I am settled into Cambridge, finally, but it feels like my relationship with India has only commenced. India doesn’t really resolve itself once you leave its borders, and it’s taking me a while to digest and consider what I’ve really taken away from this trip.
On Sunday night, at midnight, which is also 9:30 am on a Monday morning in India, I received two nearly simultaneous calls from rural India.
I noticed the +91 country code on my caller ID, and my first thought that it was probably one of the random city contacts I had made in Delhi or Hyderabad. But I answered and found myself talking to Rampreet, the eldest son of the family I had stayed with in the village of Tirla, maybe twenty kilometers outside Ranchi, Jharkhand. My Hindi was terribly rusty, but we talked a bit, and he passed the phone around to other people in the village. They didn’t own a cell phone while I was there, so I can only wonder at how they managed to procure the phone and the comparatively large investment it must have been.
During my visit, I had lent them my Vodafone Samsung to talk to their uncle, who lived in a different village. In the warmth of their clay house, what ensued was an hour-long conversation, with the cell phone traveling from one sibling to the next. I found myself witness to an exceedingly rare situation, to watch a family approach using a phone as something to be treasured rather than a usual convenience. They spoke to their uncle as if they hadn’t heard from him in years.
If contact with their uncle was this valuable, what was it like to hear from one’s father, who left months ago to ensure that there was enough income to keep the family from starving?
At the end of that call to their uncle, they asked for my U.S. phone number. I thought about what it might feel like to contact them from halfway around the world. What would we talk about? Was there anything we had in common that we could hold on to? I half-expected to fall out of their mental periphery as soon as I left.
During that phone call, I didn’t have to imagine the wonder they must have felt to be reconnecting with someone they knew halfway around the world. I heard it. And I wasn’t just a random person from another country that they knew little about to begin with. I was someone they had personally gotten to know in the flesh, speaking to them from the still darkness of nightfall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while they were just getting ready for the workday on a warm day in Jharkhand.
All of my friends from the village took turns talking to me on the phone, despite my very evidently handicapped Hindi. They told me that they’d received some more rain, but it was not very much. When I asked, they also said that their families were doing well.
None of them would ever believe that it was my privilege to be speaking to them from the other side of the planet, to be remembered despite the brevity of my stay.
Minutes after I got off the phone with Rampreet and the rest of the village, I received a Google videocall from Nagesh, who was located about 1100 kilometers southwest of Rampreet in Andhra Pradesh. Yes, Nagesh has a Gmail account and lives in a village 40 kilometers away from a town. Nagesh has an 8th class (grade) education, and his wife is a tailor who does gorgeous sequin work as well as the occasional school uniform. So, how did he end up on a webcam in a remote village located more than an hour away from the nearest major hospital? Nagesh apprenticed with someone who fixed appliances, so he acquired a comprehensive knowledge of repairing televisions. In one of the many villages where television has become a significant community past time, a symbol of wealth, and a window to the rest of the world, the ability to fix televisions is comparatively lucrative. He operates out of a two-room clay home, but has expanded his business to include a downloading service and a one-computer internet cafe.
We were able to communicate as he and his wife had learned Hindi in Gujarat, where they had migrated for a couple years. Like many Indians, they are, by default, bilingual — they know the local language, Telugu, and Hindi. They were all smiles despite the choppy connection. I happened to be drinking chai when they called, something they found to be very amusing, as I had done this several times in their home, often with a packet of biscuits to share. Their daughter had her hair in pigtails and was getting ready for school. Nagesh sent me a Hindi song that he thought was beautiful, and he also asked for Sean’s information. They wanted to keep in touch with him despite the lack of a common language. I suppose a videocall preserves the beauty of communication as something more than a few comprehensible words exchanged.
It’s mind-boggling to videocall someone in a village. Why is it possible to videocall an area where people still struggle with malnutrition, hunger, domestic terrorism, water availability and sanitation? Let me rephrase this. How have we gotten to a point where cell phone reception is more reliable than the ability to sate one’s appetite?
In the past three weeks in the U.S., not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about these village and the reasons that some people flourish in spite of poverty while others, like myself, are able to take so much for granted. A washing machine saves us several hours and sore hands each week. Supermarkets are the meeting ground for foods (none of which we had to grow) from opposite ends of the Earth. And somehow, all our waste disappears without a single thought of where it might go. Other than making sure that I’ll have internet access, I have no practical reason to get to know my neighbors and can probably get by without ever formally meeting them or spending a day with them.
None of these things are even remotely true in the village.
Clothes are handwashed at the well. Food usually goes straight from the ground to over a fire; occasionally, it endures a short trip to the local bazaar or journeys in a basket on someone’s head. Plastic wrappings are burned or left visible to all, and human waste blends subtly into fallow fields. Everyone knows one another in the village because they grew up together, cared for each other’s children, and often ate and drank together. The very concept of ownership is somewhat foreign. Sonia offered me guavas picked from a neighbor’s tree, all resources are shared and freely borrowed, and there was never any hesitation to help with the cooking or caring for someone else’s children while visiting another person’s home. It seems that overall, in a village, there are stronger ties to one’s surroundings, one’s friends and family.
To me, this is what it means to live in a village, to live in a vibrant community where your relationship with your neighbor might run as deep as blood. For some inexplicable reason, living in such a community also means conferring the same respect and acceptance to complete strangers as one would offer to an esteemed relative. For the most part, acceptance in these villages extended beyond common delineators in American society: gender, religion, and wealth.
It’s the same remarkable reason that from the other side of the planet, I can still be made to feel like a neighbor, a friend, and a fellow villager.
You have a very big heart.