Under the Indian Sun

Lisa waited in the shade of the veranda, squinting down at the Untouchable village smothered in the hot gold of the Indian sun. The small huts of dung and mud formed a lonely outpost in the arid land, a scattering of impoverished cockeyed blocks. The metal signs and corrugated tin patchworked into the roofs threw splinters of light into her eyes. She turned away.  

The American missionary school her parents had sent her to was up in the mountains where the air was cool and moist, the forest thick and green, scented with eucalyptus. Down here on the plains, the air hung in dust laden curtains over the barren land, scented with diesel and decay. Lisa struggled to breathe, struggled to believe she had been exiled to this place because of her father’s job, to accept she’d had to leave behind her home and all her friends to start over in a new school – a boarding school no less - where everyone had known each other for their whole lives, had lived here so long, they no longer even acted American. 

And now this. In an effort to make friends, she had joined a group called the Youth Corps which she had been told did community service. She thought that meant maybe singing to old folks in a nursing home. Instead, it meant being shuttled down the twisting ghat roads in a cramped tin can of a van to end up at the lowest level of hell, if the heat was any indication, on a mission to deliver medicine, food, and clothing to the Untouchables.

Her advisor, Mrs. Dhanapal, had explained that the Untouchables were a part of the ancient caste system and that it actually meant what it said. They were regarded as the lowest of the low, outcast from society, human beings that upper caste Hindus would not even touch.

“Like lepers?” Lisa had asked. She was definitely not going to do community service in a leper colony. 

“In a way.” Mrs. Dhanapal had waggled her head in that indeterminate Indian head wobble. “Lepers were regarded as untouchable around the world, including in European nations. But the Untouchables here are not lepers.”

Lisa wasn’t overly reassured. This whole thing seemed a far cry from singing to a bunch of benign elderly people in an air-conditioned nursing home. When she had called her parents to complain about the mission, her mom had pulled the "you've-been-given-so-much-don't-you-think-you-should-be-helping-to-give-back?" card for which there is no reasonable defense.

She bent over to discretely mop her forehead with the front of her tee shirt. How could it be this hot?

She must have spoken aloud because the kid next to her, she thought it might be Shaun, answered. “It’s from coming down from the mountains so fast. Your body can’t adjust.”

Lisa nodded. “I actually feel kind of sick.”

“Yeah, it happens. You should have taken the nimbu pani.”

Earlier, a white jacketed servant had come around with tall glasses of lemon water for the students sheltering from the sun while their advisor met with the fat overseer in the cool gloom of the house. Lisa’s parents had told her, repeatedly, not to drink the water in India unless it was bottled, so she had refused the beverage while the other kids had guzzled theirs down without hesitation. Maybe they were immune to the water-borne diseases, but Lisa had only been here for two weeks. Not enough time to build up immunity to the water, to pretty much everything.

“What are we waiting for?” she asked, wishing she didn’t sound so whiney.

“We need permission,” Maj answered.

“What? To help some poor people in a village?”

She nodded. “I think he owns the village.”

“He owns the village?” Lisa directed her gaze back down into the simmering valley.

“I think. He doesn’t want us interfering.” Maj tipped her head to the sound of Mrs. Dhanapal’s raised voice from within the house. “It’s not the way things are done here.” She shrugged, an old hand at the culture she’d been raised in, a virtual native - her red hair and freckles notwithstanding.

Mrs. Dhanapal finally came out, sketching her namastes to the overseer. Standing straight, her black braid hung to her knees, a small but imperious figure. Clapping her hands at the group, she gestured to the bus. “Come! Sikkirum! We may go now.” Lisa could see the sweat stains blossoming down her choli as she dabbed her forehead with the tail end of her sari.

The van trundled them down to the village, jouncing over the rutted road. In the village center, curious children gathered to watch the spectacle of the white teenagers tumbling out of the bus. They kicked up swirls of dust with their bare feet as they scampered over, calling out their greetings. “Good morning, Memsahib!” “Hello Missy!” Scrawny pi-dogs wove between their churning legs, panting. The adults stood in patches of shade monitoring the chaos dubiously. 

Mrs. Dhanapal commandeered the scene, ordering the boys to unload the van, conducting her operations with military precision: The medicine cooler here, the water jugs by the well, the bags of donated clothing under the Cadbury’s billboard jerry rigged into an awning. She held a small double pronged needle and was dipping it in alcohol to sterilize it before administering the smallpox vaccine into the arm of a young boy who stood stoutly under the watchful eyes of the others. When it was clear the vaccination didn’t hurt, he swaggered off to appreciative claps, eager to revel in the bravery he had shown. Parents urged their children forward with an oddly shy hesitancy.

“Why is our teacher administering shots, anyway?” Lisa asked as Maj strode by with a huge box of donated clothing. “Shouldn’t it be a doctor or a nurse or something?”

“It’s some kind of international effort to eradicate the disease. I think maybe the Untouchables are the last group of people to get the vaccine because a lot of people weren't willing to you know…” She left her sentence hanging awkwardly before ducking in the nearest hut with her box.

“…Touch them,” Lisa finished for her. She looked down at the cluster of scrawny children pressing close to her. She could smell sweat and spice and the ghee Indians often put in their hair. They pointed at the bright orange peach of the logo from the “Eat a Peach” concert she’d gone to right before her parents dragged her here to the southern tip of India. She could feel the jubilant expectancy on their faces, the assurance that she was going to do something wonderful. 

She smiled mutely, unable to respond, aware that her classmates were all getting to work, lugging gear around, stooping down to pick up small children, high fiving the older ones. Moving with purpose.

“Lisa!” Mrs. Dhanapal snapped. “That boy there,” she waved at a child standing back from the excitement generated by the white teenagers who had materialized in the village. “See to him.”

He was a small boy, with gaunt cheeks, his ear running green with infection, leaving a trail down the side of his dark face. Lisa stared, feeling unsteady, unready, unprepared. “What do I do…” her voice trailed off as she realized no one had time to explain everything to her.

She rooted around in the medical box for something useful, wondering how years spent at the mall and hanging out with friends back home was supposed to have prepared her for this. She found some gauze and dampened it with a bit of water from the jugs they had brought. 

“Careful,” Glenn cautioned. “We need that for milk.”

Shamefaced, she turned back to her task. Trying not to breathe, wishing she at least had a pair of those yellow gloves people use to wash dishes, she wiped the pus away as the little boy stood stoically. It wouldn’t do any good that Lisa could see, but it was something.

“Use the hydrogen peroxide,” Mrs. Dhanapal shouted. Awkwardly, Lisa tipped a capful from the brown bottle into his ear where it frothed and bubbled. She swallowed, trying to keep the disgust from painting itself across her features.

A vision of spotless hospitals, starched white uniforms, and syringes tidily thrown away after one use filtered across her mind, a hygienic veil pulled up before the veil of dust in the village square. But Mom, I don’t want to get shots! a voice whined from the corner of her mind, high and thin like a mosquito. And like a mosquito, it irritated, grating at her memories of home.

She blinked the veil aside and stared down at the grinning face of the boy. Her heart sank; she could tell he thought she had healed him with the bubbly magic liquid. 

She shooed him over to Glenn who was stirring an enormous vat of powdered milk. It was warm and lumpy though Glenn was beating it vigorously, sweating with the effort. He sloshed it into tin cups the children shared, gulping it down and giggling at the foaming white moustaches on their faces. Their high delicate laughter filled the air.

I don’t want spinach for dinner! the distant voice complained, pricking at the sound of delight around her. It’s gross! A pouting face swam into focus in her mind. A round, chubby, well-fed face. Her own face.

Lisa shook herself. She should be doing something. "Helping to give back," as her mother had said. She figured maybe she could be useful with the donated clothing and ducked into the doorway Maj had slipped into earlier. Inside, three of her classmates were holding up castoff clothing to estimate sizes for the slender girls filling the small space. One girl, little more than a bundle of bones with enormous eyes, gave her a hopeful look.

“Hello, I’m Lisa,” Lisa offered.

The girl released a birdsong of Tamil. Lisa looked helplessly over at the other students. 

“Her name is Shanti,” Cher translated. 

 “How old are you?” Lisa asked as she started sorting through the donated clothing. Cher translated the answer. “She’s 13.”

Lisa sucked in her breath. Thirteen! The girl was tiny, frail. If she weighed 50 pounds, Lisa would have been surprised. She tucked a childish dress with its cartoon Minnie Mouse back into the pile to search for something a little more age-appropriate that wouldn’t dwarf the girl. She found a flowered dress and held it up for approval. Shanti beamed with an appreciative “Acha!” and wagged her head from side to side in the signature head movement Lisa had noticed as soon as she’d arrived in this land.

She glanced a quick question at Cher, who was trying some sneakers on a toddler who clearly had not worn shoes before. “That means yes, she’s happy if you are.”

“It kind of looks like a ‘no’ that got confused,” Lisa muttered. 

Cher laughed. Shanti was tugging at her choli, which wouldn’t come down over her shoulders. It was tight, too tight. She hung her head and whispered something quietly to Cher. “She says she hasn’t any other clothes, so this is all she’s worn for so long…” Cher didn’t finish. 

The little girl had worn the same choli for so long, Lisa realized, looking at the stick thin arms cinched above the elbows by the narrow tube of fabric, that she couldn’t get the threadbare clothing off.

LeAnn handed her a pair of scissors with an expression on her face that seemed to be trying to apologize for the ways of the world.

Lisa found herself blinking, her eyes stinging as she held up the scissors. She could not believe what she was about to do, but Shanti’s humiliated expression told her to shape up and try to act like cutting the clothing off a shrunken human form was perfectly ordinary. She began to babble brightly about how nice the faded flowered dress would look with Shanti’s beautiful big eyes. Shanti seemed to understand the intention, if not the words, of this foreigner. She nodded, her fingers walking over the smocked panel. Sweeping her hands down the pleated skirting, she smiled up at Lisa in approval. “Nanri.”

Lisa felt her heart catch, like a hiccough in her chest. Giving a child someone else’s discarded hand-me-down was not something she deserved thanks for. She impulsively leaned forward to envelop the tiny shoulders in a hug. She felt Shanti’s arms creep around her in return, bone and skin against her spine, the warmth from the tiny body like holding an ember to her heart.

As she helped other little girls into faded tee shirts, dresses with frayed collars, stained skirts, a voice spoke into her head, a voice from far away but not that long ago. I wanted the denim dress, not this one. It hurt to hear it. She bent her head to her task, her cheeks flushing. Maybe it was heat stroke.

Outside, Mrs. Dhanapal started barking new commands. What now?

The other students scrambled up and began packing the unused clothing back into the box. Cher gestured out the doorway. “When she says 'Jump,' it's a good idea to jump. We had best get going.” She picked up the remaining Good Will rejects and stepped back out into the light.

“Leave the clothes there, Cher,” Mrs. Dhanapal instructed. Two boys stood next to her holding shovels. “Our mission here,” Mrs. Dhanapal said, “is not complete. The overseer would not let us come into the village unless we agreed to do a project he will not do. There is an old sewer system.” She pointed at two rows of stone sticking out of the hard packed dust. “We will dig it out.”

“You have got to be kidding.” Lisa heard the words before she realized it was her own voice speaking. Mrs. Dhanapal turned a glance on her that by rights should have turned her into stone on the spot. The tiny lady handed Lisa a shovel saying only, “Dig,” before turning to dispense the rest of the tools to the other volunteers who had had the sense not to speak up.

Lisa dug. The ground was hard, but with a little effort, fractured into desiccated chunks that scraped against the shovel. She could hear amazed murmurs breaking out around her from the villagers. A man at her elbow suddenly addressed her in English. “Missy, why are the American misters and sisters doing this thing?”

Lisa’s throat, as parched as the soil, was closing up. She knew how lame she sounded when she finally squeaked out, “We want to help?”

He nodded and suddenly began a flurry of instructions to the other villagers. As one, the Untouchables hurried off through the heat. The men returned with tin plates and battered old road signs and began digging, working nimbly and very hard. The woman returned with baskets to haul the dirt away, trotting with quick graceful steps, baskets perch on their heads.

The music of Tamil rose and fell around her to the accompaniment of the chalky scraping of the shovels.  The dry earth held the heat like a miser hoarding gold. Sweat rolled into the ground to disappear. They worked together under the Indian sun until, to Lisa's surprise, people began to straighten up. The job was finished. It hadn’t been so very difficult after all.

The school van tooted its horn, ready to take them back up into the mountains. Lisa stepped over the cleared channel, turning for just a moment to look at the village. She felt a light tap on her arm. Shanti stood there holding an ugly plastic baby doll, a fat-faced baby with its features nearly worn off and its skin a startlingly vibrant shade of orange.

Lisa smiled. “Yes, that’s a nice doll!” She tried to inject her voice with some enthusiasm.

Shanti pushed it toward her. Lisa hesitated, not sure what else was needed in this exchange.

“Take it, sister. You must take it.” The man who had spoken English earlier took the doll from Shanti and handed it to Lisa encouragingly. Take it? Lisa shook her head, remembering to make it into a clear 'no' movement. It was surely the child’s only doll, very likely her only toy.

The man wagged his head back at her. “You must take this gift Missy.” He pushed the gaudy thing into her hands. With a beatific smile, Shanti raced away to play with the swirl of children and scrawny dogs. Lisa squinted across at her dancing in her flowered dress in the bright light.

But I don’t want that! The voices of Christmas past shouted in her mind. I wanted the troll, the Barbie, the sea serpent…Why had the voices demanded so loud and so long? Why did she remember the demands and not the things themselves? Colored wrapping paper, shining toys, bright Christmas tree lights all sparkled briefly before her and then dissolved into the heat of the Indian sun.

The bus honked again. Through the heat haze, it was a glittering distortion, a mirage holding the promise of cool air and lush greenery. She moved numbly toward the sound, clutching the ugly, ugly doll. Her eyes hurt, and she wondered if it was the brightness of the light or the brightness of the gift.

.