Midway Reflections

I haven’t written in a long time because I haven’t really had very much to say, or at least not anything that was very positive. I’ve reached the half-way mark of my time in India, and I feel that I have very little to show for it. Mostly, this feeling comes from my dissatisfaction with work.

I’ve been working at the NIRRH for the past 3 weeks, and initially, the project sounded great—it’s important to understand how domestic violence impacts women’s and neonate’s health, and as I read through some of the case studies, I realized how necessary this work was. The problem is getting the work done. I suppose this is the traditional dilemma in any developing country, but it is incredibly frustrating and not something I had counted on. The way we recruit women to interview as our study subjects is through this free government program that offers vaccinations to infants. However, ever since I’ve arrived in India, the vaccine stock has been depleted, and they haven’t gotten new stock from the WHO yet. Talk about bureaucracy. Because there has been no vaccination program, there are very few women with babies 6 months and under that have been attending the clinic in Govandi (the slum area I talked about in my last email). Therefore, we have extremely few study subjects…I did get started interviewing one woman who was experiencing some violence in her home, but before I could really get to know anything about how or why it was happening, she had to leave because her husband (who was perpetrating the violence) was waiting outside the clinic for her.

So in a total time period of 3 weeks, I’ve interviewed 1.5 women. That is it. So I’ve really been frustrated because I feel like I’m getting 0 field experience, which was the primary reason I came to India. I mean, the office work that I do at the NIRRH—summarizing relevant studies on domestic violence, male involvement in family planning, fertility rates in rural India, etc, etc.—I could have done in the comfort of my home in NJ. So it’s not very fulfilling or demanding work, and while initially it was interesting to learn about all these problems in the slums and rural India, now learning about those problems is getting frustrating because I can’t DO anything about them. I feel like a useless cog in a poorly oiled machine.

As a result, for the past few weeks, I’ve been missing home intensely. That’s surprising, not because homesickness is strange, but because I spent all of my gap year traveling to random countries and knowing none of the languages, and here, I blend in pretty decently most of the time, yet my time in India has been marked by intense periods of homesickness and loneliness. For all of you who work, I don’t know how you do it. I much prefer student life to the 9-5 grind. My commute to work is about 1 hour each way, and by the time I get home, I’m so exhausted from pushing and shoving my way onto a train and then a bus that it’s all I can do to do some reading and then just crash until it’s time to wake up the next morning and start the whole uninspiring routine again. I’ve been so busy with work life (work 6 days a week) that yesterday was the first day that I went sightseeing in Mumbai.

That was really fun: I saw Haji Ali, a mosque devoted to a man named Ali who set out to complete Hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, but ended up drowning en route, and his friends managed to find his body and bury it on the spot overlooking the sea in the direction of Mecca, and people built a mosque on that site. It’s a really interesting building; if the tides come in, the path to the mosque is completely covered by water and no one can reach it, so you have to go during low tide only. I thought the mosque’s name was also really touching: Haji Ali, meaning Ali who was completed Hajj. It’s a nice testament to the importance of intentions in Islam that even though this man wasn’t able to complete the pilgrimage, everyone honored him as though he had because that is what he set out to do.

I also saw the most important Hindu temple in Mumbai, devoted to Lakshmi, the goddess who is the patroness of Mumbai. That was a bit of a hectic trip: we picked up some devotional items for Lakshmi and then as we walked into the temple, there was a mad rush to give the items to the pundit who would bless them, and so I ended up staying to the side so that my friends, who are Hindu, could ask the pundit to perform the rites. Afterwards, we walked behind the temple, which also faces the sea. We ate amazing street food and drank lassi (yogurt mixed with water or milk—for the sake of my digestive system, I hope it was milk—and sweetened), and then saw Chowpatty Beach. This was the first time I’d seen the sea since my arrival in Mumbai. Andheri, where I live, and Parel, where I work, are pretty far from the seashore so I could have stayed in those areas and never have known that Mumbai had a nice shore! The Arabian Sea at Chowpatty Beach, however, is pretty filthy. The water is a mucky brown color and there are plastic bags littering the shore, so it’s not a place anyone would want to swim in, and indeed, there were no swimmers yesterday.

We also went to the aquarium, which was pretty tiny, but did have some really cute sea turtles and some interesting fish that I had never seen before, such as the tiger fish and the red parrot fish. We also walked along Marine Drive for a little bit, and my friends and I all commented on how if you only saw Marine Drive and the buildings lining it, you would never know that Mumbai was a city that also contained such unimaginable poverty. Our final destination was Gateway of India, an arch constructed in 1911 to welcome King George and Queen Mary to Mumbai. It’s enormous, and faces the Taj Hotel. When I saw the Taj, my mouth fell open. It’s stunningly beautiful, but also, a bit pretentious in this city that contains Dharavi, the largest slum in all of Asia. The area around Gateway is the nicest area of Mumbai; many of the buildings were built by the British, and although some are in a state of decay, the sidewalks are so clean that I couldn’t believe I was in Mumbai (I mean, where did all the street hawkers and beggars go??) and the roads actually have walk signals for pedestrians. We walked past Flora Fountain, also built by the Brits, which, despite its name, has no water, and saw Victoria Terminus, the largest train station in the city and built to commemorate Queen Victoria. Aaaah, colonialism.

And then it was back to the Mumbai I knew, which I oddly found more comforting than these last vestiges of colonialism remaining in the city.

I’m really lucky to have found such amazing co-workers. They were the ones who took me around the city yesterday, and if it weren’t for them, I would probably have spent this entire weekend just sitting around in my PJs as I do every day after work. They have also been really supportive, and we’ve talked about our mutual dissatisfaction with the (lack of) work, and they have been very understanding.

I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the politics here, which are very interesting and distinctly unfriendly (not hostile, just unfriendly) towards Pakistan, which is to be expected, but still a little surprising. For example, the recent bombing in Kabul of the Indian embassy inspired some whispers that Pakistani insurgents were behind it, and just last week, Pakistani and Indian border patrol got into a skirmish which each side blamed on the other for starting. One of the papers in Mumbai said that of course the Pakistanis would claim innocence, and there was a distinct impression that the Pakistanis must have started the skirmish. There is definitely a long way to go in Pakistan/India relations, and the fault lies with the politicians of both countries.

I think the biggest shock for me however has not been being Pakistani in India but covering my hair in India. It’s not as though anyone has said anything offensive to me but people are very surprised that an educated woman would choose to wear hijab, because they view it as an oppressive symbol and the only Muslims they know who do cover their hair or openly identify as practicing Muslims all live in the slums. It’s definitely a symbol associated with a certain class of people, and I break all the stereotypes, so people, even my supervisor at work, have a hard time fitting me in to their standard world scheme. Muslims in Mumbai at least are extraordinarily uneducated, especially Muslim women, who are often pulled out of school by their parents to help with housework/enter a vocation to make money. Just yesterday I met a 14 year old who had been pulled out of school after the 7^th grade to learn how to sew so she could make money for her parents. It’s absolutely criminal; in many ways, the community is condemning itself to poverty by not encouraging the young girls to pursue any educational opportunities. I myself have yet to meet an educated Muslim here. The only Muslims I have met have been rickshaw drivers or the people in the slum communities; I have heard about a few Muslims who work at the NIRRH but have yet to meet them, and also, I’m the only woman who wears hijab at the NIRRH. That makes for very interesting conversations.

Two funny stories to end this on a more positive note:

Yesterday, I was really missing home, and as I was walking to the bus stop, I thought maybe if I close my eyes and wish it hard enough, I’ll end up in America. Too bad I didn’t have red shoes to click. Anyways, I closed my eyes for a few seconds (which was probably a bad idea, as I could have gotten killed by all the traffic) and wished as hard as I could to be back home, and when I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was a rickshaw driver peeing into the open gutter along the sidewalk. Well, I am definitely still in India, I thought to myself, and then I looked objectively at the situation and just started laughing.

Earlier, I was talking about how I blend in pretty well. Well, sometimes, not well enough. One evening after work, I was walking around the market near where I live, when I just started craving a gulab jamun. For all those of you who have not been blessed with the good fortune to have eaten a gulab jamun, it’s this amazing ball of gooey, sweet goodness that is fried (of course) and then coated with sugary syrup. So I walked up to this sweets store that looked quite popular and asked, in Hindi/Urdu, for a gulab jamun. I must have spoken about 10 words, but the man looked at me and immediately asked me where I was from. I started laughing and asked him how he knew I wasn’t from Mumbai and he told me my accent was funny. Well, he gave me the gulab jamun and in the meantime told me his entire family history (people here are very friendly, especially the merchants) and I ended up telling him what I was doing in Mumbai and ate that gulab jamun with a lot of relish right on the street corner with everyone doing their shopping around me. Yum.