I gave a woman money today so she could cremate her granddaughter. (Multiple trigger warnings)
(Note: does this belong in GD? I don't know. It's not overtly political and references DU itself in tones that may be considered whining. Hosts, do as you will.)
I.
(Trigger warning: human remains)
Anyways, I gave a woman money today so she could cremate either her child or grandchild (my Hindi is not great and her accent wasn't either). (Also, I live in Mumbai because my wife works for the US Consulate here, for anyone needing backstory.)
At least I assume that's what I did. There was a dead child (maybe 12 months old) next to her, and she said in mostly-intelligible Hindi (she was audibly a Marathi speaker natively) that she wished to cremate her daughter or granddaughter (I get the two terms mixed up still. And yet I know "cremate". And "fat-free". First World Problems). It's quite possible she was lying, but this is an issue I'd rather be duped than cynical about. We all have those lines we draw.
I hadn't seen a dead child in a while. The last sequence of that was 2003-2004, when I was back in the Marines. I was a mortuary affairs clerk at the start of the Iraq war. The job was just what it sounds like. I saw a few dead children in Iraq, mostly from typhoid fever and pertussis. But our training had been in the Baltimore city morgue. Real "The Wire" shit. Between our love affair with guns and violence and our lack of national health care, this was actually worse in some ways. Kids shot, stabbed, drowned. We had two guys cycle out with PTSD just from the morgue training (Baltimore PD apparently loses about 1/10th of their police class every time from that).
The cliche in the US about a body is "she looks like she's sleeping". Except, no. Sleeping children don't lie stone-still, breathless, face straight up on the pavement, with arms clutched across their torsos. Maybe the child was alive and very well trained. Maybe the woman had stolen somebody else's corpse. I don't care. We draw our lines, and in the developing world, at some point yours get crossed; this was mine.
It hit me harder than I thought it would. But apparently that's quite common. We're sheltered from death in the US, in a lot of ways. It doesn't happen at home. We rarely see bodies except at wakes and visitations. From the nature of my work I've seen more than most people I know, but that doesn't particularly make it easier, even if you develop an internal language for the difficulty.
This was pertussis, or a similar-looking respiratory disease; the girl coughed herself to death. The bacteria inflamed the lungs, which led her to cough so violently she broke her ribs and vomited, causing either asphyxia (in the short version) or pneumonia (in the long one). There are vaccines for pertussis. They cost about $8 for a dose. That's twice as much as it cost to cremate the girl, and it's about what her grandmother earns in three months selling scrap metal she finds.
The conservative answer is to shrug and say "life is cheap there". But it's not. Life is very, very precious here. This is a city of 21 million people in 200 square miles. This is a city where malaria and dengue are endemic but grown people who understand how these diseases are spread still leave out water dishes for the crows and feral dogs. Life is very precious here. This is a city where this woman, who has worked daily her whole life, put down her pride long enough to beg strangers to help with the burial of her kin.
I notice details. It's something I do. I once surprised my wife by noticing a crying woman in the elevator with us had her wedding band on her middle finger. That kind of thing. This woman had pitted and ridged fingernails that spoke of heavy metal poisoning, and a tote bag full of copper wire. She is a scavenger who finds metal and sells it to scrappers. She's not a beggar; she works. She works harder than I've ever worked in my life, and I've worked hard at times. And she couldn't afford to bury her granddaughter.
This is the poverty that makes our affluence possible. My view about the 1% changed once I realized I'm one of them. The global threshhold for 1% is something like $25K per year. In the US, somebody at the 2nd percentile makes about $7K. That puts them in the 97th percentile in Mumbai. And Mumbai is rich by Indian standards. That's my second complaint about Occupy (my 1st is that it's a creation of a Madison Avenue ad agency): we are the 1%, all of us in the US, whether we know it or not, and the solution has to be from the 1% rather than in opposition to us. Anyways. There are all kinds of arguments about America being great because it is good. I don't know if America is either, but I know America is rich. Rich in a way that doesn't even make sense to an average Mumbaikar. We're lucky, but we're part of this. And if I'm going to own the US and the industrialized West it's important to own how we got here, which is this poverty we create.
The child died near Mahalaxmi, home of the goddess of fortune, and the flowers were provided by the nearby shrine to Lord Ganesh. May both of their mercies be on us passers by.
II.
<meta>
I've spent most of my adult life working for the US Government one way or another. As a Marine, as a Navy contractor doing circuitry work on boats, as an attached dependent to a Foreign Service Officer. Possibly soon as a technology specialist direct hired by State (US Government IT: Yesterday's Technology Today!). I've had to put in place policies I didn't like (eg, invading a country). This has been the price I've paid for believing, as I did and do, that the way to change things is from inside. Many of you disagree. I get that.
The thing is, until a few years ago, I would have had no doubts at all about posting this story here. Now, I do. Now I wonder if this will descend into "why do we have people in India???" or "are we spying on them too?" or "I thought you loved killing children since you were part of Iraq" (yes, I've gotten that on DU recently).
DU was once a safer space than it is, and I miss that.
</meta>
III.
(Trigger warning: sexual violence)
India is really awful in a lot of ways. Just yesterday, a reporter for a magazine was gang raped and nearly killed doing a photography piece on the abandoned mills here. South Mumbai used to be a textile economy, but as wages in India increased the mills found it cheaper to move to Indonesia (sound familiar?) So there are a ring of abandoned mills that nobody knows what to do with, and this woman was sent to record them on film.
An American woman recently was a visiting scholar to another city in this same state, Pune. She was a victim of sexual violence to such an extent that she has had to take a year off from her research due to PTSD. Her story is all over the blogosphere right now if you want to look it up; it's certainly made waves here.
My wife's brief at the consulate includes sexual and domestic violence. It's a huge problem here. It's only recently become publicly talked about, and there's still a lot of silence surrounding it. Are we doing good here, with presentations and grants and visa expediting? Can we do good here, or will we just inevitably make things worse? I don't know. But, I'd rather be wrong than cynical again, in this case.
There's a local campaign called "ring the bell". If you hear your neighbor engaging in domestic violence, ring the bell and ask to borrow some sugar, or ghee, or just to say hello. Just do something, at the moment, to stop the violence right then. This is that world. Where people have to come up with ways to have a neighbor intervene in domestic violence without exposing himself or herself to danger. Can I as an American do anything at all here? Should I try? Or will it just make things worse.
What kind of life did this girl face? Married at 12 to a 2nd cousin? Beaten if she spoke out of turn? Or would she have gotten lucky? I don't know. But the fact that that question comes to me so quickly is troubling.
Hers wasn't the first dead body I saw in Mumbai, but she was the first child. An average of 10 people per day are killed on the railroad tracks here. In the shantytown east of my apartment building, the population density is 1 million per square mile. People live and die here never leaving the ward they were born in.
IV.
In my mind, in the imagination I dare to have, the woman goes home tonight with the money she received and walks to the mobile phone store in her neighborhood. She pays the 2 rupees to text the temple that she is ready for her granddaughter's puja and can they come now.
The priests arrive in orange robes and bear the child's body out with reverence. She is carried through the streets of Mahalaxmi to the temple of Ganesh, and her physical remains (poor, fragmentary records of the graceful and joyful child she was) are committed to ashes. The family cry because they will not see her in this life again, but will look for her eyes in every clean fowl and animal they see. Her ashes will be scattered on the rocks near Hajji Ali Mosque, and the Muslim neighbors too will add her to their prayers when they see the procession.
The smoke from the cremation and the dust from the dispersal will rise in the west, above Mahalaxmi and Breach Candy. A young child in Worli may look out over the Indian ocean, and see the sunset burn red and orange and russet and ask her mother what that is. "Heaven", she will say. And the Worli girl will feel for a moment the hope for a life that she never had. And maybe she'll achieve it. I have seen enough death in my life to grant myself this dream.
V.
My driver (yes, we have a driver; I can't do left-handed stick-shift in Mumbai yet) is an old Hajji from Gujarat. He was troubled by the dead child too and also offered the woman money. I tried to replace his donation with my money but he muttered something about the importance of zakaat (charity) in Islam and that since he can eat he needs to also donate. I told him to take the rest of the day off and I would walk home. I walked through Mahalaxmi up to Jacob Circle, keeping the sun behind me and to my right over the Arabian Sea.
I do normally notice details but I had kind of phased out at this point, and I just remember the smells. Shit and piss (a lot of that). The earthier smell from one of the official cows (some shrines have a permit to keep them). The monsoon is mostly over, but the sea wind did eventually pick up and blow in behind me, washing most of those away.
Why do smells bring back memories so clearly? Maybe it's the lack of words: a smell cannot be described, and can only be confronted on its own. I passed a vegetable vendor and was struck like I had been punched in the solar plexus. This was a smell I know. Here it is called coriander, but to me it can only be cilantro. For a moment, I was back in Escondido, a trouble-free 19-year-old Private First Class in the Marines, asking the taquieria to put more cilantro on my fish tacos. Then I was back, and saw the teenage boy blending the coriander in a huge dish hooked up to an illegal power drop. I bought some; we need more spices at home.
Thanks for forgiving my self-indulgence; that just hit me harder than I had expected.
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I know. And thank you. I can think of thousands of DUers who are like that. And I appreciate that about this place.
Your reflections triggered some of my own memories. I lost my sense of smell in an accident a dozen years ago this week. If you are going to lose a sense, that's probably the easiest. You evoked smells for me, and I appreciate that. Usually I just ignore it when people talk about scent, or get irritated if they know I can't smell it and they are telling me all about it. I don't smell things, but I can smell the cows, the seawind, and the cilantro in memory.
If I could bring smell back even for a second, that's very high praise for a writer. I'm glad it touched you.
I remembered on of my Indian students from a decade ago; one of the most beautiful, most evolved human beings I've ever met. She was not only intellectually brilliant, but had the most empathy, respect, compassion, kindness, and common sense, as well as a spine of steel when it came to her principles, as any person I've ever met. I was privileged to teach her for 4 years, in a system that was flexible about age/grade levels, and what ages and grades we taught. During those four years, all in elementary school, she taught mini-lessons to her classmates: Gujarati. Nobody became a fluent speaker, but it was fun to hear them playing with words on the playground. Her memory is precious to me, and I thank you for bringing it back.
It's a fascinating language; I hope to pick some up. But Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi have to come first. I'm glad I could bring her memory back to you.
Working within the system as a whole? I'm not sure if that's even possible any more.
Yeah, I hear you. There's a line in Dr. Zhivago about the motivations of people going to war, how mostly bad they are. "But some had better motives; they saw the times were critical and wished to play a man's part in them." Absent the sexist language, I think that's where I am mentally, now. I'll do what I can.
DU was once a safer place for "the left." No longer, and I miss that.
People regardless of "side" or position on the spectrum feel that way. That should tell us something. Sigh.
Thanks so much for your response.
Something we need to read and remember every day. 
