Twenty-eight South Indian third-graders stared at me with gleeful delight and dreadful expectation as I read from a copy of their crumbling English textbook.  Suddenly gushing from the children was a jumbled chorus of native tongues, their dark and smoothly talc-powdered faces engulfing my peripheral vision.  “Miss, sappadingala?”  “Enna sappidu, Miss?”  “Ennaku thanni vendum!”  I sat frozen, bewildered.  I can’t do this, my heart moaned for the twentieth time as we churned through the first ten minutes of the class period.  I managed to hush the swirling chatter long enough to get them back into their respective places – girls on the left, boys on the right – and left them to mull over their vocabulary words while I fled the school classroom and clutched the porch railing, forcing myself to breathe deeply.

Outside the sun was throbbing, and the trapped air shimmered fiercely in protest.  On most days, the obliging ocean breezes offered the only reprieve in the crushing heat.  Beyond the sentinel palms dotting the roadway from the little school and past the silent guard in his russet thatched hut, I could see the gray cement wall snaking its way around the 30-acre complex.  Beyond the main gate, goats moseyed back and forth in the sandy road, following their shepherd’s voice through weaving stacks of concrete railway ties.  Farther down the crusty gray wall, a dull green lizard waddled on top of the peeling stone, warily eyeing the blotchy red hen that clucked alongside through the twiggy groundcover.          

Behind me, someone rang the bell for third period.  Tuesday.  Eighth-grade English was next.  My hands left the bright pink balustrade and found the door to my next classroom.            

*   *   *

Indian mystic and philosopher Osho pointed out that “knowledge is not information; it’s transformation.”  Two years ago, on my eighteenth birthday, I literally cried at the passing of another year, frustrated that my life extended only as far as Oregon and the lessons of homeschool.  And so I prayed for a transformation, a challenge to strengthen my character.  My answer started with three days of long flights and longer layovers that carried me around the world to Rameswaram, a little island swimming off the coast of Tamil Nadu, South India, teeming with nearly 250,000 people.  Near the middle of the island, a five-tiered, white-washed building soars above the surrounding structures.  This is the visual landmark of Deva Sabai, Church of God, and its ministry campus, which I called home from July through December of 2006.  Through the help of a college friend connected to the ministry, I went there to teach classes in the English school, live in the girls’ orphanage, and otherwise survive the peculiarities of Indian life.

At eighteen years old, I woke every morning to a world churning and reeling with startling newness.  In a culture so dissimilar to my own, in a life so wracked with oddities and unexpectancies, I felt strange and sometimes lost, as I watched my shadowy expectations about the world disappear under India’s illumination.  Here, I found so many of my preconceived notions about life useless to me, as every day brought a new tutorial in all the things I didn’t know and an alteration of the things I thought I did.  With my first step onto Indian soil, I began a five-month journey of being utterly emptied and refilled.  A life experience that so altered my knowledge of the world that I later often found it hard to recognize.

My first views of India were like a dream, like stepping into another world.  How do you describe something unlike anything you’ve seen before?  So I searched for similarities.  In my layover in Bombay, a fly buzzed around my bags.  When it landed, I was relieved to see that it looked the same as flies I knew at home.  When the school children’s blood type was being checked, I was giddy to see that my blood was the same color as theirs.  But for the most part, I had to content myself to let this wondrous world unfold before me on its own – a world of bright, swirling sunsets, music pulsating on every street corner, the constant smell of “baked” earth.

*   *   *

            At three o’clock, the school vans trickled up the road, swung dusty u-turns in front of the school, and the kids began squeezing in.  I often observed this chaos in wonder, for just as I was sure the van would burst at its cartoon adorned metal seams from so many bodies, another class was dismissed to board the same van.  I soon learned that, in India, there are certain unwritten rules – the food is never too hot, the music is never too loud, and the bus is never too full.   

I trudged home from school through fiery ankle deep sand, past the colossal training center, water dribbling down the sides because of concrete being poured on the roof; across the open field where I dodged lizards and dog excrement; up the lazy stairs of the girl’s home, where four toddlers were tromping their frequented paths up and down the balcony.

“Akka!  Akka!”  Two bundles of brown velvet hurtled into my shins with a spray of giggles.  As Blessie and Ruth fought for the prize seat of my hip, I glanced up to see little Simon Brown chewing on the top of a carrot-colored plastic bucket.  I smiled at the twinkle in his eyes.  Simon wasn’t as talkative or active as the three baby girls.  He didn’t find the need to clamor around my legs or to assail me the moment I emerged from my bedroom doorway.  Yet eight-month-old Simon radiated a silent warmth, quiet and captivating in his deeply-dimpled grin. 

Untangling myself from the mesh of toddler’s arms, legs, and whining voices, I withdrew into my room, laid an armful of books onto my cot, and refilled my water bottle from the filter system mounted on the wall.  My journal lay open on the little table.  Several times every day, I sat with pen poised over the each next blank page.  In five months, I filled five notebooks.  I was constantly detailing my thoughts and feelings, the new experiences, joys, and heartache.  I longed to write, to release.  Yet some days, the pen was so heavy.  In many entries, my worry and feelings of defeat stained the pages in constant reminders of when my heart had succumbed to fear.  Yet without each blank page, the emotions would have stayed trapped inside, without a voice, and would have driven me to needless anguish.

I sank into a chair and perched my elbows on the rickety table.  I tore a page from my notebook to start a letter home: Hello family dear, good news – I’m still alive!  And yes, Mom, I’m still taking my vitamins every morning.  School went alright today; I spent some time entertaining pre-school and kindergarten classes with my comically white skin and charming renditions of “I’m a Little Tea Pot” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider.  Oh!  Something exciting!  I put on my saree, the traditional dress, for the first time by myself today!  It was a vast accomplishment.  Who would have thought that a plunge into another culture would require that I learn how to dress myself again?  With eighteen feet of fabric wrapped around and pleated in the most complicated manner, trust me, it’s not easy...

Noises at the door distracted me.  I heard little voices and grunts of effort as the handle clumsily turned, and the door swung open.  Blessie and Ruth hopped joyfully into the room and up to my chair.  “Akka!”

I was their big sister, their “akka”.  They were my “tangachis”.  After finding disinterest in my paper and pen, they pattered around the room, playing with lotion and trying to open water bottles.  Esther appeared in the doorway.  She was only about eight-months old, like Simon, and still crawling.  Before the end of my time there, she would take her first steps.  Considering what was nearly her fate at birth, I marveled that she sat in front of me.

Blessie, Ruth, and Esther are babies rescued by village pastors from horrific deaths.  In some parts of India the “dowry” system demands that the father of the bride pay the future son-in-law to marry his daughter.  For poor fishermen and farmers, this is not a financial possibility.  Neither are pre-natal ultra-sounds.  To raise a girl in your home that will never be married is a burden, and unmarried women often face a lifetime of disgrace from their communities.  For the desperate, the answer is to not raise them at all but to end their life at birth.  A few of the most common ways to do this are suffocating, drowning, or carrying the baby girl strait out of the womb to a waiting pot of boiling water.

I will never be able to think of these atrocities without sorrow, after having fallen in love with beautiful girls who nearly lost their lives in this way.  As I watched them dance around my room in a flurry of wide eyes and expressions of wonder, I myself wondered.  What would the world have been like without them? 

Ruth, she is the oldest, almost two.  She hated to eat her rice and bossed the younger babies around as if she were their mother.  She will be a strong leader, I think.  Blessie is sweet and mischievous, her face a breathtaking beauty.  She was forever smiling and laughing, except when she was tired.  Then, her whining could be heard across campus.  Even then, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.  My heart came to love her as I have loved no other child.  Sweet, black-eyed Esther, who was just then staring at me from my doorway, was sold by her parents to the pastor for five American dollars. 

            Christy appeared at the doorway.  “Ay yai yo,” she shook her head at the toddlers rummaging through her books.  I came out of my thoughts and helped her navigate them from our room and back under the watch of their nurses.

“And then, how was your day, Annie?” 

She always called me Annie, a nickname that Blessie started using also.  I was glad from the beginning that they’d put me in Christy’s room.  The Americans usually stayed with her, as her English was superb and her motherly care even better. 

“It was alright,” I responded, settling into my chair again as she arranged her lessons plans on her cot.  “Eighth grade was very nice, seventh was ok.  We just studied for their midterms, since their regular teacher has already taught all the lessons for this quarter.  Third grade was a little hard, though.  I couldn’t understand what they were saying, and it was hard to get their attention.”  Actually, it was quite easy to get their attention; they threw it at me willingly.  It was getting them to be still and listen to me that was the difficulty.

Christy paused and looked at me.  “You are doing good, Annie.  You are one of the youngest people to come here and teach, you know.  Don’t be discouraged.  You can do all things through our Lord; He will give you strength.”  Christy was always my most committed encourager.

“You are hungry, then?” she asked.  “I think dinner will be here soon.”

*   *   *

I drew in a deep breath as I entered the dining room and suddenly remembered that Tuesday was fish night.  The little vertebrates gawked at me from every plate, cooked whole.  I planted my heel to make a subtle about-face when the cook flung a reproachful grunt in my direction.  I sighed and took the plastic saucer Christy held out to me, a smile of sympathy on her lips, but a laugh in her eyes.  “Kunjum podum, put a little bit,” I tried, lowering my plate to the cook with her massive pot of rice and waiting spatula. 

The cook was a little woman with a fierce resolution to make sure I didn’t wither away under her culinary care.  This meant that, of course, I could be expected to eat just as much or more than the girls living there.  In reality, the youngest of them could shovel away three times as much rice as my stomach could bear.  The cook frequently chastised me that I was going to lose my strength and become sick because I barely ate anything.  “Put a little bit,” therefore, rarely received the desired result.  I tried my hardest to appease her but usually ended up ditching some of the curry-saturated grains onto my roommate’s plate when the cook wasn’t watching; as I did tonight with the smelly fish.

  Having achieved the appearance of being finished, and dodging her glances, I washed my plate outside in a bucket of water.  As I returned to my room, my friend Divya caught me at her door.

“Did you eat your fish?”  Her dark eyes shimmered. 

She needn’t ask.  For months, I struggled to better my Tamil pronunciation, displayed my clumsy attempts at wearing the native clothing, and even honed a marvelous skill for eating with my hands.  The Indian cuisine itself, however, was one thing I couldn’t quite master.  Within a few days of arriving, I found that my intestines responded quite inauspiciously to the curry dishes – fire rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  My body never forgave me.  To this day, spicy food triggers quite unpleasant symptoms, and I have to be careful what I eat, especially in foreign countries.

I laughed and shook my head at Divya’s smile, continuing on to my room.  “No, but Christy did.”

My first day in India, a few of the girls took me shopping for Indian clothing.  One of them, a joyful-faced girl with excellent English and dancing eyes, made me feel comfortable and at ease.  It took me a few days to learn how to pronounce her name; it was Divya, she told me, not Div-ee-ya.  She had arrived at the compound only five days before me.

Although she was twenty-five at the time and I was only eighteen, we got along as though we were the same age.  Divya had a contagious smile and a personality that was unmistakably outgoing and flamboyant, though she kept it under control on campus.  She was more than my best friend, she was my sister.  She answered my questions about Indian culture, taught me the proper way to eat rice with my hands.  We learned together, laughed together, played together, cried together.  We were both looking forward to monsoon season, when the campus would be drenched in heavy rains.  As soon as the first rainstorm hit, it was our plan to run to the roof and dance around in the cool water.

*   *   *

That evening, we decided our enemy would be better fought if he had a name.  Reminded of the overstuffed, greasy rat from Charlotte’s Web, we christened him Templeton.  But it didn’t take my roommate and me very long to realize that the South Indian rat was not going to play by our rules.  It was officially war when I found the corner of my adored chocolate bar ravaged by his unsanitary teeth.  In the weeks after, it was no surprise to enter our room, flick on the light, and see the obese Templeton skitter across the tile floor and out the accursed hole in our window screen. 

That balmy evening found us concocting a new plan.  I rummaged inside the small cardboard box that lay open on my cot and pulled out the mouse trap my mom had just sent me via air-mail.  After our many seemingly stupid attempts to end the existence of Templeton, my roommate looked pleased with this new scheme, and we proceeded swiftly to situate the wooden death contraption near the frequented garbage bin with just enough cracker and peanut butter to look delightfully attractive. 

Anticipation trickled through our veins that night as we lay on our stiff cots, “offed” the light, as my roommate says, and left our minds to sleep, subconsciously attentive for the slick nip of the trap.

*   *   *

I could see my mother.  She was standing in the kitchen of our little house, her eyes pleading yet forgiving.  I had just returned home from India, tired and weak, yet with a panicky resolve.  The next day I would be boarding a plane and going back to finish what I had started.  I had to finish.  My mother wanted me to stay, but she said she understood my feelings.  The children were waiting.  I had to teach third period.  I couldn’t leave them hanging.  Failure loomed over my heart like a sickness I didn’t want to catch.  I couldn’t let myself catch it. 

Suddenly, I stood in front of a room full of people, telling them about India.  Slowly, person by person, everyone got up and walked out.  I sat alone on the steps and cried.  But my mother was there.  She held me.

 “Annie? Akka!”  A toddler’s sweet yet demanding cry shattered my sleep.  I blinked, a dozen sharp sensations pricking my mind – the loud, drum-infused music from the compound’s elevated speakers, the whirring of our ceiling fan, Blessie beaming at me through the mosquito netting in my window, sweat already starting to bead on my forehead.  A surprising wave of pain cascaded through my intestines.  My mother’s face slowly faded.  My heart raced after it, crying to my mother to take me with her.  I moaned and rolled over, burying my face in my Strawberry Shortcake bed sheet. 

My heart felt sick.  Nearly every morning of the first few weeks in Rameswaram, I would wake up to strange feelings, the after-effects of a dream’s alternate reality. 

            Christy was already getting ready for school; I could hear the shower running.  The pain in my abdomen hit me again, a crunching and churning in my intestines.  I felt like I had to throw up and go the bathroom at the same time.  I reached for my water bottle, hoping water calm my stomach.  It made it worse.  Water.  My mind suddenly flashed back to the night before, when I had been in the canteen.  Jenifa gave me a cup of water.  I hadn’t even thought to ask where it had come from.  Well, I knew where it was going.

            Sitting up, my head throbbed, and I leaned back against the wall trying to steady myself.  Very slowly I got out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, clutching my stomach.  Christy emerged, wet hair tied up on her head in an Indian knot.  It dripped a little on my bare feet as I brushed past her, wordless, and shut the bathroom door quickly behind me.

I lie in bed for hours that day.  No position was comfortable.  My roommate had long since left for school; the babies next door were napping.  My room was dim and still, except for the smooth current of air from the ceiling fan and the music flowing from the porcelain figurine of a mother holding her child.  It was my mother’s music bisque.  Since I was very young, I can remember running into her room to wind the figurine and watch it dance around in circles on the dresser.  When I left for India, she let me take it with me.

           I lay in bed, crying, the musical figurine spinning on its little metal rod and base.  The music ended, and I wound the bisque again, over and over.  I closed my eyes and remembered the time my mother and I sat in her room, just weeks before I left for India.  We were crying, a little from fear and apprehension, but, for the most part, crying simply because we were going to miss each other dreadfully.  My father came down the hallway and saw us there.  He got upset at me for making my mother cry, for making her upset.  My first response was indignation, then sadness.  Why couldn’t he just let us be sad and cry?

The music stopped.  I wound it again.

            Then there was Templeton.  Our glorious plan to catch him in a mouse trap did not work.  He is not a mouse.  My roommate heard the trap snap in the middle of the night and jerked up in bed.  Templeton’s nose and mouth was squished under the metal bar, but with just enough thrashing, he shook free.  He took the cracker and peanut butter with him.

I glanced at my clock, 11:35.  I would be in seventh-grade English then, if I had gone to school, helping the kids study for their upcoming midterm tests.  Seven boys would sit opposite six girls.  Jeganesh would be drawing a new picture in his notebook.  Das, with sparkling eyes, would be staring in wonder at the test sheet that, yes, I had made just for them.  Usually, the kids had to copy all the questions off the board.  Das’ words from days before still gleamed in my thoughts: “Wow, Miss, my own question paper?”

Their beautiful faces haunted me as I lay there.  So many times I had come to the very edge of despair.  I knew nothing about India.  The language, the food, the school, the heat, everything was foreign.  And I was just a mere babe, I felt, who tossed herself into the midst of it all.  I was afraid of failing, of running home scared.

“You are here now,” my Indian friends would tell me. “Feel your wings.”  My wings?  What did they mean?  Maybe I did feel wings, hanging limp at my sides.  Other times, when I was holding Blessie or playing words games with my students, the sense of flight lifted me.  And therein lay my hope, my remedy to the sickness of discouragement.  In myself, I found no answer.  In my own strength, I felt no relief.  But in the eyes of the children, in the strength of my roommate, in the way Blessie reached right into my heart and cuddled it gently in her tiny warm hands – these were my strength, my reason to remain and fight through the discouragement and ache of homesickness.  Now, they are my inspiration to live.

            I didn’t go to school the next morning either.  Diarrhea, aching muscles, and fever kept me bed-ridden for four days.  The experience, however, taught me a valuable lesson.  Youth does not equal invincibility.  I cannot drink untreated Indian water.  Also, it’s a good idea to check the Ibuprofen label before popping the pain pills.  In my delirium, I knew only my discomfort and was surprised to find I had consumed about forty-five pills in four days.  Apparently, I’d didn’t read the “Do not exceed six pills in twenty-four hours” warning on the bottle.

            Divya came to my room with Esther balanced on her hip.  “And then, how are you feeling?” she asked, her lips pursed.  I raised my eyebrows, not lifting my head from the pillow.

            A smile sprang from her face. “Yes, I understand you perfectly.”  She sat down on Christy’s cot and bounced Esther on her lap.  “The girls downstairs wanted you to play in the field with them tonight.  I told them you were sick.”

            “Thanks,” I said, attempting a smile but failing when the movement made my head throb.

            Divya gazed at me a few moments with pity.  “I’ll come back to see you again later.”

            “Divya,” I caught her attention at the door.  “Where’s Christy?”

            She cocked her head.  “She is there, eating.  Why?”

            I struggled to my feet.  “I want to go up to the roof, but she’ll scold me if she sees.”

            “I won’t say anything.”  Divya shut the door gently behind her.

To a casual viewer, it appeared no different than any other rooftop dotting the Indian island skyline.  From a distance, it would stare back at you with the same flat expression as the roof of the building next to it.  But this rooftop became my refuge and retreat.  It was a place higher than the stress and fear.  In the morning, as the girls were donning their red-checkered skirts and braiding their hair for school, I came to the open roof to find my courage.  At night, I came to lay in the coolness of the wind as it washed over the slanted stones, staring at the stars.  This was the place above it all, where the wind came along and gathered up all my fears and worries – I felt I had no choice but to give them up and let them go.  Across the field, eagles wheeled in tight arcs around the top of the training center, and my heart went to fly with them.  Here, I felt wings.

The roof, with its straight baby-blue railings and beautiful view, was also our social gathering place.  We teenage girls spent many hours up there talking and laughing.  It was Divya and my special place, where we shared about our pasts and pondered our futures over Kit-Kat bars.  It was a place of learning.  On any given evening, one could find Raji, Esther, and Ruth struggling to pronounce the many varieties of the English “a” sound, while I memorized the 243 letters of Tamil alphabet and all its diphthongs.

Quite often, as we were talking or studying, a pair of half-nude children would slip out from under the eyesight of their nurses and tip-toe up the steep, curved, and very forbidden staircase.  Surprisingly keen, Blessie and Ruth would suppress their giggling as they reached the top and peeked at us through the designs in the concrete railing.  Then, like lightning from a storm cloud, they burst onto the open roof, shrieking gaily and scattering to the railings! Laughing, they would heave themselves half-way up the ledge, fully expecting us to come running and pull them away from the thirty-foot drop.

That night I was alone.  After pulling myself up the stairs, I found a place in the middle of the roof to lie on my back.  The sunset, a dream of crimson and gold, had faded.  The stars were like little punctures in a black ocean showing through to some gleaming glory beyond, as though the sun had never actually left the stage, just stepped behind the curtains for a while. 

As I rested there, my mind recalled a time I had visited a friend in eastern Washington in the winter, just after a heavy snowfall.  As I left the magical realm of white, rain fell alongside the highway, fraying the edges of the perfectly spread blanket of snow.  The snow, my life.  My preconceived notions of this world, fraying at the edges, as if someone else had taken up the threads and started weaving a new pattern into my heart.

*   *   *

By the end of five months, I could see some of the intricate beauty of this new design.  Somewhere amidst the pulsings of daily life, I forgot to be afraid, as I slowly and very surely fell in love. The ants continued to stream up my bedroom wall, and Templeton was a nightly visitor.  We never caught him.  I suppose that to this day he roams the girls’ home.  Somehow, that makes me happy.  

The monsoons came.  When the first one blew in, I was sick again, but managed to avoid Christy’s motherly eyes and sneak up to the roof.   For a long time I stood in ankle-deep water, as the greatest pouring of rain I’ve ever experienced flooded over me.  Divya wasn’t there.  About two months into my stay, she went home to visit her family and never returned.  For months, we agonized, not knowing what had happened.  Later, we found out that her parents, who were Hindus, had locked her in the house and didn’t let her return, make phone calls, or send emails.  That night, I stood there for her, wondering if she was standing in the rain wherever she was, heart aching that we couldn’t share it together.         

 Soon, I had dreams that I was home and woke with great relief to find myself still in India.  I loved waking up to a grinning Blessie in my window.  The day I left India, her nurse handed her to me for the last time.  My cheeks in her soft little hands, she kissed each of my cheeks, my forehead, chin, then nose.  Satisfied with her expression of affection, she smiled, while I could barely keep my knees from buckling under me.

There is a Tamil saying, “The one who teaches is a giver of eyes.”  In so many ways, India was my giver of new eyes.  She helped me wake up for the first time to a world I’d never known, showing my preconceived ideas for what they really were – only ideas. 

I had grown in a civilized American environment, grown to believe in this aspect of humanity.  But there is a place in this world where baby girls are put in pots of boiling water at birth.  I now know that despite all we attribute to ourselves, the great human race, we are still inhumane.  It makes me consider our practice of abortion with greater attention.  Placing an infant in a pot of boiling water – that’s outrageous we say.  How cruel one must be to do that to a baby.  In the raw truth of the matter, it is a difference in opportunity.  Lacking foreknowledge and adequate instruments, Indian parents resort to drastic means.  Here in America, we simply make it legal.  I find myself wondering how different they really are.

In this place I saw real poverty for the first time, and my notions of an advanced world were broken.  The real world is not all white-picket fences, two-car garages, and three-course meals.  Why do we feel it is our right to have so much here? 

In this other place, babies run around without diapers, and no one cares.  Eighth-graders are still delighted by stickers and pretty pencils.  I felt like a little girl who finds a familiar cherry blossom on ground, then looks up for the first time to discover a whole tree satiated with flowers.

Returning to America was like returning from a dream to a reality I expected to be familiar and comforting.  I instead found that the profound alteration of my own mind and heart made America feel strange and uncomfortable, like I was trying to fit back into a piece of clothing I had outgrown.  I went through cycles of wanting to purge my bedroom and live with next to nothing.  I felt guilty for owning so much after I had learned to live with little.  I marveled at a friend’s thirty-dollar-a-week coffee expenditure, while I knew some of my students in India didn’t have enough money for sandals to wear to school.  The tasteful wall décor and little coffee shops in mega-churches laughed at me.  I saw superfluity and longed for the simple concrete walls and sand floor of my church in India.

It was in people that I at last found familiarity.  I began to see that the deep emotions behind what I saw in India exist everywhere, if one has the eyes to see them.  In the face of a homeless woman under the bridge in Salem, I saw the face of a poverty-stricken Indian widow.  Behind the laughing expressions of children in the park, I could see the bubbling joy of an Indian toddler with the freedom of not yet realizing the depravity of his world.