The Light of Hidden Flowers

by Jennifer Handford

“The slums,” Reina said. As Salim coiled around people and wild dogs, dodging crater-sized potholes, I witnessed throngs of people jammed into the sides of the roads. I stared, transfixed, at the huts, sheds, and shacks—literally one connected to the other—lining the streets. As the taxi turned, I was able to see that the backs of these dwellings were draped resourcefully in laundry, so as to utilize every inch of space. Some rows of housing bordered a ditch, or canal, perhaps—some kind of waterway, anyway, if it could even be called that. The litter floating on it was dense—plastic bags, sodden cardboard, food refuse. The pollution evidenced by the grimy foam slapping at its shores was so vile, I wondered if it was also the runoff from the human waste fields.

  “How can they live like this?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. I wasn’t asking so much about how they managed to physically endure these conditions—I saw that already in the people, in their ingenuity and resourcefulness. I more pondered how they endured, in their hearts, in their minds. I questioned their dignity. How did one hold one’s head high while plowing through sewage each day?

  Reina read my mind. “They see hope; they strive. On a scale difficult for us to imagine. There is a spectrum, I’ve found. If you’re on the bottom rung, among filth and starvation and depravation, then the next rung up—the one that offers even just one more cistern of water, or another five cents to buy one more meal—looks pretty attractive.”

  Reina had a list of schools for us to visit. Overcrowded, under-resourced. Teachers—women—determined, but exhausted from the daily chore of it. Teaching was the job—the calling, perhaps—but these women were also tasked with caring for far too many children. Before arithmetic could be taught, a certain level of sanitation, or sustenance, or care, needed to be achieved for these children. The parochial schools were like palaces compared to the state schools. The wealthy children attended these schools. They were dressed, fed. They had shoes on their feet. They were from a different class, and they knew it.

  For three days, Salim drove us from place to place. We toured more and more schools. Certain givens were already apparent about India: (1) There was not enough space. According to Reina, the population of India was four times that of the United States, concentrated in one-third of the geography. People were crammed into small areas, forced to cohabitate, to share the same pockets of air that carried the scent of sweet foods cooked on open fires mixed with the odor of sewage piled on the side of the roads. In dark and dank passageways, groups of men, women, and children huddled, with only streaks of sunlight squeezing in between tarp-blanketed sheet metal roofs. There was no escape from the smoldering, suffocating swaths of people, just rows upon rows of shanties bunched together in misery, utility, and economy.

  (2) There was not enough water. Multiple families relied on a single tap that might have been sufficient if water flowed continuously through it, instead of just a few hours a day. Wherever we encountered a precious tap, we found mothers and children crowded around it, waiting to fill their cisterns.

  (3) Diarrhea and malaria ran rampant, and there were not nearly enough toilets. If you had access to a communal toilet, you paid for the privilege. Walking along a ditch line, you found viscous streams of green water and garbage and sewage sliding down the channels.

  Responding to e-mails at night, there was always at least one from Lucas, demanding to know what I thought I was doing with this detour to India. In his mind, looking to educate girls in India was no less risky than distributing feminist propaganda to the women of Afghanistan. “You’re going to get hurt,” Lucas insisted. “Come home.”

  Reina and I began looking at buildings on the outskirts of New Delhi. The children would need to be able to walk to the school, and their fathers would need to know where their daughters were, if they were to agree to anything. In every scattering of dilapidated buildings we visited, I quickly applied the valuation method I’d learned in business school to assess how much each hovel might cost: earnings plus assets minus liabilities equals?

  After hours of disappointing results from this formula, Reina kicked at the gravel, then peered ahead, and squinted her eyes.

  “What?”

  “This is going to be hard.” The dirt on her face smeared into the sunscreen, making a Nike swoosh at her cheek.

  “Let’s get a drink.”

  We settled into a bench in front of a local store, sipping Coke from warm bottles. Parakeets pranced on the tree branches. Our elbows rested on our knees as we peered into the busy streets. Reina handed me a piece of ginger hard candy. I sucked on it, and thought it through.

  “We need a building,” I began. “We need children. Teachers. Supplies.”

  “Funding,” Reina said.

  “Ultimately, we’ll need funding,” I said. “But to start, we need a building, kids, and teachers, right?”

  “At its most basic level, yes.”

  My heart somersaulted into my stomach. “We need an orphanage.”

  “What?” Reina gasped, half laughed, moved away from me a good foot.

  I felt my cheeks flush, the backs of my ears burn, my lips adhere to my dry teeth. This was why I didn’t make suggestions. This was why it was easier for me to be the backroom technician while Dad was the up-front guy. This was why the bell curve was so fat in the middle and the ends were so skinny—vulnerable, exposed, in danger of being axed. If you were strong, you didn’t mind putting your ideas out there on the exposed tails and seeing them hacked off. But if you lacked courage, as I did, then the slice was devastating. There was safety in numbers, security in the middle, shelter under the cap of the bell.

  “Stupid idea . . . I was just thinking,” I stammered. “That there are probably orphanages around here that are just getting by. I doubt they’re educating the kids.”

  “So would ‘non-orphans’ be allowed to come to school, too?” Reina asked, now leaning in my direction.

  I eyed Reina skeptically. Was she considering this? I wrapped my hands on the sides of the bench. “Sure,” I said. “I mean . . . I guess.”

  Reina and I locked eyes, our crazy grins mirroring each other.

  “We could apply for grants,” she said. “For local money, international money.”

  I bit at the chapped shards of skin on my parched lips. I looked at Reina. “You think it’s a good idea?”

  Over the rim of her Coke, Reina smiled with the eager eyes of a child who was just given a twenty-dollar bill to spend in the candy store.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  That afternoon, Salim drove us to the city center where we found the local magistrate. He sat behind a wooden desk, an oscillating fan only inches from his face. He gave us a list of the registered orphanages for girls.

  “Is there one that’s more desperate than the others?” Reina asked.

  The official shook his head. “They’re all in need.”

  “But is there an orphanage whose need is greater than the others?”

  “Rohtak,” the magistrate said.

  Sixty kilometers outside of New Delhi, we found Rohtak. Down a dirt path, we found a crippled, elderly building holding itself up with shoddy crutches. The sign out front read: “Home for the Orphaned and Malnourished Girls. Home for the Destitute.”

  Reina smiled and clapped her hands. If we were looking for an orphanage in need, we had certainly found one.

  Five concrete steps brought us to the front door, a striking, sturdy mammoth of a door, wholly out of place standing sentry before this pathetic structure. Reina had told me that India was that way: in the slummiest cities, you would find relics from an imperial age, treasures from dynasties of times past, inlaid jewels in sandstone and marble, propped up within the general hovel. I reached out and ran my fingers over the ornate etching on the door. On what palace did this door once hang?

  We pushed open the door, stretched our necks through the opening, peeked in. “Hello?” We entere
d, pulled the door closed behind us. The room we were in seemed to be a warehouse of sorts. Boxes stacked, shelving stuffed with cartons and bags. Old furniture pushed against the wall; chairs stacked three high. We pushed our way through and found another heavy door. When we pulled it open, we were engulfed by a tidal wave of sounds and smells: the cries of babies, the laughter and whines of older children, the sweet aroma of curry, the harsh stench of urine. As we wended our way through the cacophony and commotion, attracting a growing crowd of children as we went, I realized the giant etched door we’d entered through must have been the back door.

  The children clamored around us, grabbed at our shirts. “Hello, lady!” they said, impressing us with their English. A field of black hair in braids and ponytails encircled us, vying for our attention.

  Reina fished the ginger hard candy from her bag, passed it around, but there wasn’t nearly enough. The ones who didn’t procure a piece hardly flinched. Surely they had learned long ago that complaining got them nowhere.

  An older woman in a worn paisley sari emerged from the kitchen. She introduced herself as the director. Her name was Mrs. Pundari. She explained to us in measured tones that there simply wasn’t enough of anything. “We get by,” she said. “Just barely.”

  “Who funds this orphanage?” I asked.

  “For many years we were funded by a charity in the UK, but it got involved in some questionable activities, and then the donations went down to nothing.”

  Flanked with girls at her feet and on her sides, Reina made a promise. “If we are permitted, we will help your orphanage.”

  On our last night in India, Reina and I sat on the banks of the canal and looked across the fields at the orphanage that would someday become a school for girls. Already I could identify the smell of impending rain. A monsoon was imminent.

  “We have a plan,” I said. Reina would stay on another few days to work the bureaucratic channels, while I would return home to secure our financing—our financing that would come from my own pocket. Money I would freely turn over if it meant that forty girls’ lives would be changed for the better in the first year alone.

  “I didn’t expect this,” I said. “Obviously.”

  “And you thought you were going to lounge in the hills of Tuscany, sipping wine and plucking olives from their stems.”

  “My father,” I began. “Was this . . . this larger-than-life guy. The type of guy everyone loved. He loved everyone back, but he loved me the most.”

  “That must have been nice.”

  “It was. He loved me, but he didn’t really believe in me.” I waved my hands across each other like an umpire calling a man out at first base. “That’s not true. It was more that he could never get over his disappointment that I wasn’t like him—bold, gregarious, social. He was the lion and I was the mouse.”

  “Yes,” Reina chimed in. “But you know the fable of the lion and the mouse. The mouse was able to help the lion, right?”

  “What I’m doing now, what we’re trying to do . . . is bold. I think my father would be pleased.”

  “So long as you are.”

  “I am,” I said, almost too quickly. “I know that we’re putting ourselves out there. That there is a huge risk of failure. But it’s exciting, very exciting . . . to feel bold.”

  After Reina and I said good night, I sat on my bed with my laptop. With my head pushed back against the cool pillow, I smiled at the turn in my life: the prospect of being a philanthropist by starting a school for girls in the slums of India was the coolest thing I had ever done.

  I was fueled with the courage of an extrovert, someone who acted in the face of incomplete information, knowing that there was risk involved, rather than the introvert I was, who would think through my every step before moving. I logged on to Facebook and pulled up Joe’s page. Rarely did he post photos anymore, but today he had. The younger daughter was in a banquet at school—Egyptian, maybe? She was dressed in a gold headdress, turquoise armbands, posing for the camera.

  I drafted a message I thought I would never send.

  Hi, Joe, I’m leaving India tomorrow and will be back in the States on Thursday. What an adventure! I hope all is well with you and the kids. This is just a crazy thought . . . I have a layover in Newark; is that far from you? I was thinking that it would be nice to catch up. In person. Any chance you could meet me at the airport for a quick cup of coffee?

  I allowed the message to sit. I permitted myself to imagine, to fantasize that Joe would read it, would respond eagerly: Yes, definitely! I authorized myself to believe that I would see Joe Santelli again, after all of these years.

  When Reina rapped on the door a half hour later, I let her in and told her about my message to Joe.

  “Send it,” she said.

  “I’m not.”

  She strode across the room toward my laptop. “Send it, or I will.”

  “I’ll vomit,” I joked. “How would you like that?”

  “I’m not afraid of a little throw-up.”

  I took a deep breath, looked at her seriously. “It’s not a good idea.”

  “It’s an excellent idea.”

  I read the message again, then again. “He and I used to have this thing we said to each other. ‘Never not.’ Like I’d say ‘Do you promise to love me?’ and he’d say ‘Never not.’”

  “Send it,” she said. “You’re never not going to send it.”

  I laughed out loud. Reina was the best. “You used it all wrong.”

  “Send it.” She smiled with her tiger eyes.

  Finally, I hit “Send” and then folded at the waist because sending this message was the bravest thing I had done yet. Or the stupidest. Were the two synonymous?

  By ten o’clock at night, I still hadn’t heard from him. Morning came and no message. By the time the taxi arrived to take me to the airport at noon, my in-box was empty like silence.

  Taking risks on the fringes of the bell curve had left me nauseated. I just wanted to crawl my way back to the fat, cozy middle.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  JOE

  I was still at the office when the phone rang, an 862 number I recognized as Kate’s school, St. Agnes. “This is Joe Santelli,” I said.

  It was Ms. Oliverio, the middle school counselor. “Katherine’s had a rough day.”

  My blood heated at once to a rumbling boil. “Why’s that?”

  “Some of the girls played a prank on her. I’m sure they never meant—”

  “What did they do?” Big or small, I would round up each and every one of them.

  “They slandered her on Twitter,” Ms. Oliverio said.

  “What did they say?” I would send an armed drone over the Twitter CEO’s house.

  “It was simply nonsense.”

  “What did it say?” I demanded. I pushed on my knee, which had begun to throb.

  Ms. Oliverio hesitated. “These girls intimated that Katherine ‘did things’ with her math teacher and that’s why she got straight As.”

  I squeezed the phone until my fist ached. Jealous, insecure, hateful, bratty girls. I swallowed a mouthful of air. The words slipped from my mouth. “Has it been taken down?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They took it down immediately.”

  “Did you expel these girls?”

  “We’re meeting with their parents this afternoon. We have to be careful not to damage the reputations of the girls who were just, say, ‘bystanders.’”

  I silently pounded my fist on the table. “What about Kate’s reputation?”

  “We understand how you feel—”

  “Where’s my daughter now?” I demanded.

  “She’s with the head of the middle school.”

  “I’m coming to get her.” Three tours in all varieties of war zones, and I had yet to feel this helpless.

  “Mr. Santelli,
let me assure you. The girls will be dealt with.”

  “Have my daughter ready.”

  I was still red-hot by the time I pulled into the parking lot of St. Agnes Middle School. I strode into the office, took Kate by the arm, and led her outside. When we turned the corner, I embraced her. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

  When Kate pulled away, she looked at me with veteran eyes, like the guys I served with who had been through too much, too quick. “It’s not your fault, Dad.”

  “Anytime I can’t protect you, it’s my fault,” I said. “At least that’s how it feels.”

  “Good point, Dad.”

  “I’d do anything to take away your pain. I’d cut off my arm just so you didn’t have to hurt.”

  “Haven’t we seen enough amputations?” she deadpanned.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “What should we do? Go beat up the parents of these bratty girls?”

  “We don’t need to do anything,” Kate said. “I just want to go home.”

  “Can I at least buy you a sundae?”

  “Sure, Dad. That’d be great.”

  We settled into a vinyl booth at Friendly’s and ordered a quadruple-scoop sundae with caramel, whipped cream, and extra cherries. We ate in silence. When I spoke, I said what she probably already knew. “Those girls are just jealous, you know. Jealous of your good grades.”

  “Believe me,” she said. “No one is jealous of me.”

  Kate’s eyes turned glossy.

  I slid from my side of the booth and scooted in next to her, holding her close as she cried. What could I say to her, that plenty of people would someday like her, that I adored her, that she had everything going for her? None of those stupid words would help her now. What could I say that wasn’t a tired cliché? Of course I knew I wasn’t supposed to say anything; I was just supposed to listen. I pried her from my shoulder, which was now soaking wet with tears. I handed her a napkin and she blew her nose. “Ice cream’s melting,” I said in total dad form, not knowing what else to say.