Visitation Rites

Listening to some Al Green in a 2 BHK flat in Chembur, Mumbai. We moved into this place about a month ago, to this city 6 weeks ago and to India about two and a half months ago. On a week's bedrest after a rickshaw accident, just the latest in a string of unfortunate events that have kept me out of the classroom over the past few weeks. Maybe it's just the painkillers talking, but I'm feeling optimistic. If life is like a Hindi movie, then the over-the-top succession of blunders and mishaps I have experienced can only lead to true love and/or wealth beyond my wildest dreams.

On one of the handful of days I've been out of bed my co-teacher and I visited a few of our students' homes. We need to get to all 55 of them soon, so we took a big chunk out of our to-do list and made it to 4 houses. To our credit, finding these homes was almost impossible. The parents had given us their addresses in writing, but an address in rapidly expanding north Bombay won't lead you farther than a neighborhood within a general area of the city. Main streets have names--no street signs--but smaller streets aren't recorded anywhere, as far as I can tell. Here is how we located our destinations:

Step 1: Call the student's parents. Connection is dropped several times. Call until you get through. Ask for a landmark near the student's home.
Step 2: Get on Anchal's motorcycle and start driving in whichever direction you feel is appropriate. Stop and ask no fewer than 3 people how to get to the landmark. Once you have a majority response, go that way.
Step 3: Once you arrive at the landmark, ask around for directions to the specific chawl that your student lives in. A chawl is like a tenement building, or a group of tenement buildings, made up of one-room family homes. I'm not clear on the difference between a chawl and a slum, but I think a chawl has more permanent infrastructure (concrete buildings, roofs, plumbing). Most of our students live in chawls.
Step 4: Leaving the motorcycle, enter the tiny lanes of the chawl. Ask where your student's family lives, using the father's name. Someone will bring you to the room or point to the correct curtained doorway.

If I had gotten my act together and bought a memory card reader I would have posted pictures of these neighborhoods. We still have 51 to see, luckily. At all of the homes we visited, families of 5-10 people (including uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins) lived in a room the size of a small college dorm room. The kitchens were separated from the living area by a solid or makeshift wall. Some rooms had one twin-sized bed, and others had just two plastic chairs. They were all spotlessly clean. All of the families seemed to have been preparing for our visit all day. Anchal and I were given seats while the family stood or sat on the floor. The referred to Anchal as "sir" and to me as "teacher" (I don't quite understand this nomenclature but I was grateful that they didn't use "madam," which makes me feel like I should be wearing a hoop skirt and holding a parasol whilst playing croquet on a lawn with peacocks). We were fed very sweet chai, biscuits (which parents sent their children to buy especially for us), samosas and this sweet porridge with almond and raisins that is my new favorite food. By the fourth house I thought I would die of overeating, but we were not allowed to leave until we had tea, at the very least. Teachers generally garner a lot of respect here; I can't imagine rolling out this kind of red carpet for any of my teachers when I was a kid. Undergirding all these pleasantries is an acknowledgment of a social hierarchy, explicit in the seating arrangement and distribution of expensive food. I wavered between guilt for assuming a privileged stance in these homes (and eating treats that the families probably couldn't afford), and fear of causing offense by refusing the generosity.

None of the parents spoke English and Anchal was my Hindi translator for the afternoon. Once we got the hang of interpreting we were chattin' up a storm, although I know that Anchal took some liberties with my words. He assures me that he only made me sound more interesting. All of the parents we met were deeply interested in their child's education and questioned us at length about the methods we're using. Because we don't have kids copying from the state-standardized textbook, which is the norm, it would appear as if we're not actually teaching anything. The language in these textbooks would be out of reach for a seven-year-old from an English-speaking home, let alone a kid who doesn't know the English alphabet. Some of the stories in the books are also just really weird and full of grammatical errors. Anyway, some of the parents and staff at our school are understandably suspicious about the absence of these books, and we still haven't found a way to make all of the verbal work we do in class visible. Our uncomfortable position was slightly eased when the mother of one girl in our class filled us in on the latest mom-gossip: their kids have started speaking English, so we must be doing something right. Hallelujah.