Laundry

Pictured: Asu, Mili Das on her mother's lap, the water pump.

I have come to relish washing my clothes. I admit I’ve always found laundry a satisfying experience, despite my tendency to put it off until there sits a mountain of clothes dominating my apartment landscape. I like the process in all it’s American varieties: a) the lugging of a giant bag to the local Laundromat, the watching of uncommonly-seen-at-home television shows like Sabado Gigante (nothing beats adding fabric softener to the antics and voice of Don Francisco in the background) while the clothes are washing and drying, the analysis of fellow washer’s clothing, b) the lugging of a giant bag to your building’s basement wash room after memorizing the schedule of all the other tenant’s washing habits in order to avoid wrangling over your favorite machine, and c) the luxury of having a washer and dryer in the home and lugging a giant bag to your own basement to joyfully pop in a load at your convenience while going about the day’s other activities, retrieving said load once finished, all warm and fluffy and ready to be folded while you relax in front of the TV, watching a show of your choosing, at peace knowing you’ve accomplished a task you often put off and that you’ll have clean clothing for another week (or two, or three if you really stretch it and buy some new underwear).

Here in Juanga, laundry involves a bucket, soap, water, a hard surface, my hands, a clothesline, and the sun. It’s windy, hot, and agricultural, so my clothes get dirty easily and regularly. I do a “load” every three or four days, a discipline I imagined I would dread, but as I said, I’ve come to relish. Not because I get some kind of kick out of “doing as the locals do,” or because I feel like I really “know how to handle life without amenities.” I like washing my clothes because I really like beating the heck out of them. I soak them in the soapy water for an hour or two, and then I take each garment and beat it against the cement by the water pump, pummeling out every piece of dirt that invaded it since it’s last washing.

I didn’t always know the joys of beating clothes against the proverbial rocks. I used to just swish them around vigorously in the bucket, do several rinses, hang them, and be done. But one of our hospital’s most dedicated workers, a teddy bear of a man named Asu, saw me washing one day and guffawed. Before I knew it, he had taken every piece of my clothing, underwear included, and in a flurry of grunts, methodically beaten each within an inch of its life. Rinsing followed, then a primal wringing-out process, again accompanied with several grunts and a semi-heave, and I was sent to hang the clothes on our roof. A small crowd gathered of our fellow hospital employees, all of them enjoying the scene and noting my utter embarrassment that Asu had beaten and wrung my clothes, most pointedly my underwear. I couldn’t get over the underwear. But Asu's example proved effective, awakening within me my own primal washing power.

While I’m beating my clothes, I feel connected to all those who pound clothes on rocks all over the world and who have done so through all time. All my frustrations come to the surface, finally having an outlet. I can beat my jeans and remember how angry I am that the Orissa state government hasn’t yet built a proper road to reach our village. I beat my soiled t-shirts and remember the fight in the village over six inches of property that lead to the injuring of a woman, and how much she bled as we dressed her wounds at the hospital. I pound away and think of Mili Das, a beautiful three year old girl whose foot was run over by a drunk driver tearing through her village on a scooter a month ago, who comes each day for dressing and cleaning of her excruciating wounds, whose life is now considered ruined because with a mutilated foot, she won’t be seen as a suitable candidate for a good man in potential marriage arrangements. I remember how my two favorite drummers from a neighboring village welcomed me into their homes and introduced me to their children, where I learned that one of their sons is blind, and another has six fingers on each hand, and that such maladies are considered part of the norm. I remember the political system run by bribes. I remember the difficulty in communication, the lack of trust I feel because I’m constantly fighting to get an honest answer about how things work, what time it is, when something can be finished, whether something has been begun, if I’m being asked a fair price. I remember how exhausting it is to be constantly stared at, haggled, touched because of white skin, asked for money, for a camera, for jewelry. Every challenge, spat, hurt feeling, cultural clash,injustice, and misunderstanding comes up and faces near pulverization.

By beating my clothes, I experience a window of time in which to entertain my negative thoughts, to admit anger, to let out the exhaust and fumes consumed and produced in a given several days of life and interaction and work.

I spend so much time trying to live on the positive side of the balance, partially because I’m an optimist, mostly because I am surrounded with an abundance of joyful experience and interaction. But the other side has its place, and thanks to Asu, I’ve found it.

Hockey

Bapa and I spent last weekend in Puri, he visiting his son Manu, I working on paperwork for Columbia Nursing School. The experience was nothing short of mind-blowing for me because in the span of five hours, we went from the oxen plowed fields of Juanga, to Janardan’s pink internet café, surrounded by computers, a scanner, a web cam, and several customers using Skype to communicate online with friends in foreign lands. I'd made this journey many times, but having Bapa by my side and trying to see it through his eyes multiplied my sensory intake exponentially.

Like hockey pucks on a frozen Minnesota pond, we slid from the ancient world to the modern world in a matter of hours. I don’t know that Bapa thought about the contrasts zipping past as we went from one point of origin to another, but I was reeling. His adaptability also threw me for a loop as I watched him sitting, smiling, conversing with Janardan, happy as a clam in the midst of all the gadgets and machinery. Why was it so easy for him to be surrounded by such unfamiliar things when I need at least a month to adjust to the world he considers familiar?

He was made more at home, of course, because there were drums at the internet café. We sat and played through the afternoon, the foreign clientele entertained by Bapa, an ancient village man in a white dhoti playing as energetically as he does, the local clientele equally entertained by their disbelief that an American woman had become this old man’s daughter and learned the region’s San Kirtan music.

I suppose that Bapa and I together pose a certain juxtaposition ourselves – a tall, white American woman, an obvious product of the 1st World, and a small, brown, Indian man, an obvious product of the 3rd world. We forget these differences most days since there’s another, familiar rhythm resonating between us. But when one puts Bapa and web cams in the same room, loincloths with DVD writing, lifelong bare feet with hippie pilgrims in the latest Birkenstock styles, one is bound to feel some degree of overload.

I’m always asking how to bridge the gap, make things more even, giving equal opportunity to the people of the 1st and 3rd worlds. Most of the time, from the vantage point of Juanga, the gap feels enormous and nearly unbridgeable. But this weekend, sitting with Bapa in that pink room, the buzz of technology surrounding us, I tried to comprehend just what was so confounding about the whole scene. I came to understand a sense of opportunity within this complex reality; that there are indeed ample means to shorten the distance. If Thomas Friedman is right, and “The World is Flat,” then maybe Bapa, and more importantly, Bapa’s grandchildren, will find a way to slide across the rink and land in a place far away from the poverty that currently surrounds them.

The King of Water Buffaloes

I’d like to introduce my friend Benua, the proud owner and caretaker of seven distinguished water buffaloes here in Juanga. I first came to know him in 2005 when I’d go each day to our school building early evening to sing. The sun would be on its way to the horizon, and as I peaked out the second floor window, I’d see Benua regally guiding his water buffaloes back home. I mean regal in its truest sense: this man has the presence, grace, and carriage of Yule Brenner. I have no trouble picturing him as the archetype of any operatic King, from Sarastro to Don Carlo’s despotic King Philip. He is tall, broad, solid, and unwittingly communicates a sense of inner power and nobility.

The Oriya word for water buffalo is moisi, and king is raja. Thus, I ordained him “Moisi Raja,” a title our fellow villagers greatly enjoy. Nearly every day someone walks by and says, “Benua nam kono?” (What’s Benua’s name?), I respond, “Moisi Raja,” and great gales of laughter follow.

For months we never spoke, though each day he would look up to me in my window at the school, raising his bamboo stick in greeting, sometimes nodding, always giving me some portion of a smile (a Moisi Raja never all-out grins at mere subjects). I loved this ritual. If I saw the sun was setting, I dropped everything to get to school and start my singing so I could see Benua gliding along the terrain amidst his herd, his bright pink gumcha (a towel-sized cotton multi-purpose cloth, seen here and a light saffron, used most often in early evening as a shawl or head wrap) softly blowing against his brown, broad chest, bamboo scepter in hand, the top part resting on his shoulder until needed to encourage forward movement from the gentle beasts.

Only once did I see him break from character. One of the moisi gave birth to a calf last time I was here. Once the calf was up and ambulatory, it joined the herd each day, and thus returned each evening during our ritual time. From our school to their patch of land, there’s a 50-meter, straight-line stretch. One evening I came to the window and got to see the little calf test its engines for the first time, diving into an all out sprint from the school to its hitching post. This was an unexpected and comic burst, and Benua’s face peeled into a full-toothed smile, beaming with pride at the antics of his newest charge. He then glanced up at me, and we exchanged a knowing, joyful look.

My first day back in Juanga this year, I saw Benua heading toward his moisi to gather them and take them to their grazing area for the day. I ran over, shouting “Benua! Benua! Moisi Raja!” and that same, glorious grin appeared, along with a sincere “Namaste” and pat on the back. We are more familiar now, and he’s one of the people here that can figure out just what I’m saying when I speak Oriya, surely a comical and potentially frustrating experience. I can see his moisi from my window at the hospital, and I know the time of day by observing their presence, absence, and activities. What were four moisi my first visit have become seven – four adults and three little ones – a promising step toward bringing his family out of serious poverty into a more livable existence. I admire Benua, not just because of his poise and stately manner, (qualities of which I am sure he is unaware), but because he lives and breathes and feeds his family by taking earnest care of his herd of strangely commanding and beautiful beasts.