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.