by Rahul Raina
Some of the sisters were lifers, who would have been totally lost back in Europe, brown souls underneath white skin, while the rest were just staying for a few years before being returned to the West, eager to see this country, just not the parts where they could not drink the water or had to travel a hundred miles to see a film.
They showed their pupils the true way of Christ, mass every morning, hymns sung to an organ groaning with rust and rot, Bible readings in staccato voices, but not often enough so that the parents would complain that their children were being converted.
Elocution lessons, deportment, English, French, music. Get them to university, five years of work, marriage, kids, tennis lessons, luxury cruises, death.
“That boy should be in school,” were the first words I heard her say about me. A white woman speaking his language? Papa responded in English with “Tea?” He had recently extended his vocabulary to shouting the word at tour groups, and various cricket terms like “six,” “boundary,” and “jolly good shot.”
The expansion of his vocabulary had occurred when we arrived in New Delhi. We couldn’t be our simple selves anymore. We were dealing now with mobile phone users, metro riders, executives. We had to adapt. Papa acquired new skills—I found an English phrase book among his belongings, and soon enough English phrases among his speech. At least we got to double our prices.
“One chai,” she said in response, in Hindi, and Papa had not known what to do.
I registered her accent immediately. I was even then on the lookout for life-changing opportunities. This was something different, something new, out of the ordinary. I was on alert.
She was looking over the stall at me, as if she was expecting me to be there. She watched me as I bashed away at the spices.
She was a nun. She was white, maybe fifty years old, with a few spare strands of white hair creeping out from beneath her hood. Her robes were dark gray, and there was a cross hanging around her neck.
She stared a little longer. She watched my movements. She nodded, as if I was someone she had known for a long time.
Then she repeated the fateful words, the ones that would change my life: that I should be in school.
Papa had not known how to respond: whether to call her a goat-fucker, or try to joke it off, play to the crowd by calling her a crazy woman, or say “These goras, huh?” She was white, she was a nun, and he had the slight deference toward religious figures that makes us Indians such marks for gurus, holy men, and messiahs, as well as every color of trade-promising conqueror.
“Would you like romance chai, madam? Increase your success in love life?”
The tea-drinkers laughed.
Claire’s eyes moved from soft to hard in a second. “He should be in school,” she said. “How old is he? Ten? Can he read? Write?”
Papa was out of ideas. He merely nodded his head. He didn’t know anything about my education, so it came out faker than an Indo-Chinese friendship pact.
“Do you want me to call the Department of Education? There are laws against child labor, you know,” Claire said, straightening the collar of her habit while Papa squirmed in front of her.
I remember the beatings and insults of my childhood, but the parts when Papa got humiliated? I remember those best.
He decided next on meek subservience, spineless prostration in front of the white woman, get her out of there, move the stall the next day if need be, for he could see in her eyes that she wouldn’t give in quickly. He had that stomach-squeezing radar for trouble that all the poor have.
He lied and said I went to school every day—apart from this day, of course, but it was such a rarity he could not begin to tell her, but perhaps she could move out of the way, she was crowding his customers, a poor man had to earn a living. Claire didn’t believe him. She looked down again at me, and nodded. I was at a loss. I nodded too.
I have to stress at this point that I was not totally academically deficient. I could read. I knew my letters. I had managed two years of school, if you added together all the hurried mornings and afternoons when I had annoyed my father enough that he had slapped me and sent me somewhere I couldn’t displease him, or when I had been dragged there by neighborhood women who had gotten ideas from Western charities. In Delhi it seemed like your family’s business was everyone else’s, like your home was an alleyway that anyone could walk through. You would find yourself being taken by some unknown aunty to the vegetable market, for a haircut, another would take you for an eye test, and when you returned it was to see your father dead drunk on the floor, and you would wonder what exactly had just happened.
Papa had a reputation. Women were constantly trying to reform him, and me, for they feared I would go the same way. They must have had some effect, for I am a moral, upstanding citizen who, I must repeat, is stupid enough to pay his taxes in full. Social workers, lovers, teachers, distant relatives, a mixture of all of them sometimes, tried and failed to make him and me conform to Vedic practices, and if I got some time off the tea stall, so what?
I didn’t go to school full-time, of course, not the Western way of nine to three, assembly, lunch, and poisonous feuds between social groups. The teachers marked everyone as present and let you run wild and free. The school authorities got their beloved literacy targets filled, received awards and money and garland ceremonies from the central government, and at the end of it all our education ministers got standing ovations from the UN and their faces on the cover of Time.
I learned Hindi from the school’s comic books, the ones with all the gods from all the religions, the offspring of some faded “let’s all get on together” initiative, a child of the “India is a pluralistic, multi-confessional democracy” bakwas believers. The comics were stored at the back of the class, where ceiling paint fell on them like ashirvads from heaven. I ate the stories up, sitting inside at break time while everyone else dirtied themselves outside. To me, the point of school was that it was a chance to stay indoors, away from the heat and noise, a place I could be clean and silent, but what do I know, huh?
“He knows his words. Education is dear to the hearts of the Indian people,” Papa said, as if Claire was some tie-dyed hippie and not an educated woman whose Hindi was better than his. She watched him lie. Her lips curled slightly upward. He had decided to bullshit her with some Nehruvian nonsense about the eternal search for truth. That was from the newspapers he had begun reading. Our clientele wished to expound upon current affairs while they drank tea and pretended to be men of the world, or at least of the National Capital Region.
She was the first white person who’d ever talked to us.
“I’ll be here tomorrow. With books. For him,” she said.
Then Papa had started giving her a long speech on Saraswati, on the importance of reading: “We invented number zero, ma’am . . . My family has long history of loving books, we were poets, you know . . . I go to temple every day.” She simply watched. He was sweating. His customers observed with amusement as my papa, the great talker, the great romancer, wriggled like a ferret in a sack in front of the white woman.
She said how things were going to be. And all he could do, out of ideas, out of theories and stories and sayings, was to say, “Yes, ma’am. Tomorrow, ma’am. Yes.” He was ground down, and I knew I was in for slaps that night, big fat ones, alcohol-fueled ones, remembering-your-perfidious-dead-mother ones.
“Make sure you’re here. I know the police. I teach their daughters,” she said finally, and didn’t bother to hear his reply before leaving, giving us all a sunny smile as she walked off.
Papa stayed stunned to the spot for five minutes, hands grabbing robotically for milk and tea leaves.
“Goras, huh?” he said when his face had unfrozen, for he had nothing else to say, and the fat self-employed businessmen at the stall had laughed at his humiliation.
He had recovered as the afternoon waned, and gone on as he did every day, speaking of bodily functions, of bowel movements, of liver imbalances, medicinal
cures, miraculous pilgrimages, strange creatures found in the Yamuna, improbable lottery wins, of crotch rot, of talcum powder.
He slowly convinced himself that she would never come back. Just some white woman who had wanted to order him around, and a nun at that. He had had such respect for the Christians, but not after that, sirs, not after that.
The next morning, Papa and I were working industriously together, hand in hand, equal to equal, setting up our family business in an atmosphere of mutual respect, when Claire appeared, with books for me, with toys, plastic gods with lifeless eyes, a pair of shoes that lit up when I walked in them. My father had sworn, bug-eyed, when he saw her, and I had laughed involuntarily and been beaten very hard that night, the second night in succession, his shiny, whip-like hand getting plenty of use.
I understand why she chose a child to educate. She had not been serving the poor and the ignored as her books and sisters preached, but was merely teaching the daughters of the undeserving thick-necked rich at the Sacred Heart, and her faith was becoming hollow, meaningless. What I don’t understand is why she chose me. Out of all the kids, the millions of them on every street corner and park bench and rubbish dump. I was not particularly angelic-looking. I did not have a good, toothy UNICEF-website smile, nor did inner light shine out of me.
Why?
She never spoke of any reasons or doubts. For me, everything would open up: learning, school, exams, college, a new life, something out of nothing.
Later she confessed that she had first seen me cycling to work in the mornings. I was only five minutes away from her school. She had walked by one day to hear my father complaining. And then she had seen me, and of course, that had been that.
A few years later, when she was ill, she would look at me as if she didn’t see me at all, as if I was someone she had lost long ago. She would touch me and look on with surprise, as if it was a miracle that I was real and standing in front of her.
“We are going to make a life for you, little man,” she would say, as if I did not have one already and she was some creator goddess breathing life into formless black Yamuna clay.
For the next few months, she came every day, at three in the afternoon, after her classes had finished. She had first come at midday, but “Please, madam!” my father begged, come when business is not so high, and around the back, please, madam, so that the businessmen will not be put off by a woman, a nun, who would interrupt their man-speak of actress-fucking and wife-slapping.
Every day, I worked extra hard in the hours before she arrived, pulverizing spices to the atomic level, putting tea strainers in a row, handling boxes and spoons with extreme care, placing each in easy reach of my father.
Then Claire came and we sat on the crumbling, pigeon-shit-encrusted concrete bench beside the stall, where I stumbled over English and Hindi, over numbers and letters and pictures of dogs and gods, and she ruffled my hair, gave me hugs and pats on the cheek when I did well, which was every fatherfucking time. I shooed away the inquiring eyes of little children more unfortunate than me. I was as status-conscious as any American suburbanite. They had BMWs and Jacuzzis. I had a nun.
In the first few weeks, I tried my very hardest. I was terrified that if I got even one answer incorrect, she would abandon me. Choose some other boy, one who had better prospects. My heart would beat as the appointed time approached, and I would always, always think that she would not come back tomorrow, that it would be the day she realized she was wasting her time. I am a great deal less worried about my meetings with white people today.
Of course she would not have abandoned me. But I had nightmares. Looking back, in the absence of a mother, the reasons for my fears were obvious, but it was painful to shake with terror at night, thinking she might find another pupil or project. (I have read Psychotherapy for Dummies exactly once, and that is what I gleaned from it.) But each day I saw her again, I felt safe. She would not leave. I made sure she never would. Whatever reason she had chosen me for, luck or fate or resemblance to someone long dead, I would keep her because of my intelligence.
Just being with her was something. I couldn’t believe that she was white and she was talking to me and I was touching her and she me—how easily impressed I was in those days by Europeans! If I could advise my younger self, I would tell him to ask for money.
Over those months, she gave me little one-rupee sweets, bags of potato chips emblazoned with cricketers preaching victory, pencils, rubbers, sharpeners, bubble blowers. I thought that all whites must be something like gods. I know better today.
Finally someone was paying attention to me. Whether she was white or brown did not truly matter at the end of the day. She was spending time with me, and she never lost her patience, she let me ask unending questions, she never failed to laugh at my jokes.
“Très bien,” she would say. “Très bien, mon petit chou, once again,” and sometimes when we were done she would talk softly about France and films and folktales from her youth while my father looked anxiously back at us, fearful both of her sweet-scented retribution and of my head being filled with white-people ideas of secondary education and the inefficacy of corporal punishment. His usual trick of dealing with women, the seduction, was unavailable to him. She was educated. She knew more of the world. She was more experienced. She was also sworn to a lifelong vow of celibacy. He wilted in front of her.
If this was a biopic, I would have left Claire out. She would have made the whites uncomfortable. There would have been a montage of me growing up, stealing precious hours away from my abusive home, going to night classes, slowly crawling my way through the education system—until finally, after years of effort, I had mastered the letter A. It would have been purer, more Indian, more real. Everyone in the cinema would have cheered at the screen, at the boy who never gave up, who broke the system on his own, who made it under his own steam.
But that is not what happened. I do not care about what looks good. I care about the truth. Claire changed my life. I owe it to her memory to tell things as they really were.
Now perhaps I am misremembering things a little. No doubt I have softened the edges of my early life. I have created a narrative, like Americans do after hundreds of hours of therapy. Maybe Claire has become something in my memories that she never was, and her kindness has made my recollections of her rose-tinted. Maybe I have watched too many episodes of Oprah. But that is the way I remember things. When I think of Claire, I think of gentleness, of a woman who was tough with the rest of the world, but not with me, who ensured that my talent was not wasted, ensured that I did not become another faceless child who disappeared and never made his voice heard.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I could have risen as far and fast as I did without her. But I did not. I cannot lie. I have to tell the story of our time together. When it comes to Claire, I always tell the truth.
Over the next few months, I found a new sense of determination as a consequence of my time with Claire. She gave me a tin box with an engraving of Parisian landmarks on the outside, in which I kept my treasures, my pencils, my rulers, my books. I worked in the evenings, when my father was out, though our apartment building had a very unreliable, semi-illegal electric connection and we could not have afforded a generator in a lifetime of work, not with my father’s skill at household accounts. We had a blackout across the city, cloaking in darkness the many families that roamed the streets, the cardboard-doored hovels that smelled of flour and fat and adulterated daal (which, I assure you, smells different than the real stuff), the little concrete roof where I worked under the stars. I ignored the spiders, the cockroaches that flew into my face, the screams and sighs, of men and women, of children being beaten, of weekly wages spent on alcohol.
I was never alone up there. That was the joy of our fecund Indian uteruses, supercharged by both ancient Vedic rituals and the poor’s lack of televisions and Facebook (how the world has changed!)—never afforded a moment’s peace!
I went up there in all weathers. When it
was cold, I had a sweater Claire had knitted herself, of a dog named Snoopy. When it rained, I tried to stay out as long as I could, before running back inside clutching paper against my breast to save it from the rain. One night, a hoarse voice, soaked in decades of alcohol, said, “Get out of the rain, beta!” “He is reading! Reading!” A man laughed, and then another, and I had never known helplessness like those faceless people laughing at me.
When Claire asked me the next day what had happened to my sodden books, I could not explain. She ruffled my hair and I knew I had been forgiven. It was nice to feel that some of your problems had been solved simply because someone cared. Someone who wiped away your tears when you gave the wrong answer. Someone who gave you treats and sweets and attention, and shoes and a nice white shirt. It made you wonder what life would have been like if you’d had a mother from the start. How far you could have gone, the schools you could have gotten into, the life you could have led.
But then again, maybe I’d have been loved and nurtured and utterly useless anyway.
After a few months, Claire realized that there was only so much that could be done out of the backside of a tea stall on the Bangla Sahib Road. Not that that is such a bad place. Great commercial empires, multi-crore computer companies, have been built from it, as well as political careers groaning with corruption and virginity-taking and obesity. But it is a hard place to teach.
So much beauty! So much modern architecture! So much life! So much piss!
One day she told me that I would have to leave the stall, at least for a few hours every day. She would tell Papa tomorrow. I wept with joy and told her I loved her, and tried to keep my voice down so that Papa couldn’t hear, even though the road was its usual ear-pounding self. I can be very stupid sometimes.
