This past week was Diwali, the Indian New Year. It’s probably the biggest festival of the year, and most people go back to their native village to celebrate with their families. I went to the home of one of the accountants here, whom I’ll call Suresh, though that’s not his real name. Suresh speaks English quite well, and lives in a village called Ranoda about 25 kilometers away with his parents and sisters.
I left for Ranoda on Friday, and took a series of three shared auto rickshaw taxis, each one packed with about eight people, though they should sit only three. The journey cost me less than fifty cents. I called Suresh when I arrived, and he came out to meet me. We walked together down the main road of the village—unpaved, though level and covered with gravel—and then took a left.
“The road to the right is for non-Dalits,” he said. In nearly every Indian village, the Dalits live in a separate locality some distance from the rest of the village. The road we were now on was in significantly worse condition than the main one; it was probably too narrow for a car or truck, and was fairly muddy.
Nearly everyone we passed was excited to see me. They all asked Suresh where I was from, and nodded in awe when they heard the word “America”. Suresh was clearly enjoying showing me off, but I didn’t mind. I’m sure I was the first foreigner to come into the Dalit locality (probably the overall village, too), and maybe even the first person from outside Gujarat. Soon a trail of people had formed behind us as we walked to Suresh’s house, winding between the houses and alleys. His house was two stories, and made of concrete and wood with an earthen floor. Suresh told me his grandfather built it fifty years ago.
Suresh’s sisters and mother smiled when they saw me. They sat me on a cot, and gave me some water and then tea. When I finished, I went on a short walk with Suresh. It was late in the day, around five-thirty, and it was really just beautiful, very much the picture of Indian village life that you might imagine. Balanced on their heads, women were carrying jugs of water or fodder for the buffalos. Old men, whose smiles displayed only half the number of teeth there should have been, were coming back home from the fields.
In a clearing surrounded by houses, some kids were playing cricket. The houses there were fairly large (by village standards), concrete, and together formed a “U”, with the interior left open for hay, buffalos, and a tractor or two. The boys playing cricket invited me to join them, so I picked up the bat. I hit a few good balls, but they were pitching (or “bowling” in cricket terms) slowly for me. Everyone cheered when I had a good hit.
Suresh’s mother cooked dinner on a small wood fire just outside the house. Suresh and I were served first, so we ate sitting on a rug on the floor. The food was really good; there were several dishes, including a vegetable stew, lentils, rice, and Indian flatbread (roti). The rest of the family didn’t start to eat until Suresh and I had finished.
After dinner, the Diwali celebrations continued. People carried torches (crowned with buffalo dung, and soaked in coconut oil) to the banks of the pond, and stuck them in the ground there. It’s supposed to symbolize something, though I’m not sure what. Kids were lighting firecrackers and fireworks the whole time, and actually they didn’t stop until well into the next day.
When it was time to sleep, Suresh’s sisters lined up some wooden cots outside the house, and everyone slept in a row. I was too tall for the cot, and my legs stuck out, so it wasn’t the best night of sleep in my life. But that could also have been because of the nonstop firecrackers. At one point, I woke up to see a boy lighting a firecracker fifteen feet from my cot. I checked my watch; it was 4:30.
People were up and moving well before sunrise, and soon we had tea and crackers for breakfast. Suresh and I took another walk around the Dalit locality. I was offered tea by probably a dozen different households, and I accepted from a few. Oddly, the custom here is to pour the tea from the cup onto the saucer, and then sip directly from the saucer. I think the point is that it cools down more quickly that way. As is typical in Gujarat, the tea was made from boiled buffalo milk and black tea leaves. It’s a bit sweet for my taste, but still very good.
Suresh wanted to take a bath, so I continued my walk by the houses where I had played cricket the day before. I learned that the reason those houses were so big was that they had been built under a government plan implemented by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, India’s foremost Dalit leader, now deceased and revered by many Dalits as something of a god. Ambedkar dedicated his life to the breaking of caste barriers, and was the main author of India’s constitution. As a result, Dalits receive legal protection and are given reserved spots for government jobs, called “positive discrimination”, the Indian version of affirmative action. The caste system is deeply ingrained in Indian society, however, and laws are often not enforced. Sadly, the condition of the Dalits in many places is not so different today than it was a hundred years ago; many are landless, uneducated, and relegated to the most menial, laborious work.
Anyway, I walked from house to house, and had tea with a few different people. Most had framed portraits of Dr. Ambedkar on their walls, usually next to a picture of a Hindu deity. Some homes had handlooms on the front porch; these probably belonged to Vankars—the Dalit sub-caste dedicated to weaving.
I spent the rest of the morning lounging around Suresh’s house with his extended family. They served us lunch, and afterwards we headed outside the village to see some other of his family members.
Near the village entrance was a temple compound, with one larger building and one smaller. It looked harmless to me, but Suresh pointed out that Dalits are forbidden from entering the larger temple, and have to be content with the smaller one. This is typical in India, as untouchability—the practice of treating Dalits as polluting by their very presence—is common in rural areas. Suresh also told me that though relations were good between the “upper” castes of the village and the Dalits, and the “upper” castes sometimes came into the Dalit locality, they wouldn’t drink tea or water from Dalit homes. Doing so would, in their minds, cause them to become “polluted”. “They come to my home, sit on the cots and talk to my family,” Suresh said, “but they don’t drink our tea. Never.” Some elderly Dalits are used to this discrimination and rarely complain, but the youth seem to assert themselves more actively.
So we spent the afternoon at the houses of some of Suresh’s relatives, drinking tea, eating sweets, and chatting. I spent the next night in a town called Dholka at the home of the manager of the vocational training school here. It was very pleasant, but lacked Ranoda’s charm. I’m planning on developing the pictures I took at Ranoda and giving them to Suresh’s family as a thank-you gift for treating me so well. Everyone loved my camera, and basically lined up to have a picture taken. Despite my poor Gujarati, I understood when one man told a neighbor, “Come on! Have him take your photo. Then people in America will see you!”
I have open invitations to come to many different villages here, but I’m going to make sure I go back to Ranoda at least once before I leave.
My second haircut was a bit less of a positive experience. I live now just outside of a tiny village, so normal barbershop facilities aren't available. What is available, though, is a guy in a shack who has a pair of scissors, a straightedge razor, and a mirror. I went to see him about three weeks ago in the evening, around six, but since the sun was low in the sky and he didn't have electricity, and my curly hair would require more concentration than usual, he asked me to come back the next morning. I did, but the haircut wasn't nearly as good as the one I got in Mussourie. This barber was clearly intimidated by the curls, and kept trying to straighten my hair, which doesn't work very well. As a result, some parts were too short, others too long, and I wasn't particularly satisfied. It cost 15 Rupees, or about 37 cents.
