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Journeys |
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Journeys |
Teaching the Foreign Teacher How to Travel
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| Before Michelle Obama paid the area a visit, a group of teenage girls in Nizamuddin Basti had been giving their English instructor some food for thought |
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Published : 1 January 2011 |
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SAMI SIVA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| Fatima with her niece and mother at their home. She is
the last of the 11 children.
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| I |
T'S NOVEMBER IN DELHI, and the streets of Nizamuddin
Basti are covered in blood. Groups of men cluster
in the narrow lanes of this once medieval Sufi village,
texting celebratory messages to their loved ones as they
watch the ritual goat sacrifice during the Muslim festival
of Eid-ul-Adha. Except for the occasional glint of
sequins through a curtained doorway |
—accompanied by an outstretched hand clutching a hunk of freshly cut meat—women are nowhere to be seen in the streets. Beggar children play on ancient, crumbling graves, vendors hawk green-gold prayer cloths and blinking LED clocks, and, inside the dargah to the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, women moan and toss their hair to exorcise evil djinns, their fingers gripping the latticed wall of an unmarked tomb.
I am on my way to Sana’s house; she is part of a group of
teenage Muslim girls to whom I have been teaching English
conversation for about two months now. As I walk through
the maze of alleyways, smiling unsurely at a group of young
men who cry “Eid Mubarak!” at me, part of me wishes I
had covered my head—and part of me wishes I had brought
a camera.
I first came to Nizamuddin Basti in August, when I accompanied
an army of SLR-brandishing tourists, fiddling
obsessively with their makeshift headscarves, on a ‘hidden
history’ tour led by a local NGO. I became obsessed with
this part-medieval, part-21st century village tucked into the
heart of Delhi, fuelled by a desire, born of many a heated
college debate, to find other, non-Western ways of existing.
I was on a Fulbright scholarship to study Dalit literature,
the Narratives of the Oppressed—or something like that—
and my head was swimming in grand academic concepts,
brewed in the gothic classrooms of the University of Chicago:
Modernity, the Postcolonial Experience, the Other, the
Veil And so, on a quest to find the Untranslatable—which I
saw in the ghostly otherworldliness of this bustling, impoverished
neighbourhood that had burst through the ruins of
an ancient cemetery—I signed up to volunteer at the local
NGO’s informal school for girls.
I arrive at Sana’s family’s two-room home. Sana, in a baggy burqa that engulfs her tiny frame, shooes me inside, scolding
me for walking through the streets alone. The girls are
huddled in a circle on the floor, dressed in glittering Punjabi
suits and high-heels, their faces caked with make-up; they
sip Coke and giggle about their favourite Bollywood stars.
“Rehana’s getting married,” Amina, who is wearing jeans
for the special occasion, whispers to me. “No, I’m not!”
shrieks 16-year-old Rehana, slapping Amina. The girls
smile at me sweetly, offering me Lay’s chips, which they
have carefully arranged on a small plate.
With a mouthful of biscuit, Rehana announces proudly
that she will start wearing a burqa on her next birthday. Fatima,
who is about 17 with short, cropped hair, smiles bashfully.
“I want to wear one, but my mom won’t let me because
she thinks women who wear burqas are more likely to run
off with men,” she shrugs, laughing. Sana’s older sister
Shazzia, a spunky 20-year-old who teaches the Quran at
the nearby girls’ madrasa, shoots the girls a disapproving
look and turns to offer me more biryani.
After much discussion of everyone’s newly acquired jewellery,
I ask the girls, playing innocent, if men also wear
burqas. Amina bursts into uncontrollable giggles while
the other girls attempt to stifle theirs; but once they have calmed down, they become solemn. Shazzia smiles at me,
and with a wise glint in her eyes, explains to me calmly:
“When you go outside, you never know what evil, shaitan,
awaits you. You don’t want that evil to touch you, to possess
you. That’s why you wear a burqa.”
AUTUMN
| I |
FIRST MET THE GIRLS IN SEPTEMBER, at the tail end of the
monsoon that washed away the departure lounge of the
Delhi airport’s brand-new domestic terminal and the beginning
of Ramadan. On my first day of teaching, the girls
marched into the classroom boldly and squirmed into their
seats, staring at me with wide-eyed curiosity. “We want to
learn English so, so
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badly,” Gulshan, a bubbly girl with puffy, rosy cheeks, said in Hindi. I was struck by the girls’ exuberance and sincere desire to learn, which seemed to be worlds away from the angsty, moody teenager I had been.
Classes were punctuated by the sounding of the azaan
prayer, at which the girls would hastily re-adjust their
matching white dupattas, nudging each other to do the
same; sometimes a younger girl would gesture to my unfurled
dupatta, indicating that I should cover my head,
which elicited chiding laughter from the older girls. We
began with the foundation of Western conversation, and
I would start every class by going around in a circle and
asking, “How are you?”—until I began to be barraged by an
extremely chirpy chorus of “I’m fine, ma’am!”
| THALIA GIGERENZER FOR THE CARAVAN |
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The girls pose during one of their many Sunday outings. |
I began to get little glimpses into the girls’ lives. They
wanted to be singers, doctors and airhostesses, but were
confused as to why windows did not open on planes; they
had elaborate birthday parties, but didn’t know how old they
were; they all had cellphones, but barely left the house; their
fathers and brothers often worked as auto-rickshaw drivers
or cooks. Sometimes, amidst much giggling and blushing,
the girls would ask me whether I had a boyfriend, or, as in one class, they asked me to “once, just once, let down your
hair,” and I obliged, to a chorus of ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaaahs.’
In December, I took the girls on the first outing in a long
series of Sundays on which we took—somewhat forbidden-feeling—
trips around Delhi. I hadn’t exactly asked the
NGO for permission, and, as I saw it, these outings were
purely extracurricular. As we piled into an auto-rickshaw
to go to the German Embassy’s annual Christmas Market
in Chanakyapuri, a thrill of excitement shot through the
vehicle at the novelty of leaving their homes, the novelty
of a rickshaw ride. I had obtained their parents’ permission
without difficulty. Sana’s mother had asked, her eyes
weary, if Sana would have to take off her burqa; I assured
her that she wouldn’t, hoping that this was in fact the case,
suddenly feeling very protective of Sana. Before I met the
girls, I probably would have had the opposite reaction—one
of pity, disbelief—to a burqa-clad woman walking around
in a secular, public place, but now I was ready to have it out
with anyone who so much as looked at Sana funny.
| SAMI SIVA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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Nizamuddin Basti, easy to miss on the drive to south
Delhi, is a lively, bustling neighbourhood. |
We walked through the metal detectors into a world of
glittering Christmas ornaments, Westernised Indians and
expats. Amina wandered around the market in a trance,
stopping to caress the pink children’s frocks and Barbie
dolls. I was worried the girls would feel as if they did not
belong to this Westernised, affluent world, but they were
perhaps too young to fit themselves into categories like that,
and they were incredibly curious about everything. After
multiple rounds of the market, we sat down in a park, exhausted,
and watched people walk by, some carrying trays
of beer. Amina, wearing new jeans, wrinkled her nose and whispered, “Gandi aadat hai. It’s a filthy habit.” Women in
mini-skirts and tight tank tops walked by; the girls stared
open-mouthed. “I don’t like it,” Amina frowned, and then
grinned, “but I like watching!”
For our next outing, I had planned a tour of Nizamuddin—
but I could see the girls had envisioned more exotic
destinations, whispering to each other, “What’s in Nizamuddin?”
After the girls grew bored of chasing each other
up and down cement construction mounds on the edge
of the basti, they pleaded with me to take them to the church
across the road. Amina grabbed my hand, as if to protect me,
as we walked under the flyover where beggars were smoking
drugs—“Smack ,” Amina said disapprovingly in English.
In front of the church, the girls marvelled at the LED
flashing Jesus idols, plastic rings and tiny Bibles for sale. As
we were about to enter the church, Rehana hesitated, looking
uncomfortable, “I can’t go inside,” she whispered to me,
her face reddening. I looked at her quizzically, then, realising
she had her period, assured her it was okay.
We stepped into a bare, sparsely decorated hall with
white-washed walls and a lone cross at the pulpit and
Amina asked, without hesitation, “Where do you pray?” I
wasn’t sure, but since the church was empty, I pointed to
the velvet altar under the cross. As if it was the most natural
thing in the world, Amina marched towards the altar,
Rehana lingering behind her, and knelt down in front of the
huge cross, cupping her hands upwards, closing her eyes
and murmuring intensely. I knelt next to her. I had never
prayed in a church in my life. When she opened her eyes,
she looked at me and smiled. “Did you take a picture of me?” she asked softly. “No, I didn’t want to,” I said, although I
had been tempted. She patted my hand and said, in English,
“It’s okay.” We sat for a while longer in the silence of
the church, and for one moment, the giggling, smart-alecky
teenager was gone.
“Who were you praying to?” I asked her later.
“Allah, of course,” she said.
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