I was kind of nervous to go out to Gurgaon by myself-- I'd only been there once before, in a private car with someone's driver. Many of you seasoned Delhi-ites will probably laugh at me for this... and for those of you who don't know, Gurgaon is a former village 40 minutes south of Delhi. It's where all of the high rise office buildings and the mega shopping malls are located. From a distance, it could almost be some ultra modern city... but no, the whole of Gurgaon experiences power and water outages every day, there's lots of crime there because the development of a security force hasn't kept pace with the expansion of the city, and next to high rise office buildings you still find cows ambling and vegetable sellers pulling their carts.
So I hired a way-too-pricey tourist taxi for the day and set off. I was going to have lunch with the Anand (not their real name) family. I'd met Mrs. Anand at Suniye, an NGO for hearing impaired children. As soon as she found out that I have a hearing impairment, she invited me to come have lunch with her family so that I could meet Sally (again, not real name), her 32 year old, also hearing impaired daughter. I got to their high rise apartment building and, no surprise, the power was out, so I ditched the elevator and trekked up to the 9th floor.
We had such a lovely lunch together, and I was almost brought to tears by how much the family opened up to me. Though they are Punjabi, they lived for many years in Gaya, a small city in Bihar, until they realized that moving to Delhi would bring more opportunities for their children, especially Sally. Mrs. Anand told me all about her struggles to come to terms with Sally's hearing loss, to fit her with hearing aids, to find a school that would accept her. Mr. Anand told me about his years of studying in London in the 60s and how, to this day, he regrets turning down a job offer there. He believes that if he'd been able to stay on in Europe, life would have held far more opportunity for him, for his children, especially for Sally. He showed me old black and white photos of himself and his wife in their youth, the children babies in their arms, wearing traditional Indian clothes and usually surrounded by relatives in front of a country home. He showed me pictures of his carefree days as a student in London-- they looked like stills from a 50s movie-- and we talked about the freedom, the opportunity, the sense of I-can-do-anything that Americans and Europeans take for granted, which simply don't exist in the same way here (despite what you may read in The World is Flat).
Sally herself was amazingly sweet and always smiling. I communicated with her through a mix of Hindi, English, lip reading, rudimentary (on my part) sign. Her parents left us alone on a couple of occasions, so that they wouldn't distract our conversation. Though she's been hearing impaired her entire life, she didn't get hearing aids until she was 7 because no doctor before then ever explained to her mother that hearing aids would help and morever, that it was important to get them ASAP. Thus, she's had to catch up on her language development since then. She tends to mouth most of her words, rather than say them aloud. She doesn't have a job but she works informally at art and dancing. Her paintings lined the walls of the apartment, along with photographs of her sister who lives in Kuwait with her Pakistani husband and of her brother who works for an American security firm in Baghdad and goes to sleep every night to the sound of rockets and alarms. He would never choose to live in such danger if it didn't pay about 15 times the salary he could get here in India.
At the end of lunch, Mrs. Anand cried that I hadn't eaten enough-- after two and a half chicken kebabs, two servings of rice, two servings of dal, two servings of vegetables, half a chapatti, and a bowl of yogurt, she insisted that I must not have liked the food. I placated her (I have become practiced at doing this) and accepted some Indian sweets for the road. I promised the Anands that I'd help look into scholarships for Sally to study in the US-- I know there are scholarships for deaf students through Gallaudet and other places. I also promised to come visit again before I leave, and I'm sure I will.
I keep thinking again and again about this meeting with the Anands. Coincidentally, the day of that visit was the eve of Yom Kippur. Though one side of my family is Jewish, I am not religious myself, but had agreed to accompany a Jewish friend to services that night. Yom Kippur is a Day of Atonement which to me, since I don't really believe in "atoning," means a Day of Reflection. The lunch with the Anands gave me so much to reflect on. In a synagogue full of Indian Jews, Israeli diplomats, hippy backpackers and white expats, I thought, not for the first time, about what it means to be American, about the privilage and opportunity I have received just by being born in the USA. Anyone who says that America is NOT the land of freedom or opportunity has got to come to India... then they'll know...
