth month of my class with ragpicker children, named Sahriday 'Balwadi' or children's centre to distinguish it from an actual school, we are still grappling with the term 'Randi!', meaning 'Whore!', the favourite term of abuse among two, three, five and six year olds.

They listened to me with wide-eyed attention the very first time I told them it was a bad word and must not be used in class. along with other, worse ones. However, every few minutes, there would be small fights like minor cracker explosions among the kids, with 'Randi!' being bandied about like crazy. It appeared that this particular term was very dear, that it tripped off their tongues almost without their knowing, since it was so natural for them to utter.

My assistant Laxmi and I did manage to make some breakthrough in the weeks of June and July. The older kids began to look shame-faced if they were caught using the word in class. We began meting out punishment. Any child who said 'Randi!' in class was promptly sent home and had to miss play time, or whatever we were doing that day. A whole culture began developing of informers - "He said 'Randi!'", and "She said 'Randi!'" became common complaints that we had to sift through with care. How could we send everyone home? "Did you just say it?" we would ask, towering above the erring child, who looked at us defiantly, while a host of voices around us confirmed, "He did!" "She did!" or, occasionally, "No, she didn't! It was Rushna!"

'Randi!' became more familiar to me and Laxmi than it had ever been in all our adult lives. Sometimes, we would turn from a mild scold to a child and hear him/her mutter, 'Randi!'. "Haven't these children learnt any other way to describe a woman?" Laxmi would sometimes ask, with equal disgust and despair.

And now we are in September, and our class has a blackboard, and is approaching the shores of civilisation. In a discussion about the children's occupation of rag-picking, we talk to them about the different zones for groups of rag-pickers within the town, and learn from them the importance of territory. "Ok, suppose you find some people from Shehenwa (across town) in your area, picking among the trash, what do you do?" I ask them.

"We fight!" says one. "We say 'Randi!'" says another.

The class erupts in full-throated laughter.

That is how far we have come. Turned the near-constant abuse and frustration they have inherited from their parents' speech into a source of humour. Small blessings, but they feel good to us.

The Throwaway Kids

Another chapter began in my continuing exploration of rootlessness, on the 25th of May, 2009. This was the day I began a class for a bunch of ragpicker children, who live near my home in Faizabad, in huts made with stretched polyester fibre sacking over frames of slender bamboo shavings. These huts are sprawled around a central hand pump - the sole water supply source for a community of nearly a hundred.

My relationship with the children began like this: I would go to the neighbourhood shop and encounter a few of them at a time, buying sweets or matches or something. I would smile and talk to them, and have the occasional answer. The locals avoided these people because they are the kind that fall into the category of 'Bangladeshi migrants' according to our more nationalist parties. In simple terms, they are Muslim families from Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh, who have lost all land and means of livelihood where they come from, and must, of necessity, come to cling on for survival in cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, and yes, even third tier towns like Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh.

Anyway, the children began noticing me from the encounters at the shop, and because I was dispensing blankets in the winter (I confess - few things feel better than to hand out those rough woolen rectangles to hands calloused and reddened with the cold!). Gradually, a pattern of greeting and smiling developed between us. As my relationship turmoil increased at home, and I began to grapple with a familiar, deep-dark-bottom-of-the-well-loneliness in an unfamiliar and often most unattractive landscape, the children began reaching out in ways that was balm for my spirit.

Having absolutely no occasion to dress up for months on end, and having completely forgotten the taste of city delicacies like chicken sandwiches (!) I would one day wear a saree in utter desperation, just to go to the market and buy a few fruits. Walking back, the bolder girls among the ragpickers would meet me half-way and declare, "You look so nice in a saree!" Since the seed of loneliness is merely a fear of not being needed or noticed by anybody at all, this form of being noticed was very welcome in my fragile state. I was grateful to the children.

And now I have a class of them among the refuse - the clear plastic disposable tumblers, plastic bags, old shoes, torn notebooks, and all manner of urban debris that forms their landscape, its contours changing with towayays and fresh loads, but depressingly similar in its basic theme of things that need to be thrown away. As I try to engage them with modeling clay and crayon, slate and chalk, mime and rhyme, sometimes the pitiful inadequacy of my work does strike me - finding a naked toddler casually handling a naked razor blade is common, or having a member of my class show off with a huge plastic bag stretched over his head. An infant is freshly bathed and placed back in the slush around the hand pump. A sick child has been having the chills and trembling for days.

But amidst all this are the individual characters of each member of the class, now clearly emerging after a couple of weeks. Some children are so engaging and show such a delightful response to everything, that it is a wrench to say bye to them! To balance these, are the characters who swear loudly and claw at each other in regular fights. Something is always bringing me back to reality. Neither my assistant Lakshmi nor I can afford to float along on a wave of warm sentiment. And yet, the reason I want to do the work at all is because of the affection and gratitude I feel for these throwaway kids, my companions in displacement.

As they pick within the garbage, they find gleaming bangles, a child's beautiful rattle, a notebook with almost new pages. "There's treasure if you look for it" is something they need to believe if they must have any enthusiasm at all for the day's tasks. I am doing all I can to believe and keep on looking.

  

The Faizabad Tigress

For weeks, the daily update about her in the newspaper was my first brush with reality. I would get up and want to know immediately if she had lived another day. Of course, at that time, I did not even know that she was 'she'. Like so much else about her, her sex too remained a mystery till her death. 

As chronicled by all the papers, she had left Pilibhit forests in UP around the 11th of November 2008, and had covered a distance of 400 km on foot, padding through riverbank forests, taking swipes at village cattle and consuming them every few days. She had nearly reached Lucknow, spending weeks in nearby Barabanki, before coming to the Kumarganj forest range in Faizabad district on December 28. There she had stayed put, and was proving very tough for the UP Forest Department to capture. They put out live bait, and she failed to show up. They tried tempting her with another tigress (remember they thought she was a tiger?) and she didn't show any interest. They concluded therefore that this young tiger had not yet reached maturity.

Meanwhile, there were umpteen reports of Forest staff who had become so frightened at the sight of her that one had clambered into the cage meant to trap her and locked himself inside while she ate the meat which had been left outside as bait. Experts from Corbett National Park and Dudhwa, Dehradun and elsewhere were said to be finding it extremely hard to track her. But what was extremely upsetting right from the beginning was the Forest department's determination to have her killed. Three human beings were said to have been killed by this tiger/tigress and early on, she was declared a 'man-eater' with her tracking being for the express purpose of having her killed.

I wrote to the Rashtrapati Bhavan for a Presidential pardon. A teacher in Rae Bareli filed a PIL asking that the three tigers then roaming Uttar Pradesh - in Faizabad, Lakhimpur and Azamgarh, all be captured alive and not killed. A dedicated team from WTI, the Wildlife Trust of India, assisted the Forest department pressing for a live capture all the time. Another PIL was filed by wildlife enthusiast and member of the Uttarakhand State Wildlife Board, Kaushlendra Singh. But all this seemed so much chatter before the implacable decision of the UP Forest Department to kill this tiger. This resolve of theirs kept coming through in daily press briefings. No animal-lover, or anyone who actually took seriously the tiger's 'National Animal' status for India seriously, could understand why they should be so determined to shoot dead instead of tranquilize and capture. All through January 2009, I prayed each day that this young tiger would live its full life and not fall to a hunter's bullet. Such prayers seemed the only recourse against the Kafkaesque tactics of the Forest Dept.

On February 23, Shivaratri day, I was mighty kicked as I drove my family to a Shiva shrine in nearby Ambedkar Nagar, about 60 km away. I was singing 'Jai Ho', the anthem of that morning, without knowing about its Oscar sweep. Life seemed good and the tiger wise enough to withstand all the teams that had tried to track it on long winter nights for over two months. But just a day later, I was crying so much I alarmed myself. The photograph of the dead tigress, shot by self-styled shikari Nawab Shafaat Ali Khan of Hyderabad on the front page of 'Amar Ujala' was too much for me. How could they have hounded such a splendid young animal to this indignified death? And the worst blow was the discovery that she was a tigress who could have been the mother of several cubs, after she had been shot. 

Somehow, for me, this tiger's death represented all that is so difficult to take about life in Uttar Pradesh - astounding levels of ignorance, stupidity and greed. Insensitivity and callousness on a scale that defies description. I mourned for days, unable to immediately recover my appetite to go on living. Of course, I rallied to take some steps to vent my feelings - shot off an open letter to the so-called Nawab for the local papers, sent off an RTI enquiry about how the tigress' remains were disposed off and how it was ensured that none of these would find their way into the illegal intenational market for tigers' parts. But none of this made a difference to the overwhelming grief. The realization that this world was too cruel to let a magnificent young, spirited, and independent creature live. I truly loathed all of humanity for some time, our endless propagation, our rapacious appetite for every resource that makes for life on earth. I wished I could have let this tigress live even if  it meant substituting its life with my own.

Did I love her so excessively because of our being fellow displaced citizens? She had traveled very far to make a new life for herself, just as I have in recent times. I don't know. But one of my prayers for an after-death experience is definitely this - that I get to bury my face in the orange fur around her neck, and whisper how much I love her into her round, white tipped ears. 

Buffaloes...

One of the fallacies I was subjected to when I was growing up was a myth about the recalcitrant nature of buffaloes. My dear father reinforced this myth when he said that you could never get buffaloes to do anything they did not want to do. They were not meek creatures that did anybody's bidding. They were also supposed to have unpredictable flashes of temper.

Perhaps it was this that made me come to regard buffaloes with a mixture of fear and suspicion. What may have added to the fear was the mythological association of a buffalo being the vehicle of the Hindu god of Death, Yama, or the buffalo-demon Mahishasura whom Devi kills with such fanfare. In any case, for years, buffaloes meant something not-so-good for me, and if they appeared in my dreams, I was generally scared and worried by the image when I woke up.

Then, after I left Mumbai for Madras, as it was then known, when I got married the first time, I saw dark buffalo calves with pale down on them. I heard the plaintive 'yeahhh' sound of the buffalo, so different from the assertive mooing of the cows. Some soft feelings for these creatures were inevitable. But I still gave a wide berth to these broad-beamed quadripeds on the road, if a herd of them was passing me by. When I learnt to drive, I thought of them as 'brake-inspectors' as someone had once called them in my presence. They were still distant, alien, not as special as the cats, dogs, kittens, birds, that dotted my life with regularity all the years my children were growing up.

And now I'm sitting in a riverside area of Faizabad called Kakarahi Bazaar or Cucumber Market, waiting for a meeting of the Majha Janhit Raksha Samiti, a loose organization I helped to form and name in mid-January.  'Majha' means a riverbank area in Hindi, here referring to the banks of the river Saryu, where farmers have traditionally grown vegetables and grains, and where guavas are grown in acres of orchards. The fruit here is extremely succulent, surpassing in its sweet graininess the best I have eaten before I came here.

When I learnt that this green farmland, home to thousands of farmers and their families, and the cows and buffaloes they own in large numbers, was threatened with extinction by a new 'development' scheme called the Saryu Township Yojana, I was extremely agitated, and have banded with some residents and local people's representatives to challenge the imposition of this scheme on the region. We meet on Sundays in different localities, and I have plenty of time to observe buffaloes and other beasts, as I wait for the famers and milkmen and their families to come to the meeting venues.

In Kakarahi Bazar, or Cucumber Market,  buffaloes pass us in groups of roughly one group every four minutes. They take a while to pass completely, walking slowly and sedately with rhythmic rocking pelvic motions. They look straight ahead mostly, and I notice immediately how calm they are in comparison to the nervy behaviour of cows (more on that in another post), and how disciplined they seem, walking all together. Occasionally, one more curious than the rest takes a look in our direction. But even this is a serious and disciplined thing. She stops, turns her head, and gazes at us with full concentration, her mouth lifted up, her liquid black eyes long-lashed and impossibly large in her dark grey face. As I return the gaze, I feel a real strong kindness for buffaloes.

One recovers from nearly every youthful misapprehension is what I'm thinking, if one lives long enough. The next group of buffaloes finds me musing and philosophical...

And then there is the thundering of hooves. A group of buffaloes rushes into sight, tails swishing in alarm, as they raise dust, frightened by the antics of one of them, a crazed looking creature with light grey eyes. They gallop past, and are nearly out of sight on the road before they resume their previous slower pace. My thoughts have scattered too, in this Brechtian moment that rekindled some of the yore of lore about Yama's vehicle. Like pretty much else in life, you can never know all about buffaloes.