Adventure Divas Page 14

  “We should shoot her seashell collection,” says Julie, who met Alice last week while scouting. “Shells in this dry, barren desert; an odd obsession, don’t you think?”

  Alice is the founder of the Bal Rashmi Society (bal rashmi means “raise up” or “first rays of a new dawn”), which advocates on behalf of the most disenfranchised peoples of this region. Discouraging child marriage is just one item on her very long agenda.

  Alice and the Bal Rashmi Society have been frequently under fire for their work to bring attention to—and end—atrocities against those in the lowest castes. Alice was involved in a campaign to bring to justice a group of gang-rapists, one of whom was the deputy superintendent of police. Alice quickly became a target. Before we arrived she e-mailed us about this experience: “I do not know if you are aware of the politically motivated attack we had to face. Nine cases—rape, murder, attempt to murder and rape, exploitation, fraud, misuse of funds, etc.—were registered against us.” The Bal Rashmi office was raided; Alice and her associates were taken into police custody and tortured, and one died in custody. Since then, the ruling government lost assembly elections and was replaced by a new party. The case against Alice was reopened and dismissed. In the end, she and her colleagues were fully exonerated by a human rights commission.

  “As a result of this, all our programmes have suffered greatly,” Alice wrote. “However, there is plenty going on once again,” she concluded her e-mail, encouraging us to come.

  Alice Garg opens the front door and greets us with a subtle head cock and a warm smile. I notice that one eye wanders ever so slightly. She wears her salt-and-pepper hair in a tightly wound bun at the nape of her neck, and a chunky red bindi centers her forehead. She is wearing a white sari with red trim as, I later found out, she always does. Seventeen years ago Alice made a decision. “I am not against fashion or anything, but I feel that we women waste a lot of our time in selection of our dresses. Also, white matches everything.”

  She also intimates that she could spend the money she might have used on clothes on acquiring seashells, or on a trip to the seaside to pick them up herself. Her seashell collection is housed in a glass case, and she shows us this almost immediately after tea. “These are from all over,” she says rhapsodically, taking small pinkish shell after small pinkish shell out of clear plastic bags and displaying them to us.

  After an hour of filming the shells and watching Alice peddle on her exercise bike in her sari (and consuming a total of sixteen cups of tea and four primary-colored sugary treats each), we are all bumping along a dirt road through a scrubby desert landscape in a jeep, on our way to the village of Soan ka Baas, to follow Alice for a typical day of fieldwork. Once in a while a weak-looking tree asserts itself onto this seemingly inhospitable environment. As we drive, Alice tells us about her life.

  At eighteen she married the wrong boy next door (as in wrong caste, wrong religion), which led to being disowned by her family. Her activism took shape shortly thereafter, and in 1972 she left her job as a high school teacher to start the Bal Rashmi Society with four thousand rupees (about ninety dollars). “I have seen poverty, extreme poverty, I’ve seen people suffering, you know, without any complaint. That motivated me,” says Alice. In the early years, when Bal Rashmi was still fledgling, she took “untouchable” orphans into her home and cooked and cared for them. At least one out of six Indians are Dalits, or untouchables. Dalit means “crushed” or “stepped on,” but Gandhi called them Harijans, or “Children of God.”

  These Children of God are often brutally persecuted and are victimized by violence including murder and assault, and they are often banned from worshipping at temples. Untouchables are thought of as too polluted to count as human beings, untouched by even the supreme Hindu deity. They are so low on the Brahmanical order that they are not really even on it; they are a caste predestined to deal with human waste and dead bodies.

  Alice’s latest project is the construction of an enormous water-retention site for the drought-ridden village of Soan ka Baas. “This is the third continuous year that we are facing drought,” Alice explains. “We are trying to create a big facility in order to catch the runoff water from the rains. We do not want the water to go to waste.”

  We drive over a berm in this dry, butterscotch-colored wasteland and stop when we see at least fifty women, from teenagers to the elderly, dressed in stunning, bright saris that stand out like gems against the parched landscape and the hazy, pale blue sky. The women have carved out a vast depression in the dry earth and are busily picking and digging and hauling buckets of soil to the surface. A line of women emerges from the hole, each balancing a heavy, round, metal, saucerlike bucket—heaped with earth—on her head while holding a veil over her face and negotiating the steep grade. They pass by one another, often trading smiles, in the hundred-degree heat as they make their way from the bottom to the top, where each transfers her bucket to another woman. The curves and poise and sharp fuchsia and lime-green and bright aqua moving over a dead landscape make for a most graceful and extraordinary chain gang. I am loath to glamorize this back-breaking work in this sweltering environment, but there is something uncannily serene about the women’s movement, and indeed, the entire scene. The run-off well that they are creating will radically change their lives.

  “If the water is there, then there is some relief at least; it is the women who bring water for the whole family. They are always the one,” Alice says, wheezing just a bit from the dust-filled air.

  The men and boys, in white cotton pants and shirts with blue and green turbans, are looking particularly serene, as they are lounging on a ledge that forms the perimeter of the construction site where the women work. Alice yells at a group of idle men and explains that since they never have to carry the water, they don’t care how close it is.

  Alice surveys the sweltering, dusty work site, which covers a few acres. She scuttles quickly over tough terrain, unself-consciously hiking up her sari when necessary; we scramble to keep up. This is no tour for us; this is a typical work day in which Alice might cover two hundred kilometers and oversee several projects. Alice constantly barks directions, in a piercing, gravely voice, at those who are not working, and sometimes at those who are.

  Her brashness is forgiven because it is a part of “Didi” (a moniker of trust and intimacy used by those who are digging the well), a woman who has won respect by years of working to empower the disempowered and to improve communities.

  “What’s the status of women in this region?” I ask, when we finally get Alice to stop moving for a minute.

  “She is considered to be nothing. Nobody knows the women’s names in the villages. They live anonymous lives. Day and night, unpaid servants,” she says, gesturing to the chain gang, and her brusque managerial style softens.

  “The caste system seems to create a double whammy—both caste and gender oppression,” I say. Although caste discrimination is officially illegal, Alice confirms that it is still the most operative force in people’s lives.

  “Yes, [caste] plays a very major role. Oh, it exists very much, you can see it, you can feel it,” Alice says, with that strange little wheezy cough that has been with her all day. She goes on to talk about how it takes a long time for cultural reality to match laws.

  “We have a law, for example, against child marriage, but it continues. We have a law against female infanticide—you cannot just go kill the girl in the mother’s womb. But it continues.

  “Women in Asia are not even living in the Third World; we are living in the Fourth World. You don’t have a right to be born. You don’t have a right to live; you don’t have a right to your future. The women are tortured and treated badly by the family and other people because they think that she will not open her mouth.”

  Alice goes on to explain the ways that oppression is institutionalized in contemporary India.

  “I call the family an institution, because we in India, women especially, we’re born in the family and we
die in the family, we don’t have any separate identity. So, the institution—like family, police, administration, religion—women are not safe anywhere in these institutions. Anywhere—including the family.”

  “Not safe from what?” I ask.

  “Unsafe means their development is not considered; and unsafe in other ways, too. She can be killed for dowry in the family itself. We have seen rape cases in our police stations, by those who are supposed to protect women.” Alice’s voice cracks, and she pauses to compose herself. Working with everyday atrocities has clearly not hardened her.

  “But now, women have started raising their voice against it,” she continues.

  Alice explains that laws will not change the adverse affects of deeply rooted mores and caste oppression. Change must come through people and through the social order.

  “Why do you do what you do?” I ask, wanting to better understand her personal motivation. But she responds with the mission of her organization.

  “We are working so that women can understand their situation and start making their own decisions. So she will be able to have her own identity as a woman, not as somebody’s daughter or mother or sister, but through her own work, identity, through her education. We always tell them to raise voice against them. They should not feel ashamed. It is the women who need to change the social values now, in their favor.

  “The mothers say, ‘We have seen what our lives are like, and we don’t want our daughters to face the same thing.’ ”

  First water, then school. We leave the site of the well and drive to one of the twenty-nine rural villages where Bal Rashmi has set up schools. Alice and I walk through the tiny village, followed like Pied Pipers by a small parade of children. We settle in next to one of the caramel-colored mud huts to talk. Alice sits cross-legged on a bench and the villagers gather around to watch. Little girls, maybe six or seven years old, in pigtails with carefully tied, tattered ribbons, skip along the dirt road in front of us with buckets of water on their heads. They are in navy blue skirts and blouses, school uniforms—the only clothes they have. They are the first generation of girls from this community to go to school.

  “Education is the best resource for a woman. If she can improve her economic situation, she can take care of so many things. She can also stand against the caste system and the so-called untouchability.”

  Alice wants to be sure I understand the gravity of the situation in these disenfranchised communities. Making us, the press, understand is critical, and thus she is willing to talk as long as we want. She seems unfazed by this long day under a brutal sun, but working against such a tide of ignorance and facing such a monumental challenge—not to mention political persecution—must take a personal toll on her.

  “Do you have fears?” I ask, thinking of the sometimes dangerous circumstances of her work.

  “Now I don’t have any fear, I don’t have any fear. This attack,” she says, referring to the former local authorities who persecuted her and her colleagues and tried to destroy Bal Rashmi, “has made us stronger, because we have seen a lot—a lot we could never have imagined, you know? That is the difference between us and them. We will do this good work again, with full strength.” As Kiran Bedi articulated regarding the death of her mother, when you confront your fears directly, you transcend them.

  “Are you . . . happy?” I ask, as fearlessness and integrity, while admirable, don’t necessarily add up to joyful living.

  “Oh yes.” A mellow expression replaces the serious intensity with which she has been speaking. “It gives me happiness when I work. It gives me happiness when I reclaim something which was going bad. I am not powerful. I am not in the politics. I am not a rich man’s wife or daughter. I don’t maintain any status. I am a social worker. But I will not stop. Now nobody can stop us.”

  This combination of personal humility and fierce determination seems to be part of a long-standing Indian tradition, with Mahatma Gandhi as its most famous recent exemplar. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,” Gandhi said, and Alice, like Kiran Bedi, seems to have taken this maxim to heart.

  Alice’s commitment to her work is total. She has forfeited her own status (and possibly her health, from the sound of that cough) rather than exercising it at the expense of others. That ethos—and the small pink seashells that are her passion—are the wells from which she draws happiness.

  It is long dark by the time we start our two-hour jeep ride back to Jaipur. We, the crew, are exhausted, heads bobbing with fatigue. “Alice,” I ask after a long silence, “what’s a diva?”

  “Diva?”

  “Yes, diva, does that word mean anything to you?”

  “Diva is, like, lamp.”

  “Yeah?” I say. “Nothing else?”

  “You said ‘diva’?” says Alice.

  “Diva. D-I-V-A,” I say.

  “Yeah, it is a lamp, which gives lots of light to others and goes on burning, you know?”

  She looks out the window at what seems to be a small cluster of lanterns a quarter mile in the distance. “We must drop off this chalk for the school,” she says, and the jeep begins to downshift.

  Only later would I find out that diya means “lamp” in Hindi. Perhaps Alice misunderstood me, perhaps not.

  Our cab whizzes along Mumbai’s Chowpatty road. We pass a bawdy billboard that screams HUM DIL DE CHUKE SANAM!, which looks to be a recent hit movie. The billboard’s lusty, big-eyed couple, in what you might call aggressive repose, welcome us to Bollywood: Palm trees. Movie stars. The city’s thriving film industry, which turns out hundreds of feature films a year, is just one indication that Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is the country’s economic powerhouse.

  We decide to take the rest of the day off. John and soundman Doug take in Bollywood’s latest at an air-conditioned theater and Julie, Cheryl, and I go our separate ways to explore Mumbai. I buy a plastic rendition of Kali that plugs in and makes the goddess’s garland of severed limbs flash in bright red, and I get my fortune told: “You make a good friend and a bad wife.” (And I paid for that?) Cheryl buys a poster of a leisure-suit-clad guru Si Baba, plucked from a bin of a hundred deities. Julie gets oil dripped on her forehead at an Ayurvedic health clinic.

  Later, the three of us meet to swap stories over an early dinner. “I told the Ayurvedic guy I was seeking treatment because I was having trouble sleeping,” Julie tells us, passing the chicken curry and some herbal chutneys clockwise. “He asks me why, and I tell him because I broke up with my boyfriend before coming to India. He looks at me puzzled, then says, ‘Well, get a new one.’ I’m telling you, there’s a really different relationship to attachment here,” she concludes drily.

  On our walk back to the hotel we come to a bridge that crosses a river. I stop, and delicately ask Julie about what has become a slightly touchy subject.

  “Julie, any luck on finding us somewhere to fish?” I say, looking down on a strangely deserted river’s edge, in what is a very populated city.

  “Holly, give it up,” says Julie, who has been irritable with a bout of something lately (or maybe just a sad heart). “All the rivers in India are either dead or sacred.”

  Well, looky whose Ayurvedic treatment didn’t work, I think.

  The water does have an odd green hue, not dissimilar to the Chicago River on Saint Patrick’s Day.

  We return to the hotel and find John bellied up to the bar and looking sulky. Something is wrong.

  “Half of Cheryl’s film is blank,” John says.

  “What?” I say, praying I misheard him.

  “Blank. Nothing on it, they say.”

  “Did they put it in the wrong soup?” Cheryl asks. “I marked the black-and-white explicitly,” she adds, teeth grinding.

  For two minutes we spiral into a finger-pointing frenzy in which we call into question the competence of Kodak, the Indian film industry, Cheryl’s film cameras, the blasted hot sun, and my judgment about developing the film in situ rather than Fed
Exing it home. It is a stunning display of the virulent strain of ass-covering that is endemic to the TV industry.

  Weak from days of fever, I lack the horsepower to reach the high road, much less take it, so my response to the ruined film is to find Julie an hour later and have a meltdown about the waste of precious money, the heartbreaking loss of images, and the goddamn incessant heat.

  “Holly, I will fix it,” says Julie, with all confidence.

  She gives me two Cipros and two Advil and slips in a sleeping pill and some unidentified orange tablet. I wash it all down with a Kingfisher.

  It is Tuesday.

  I float off to a fuzzy otherworld, thinking Julie is off to war with the local Kodak people to get our money back and somehow sprinkle magic dust to reconstitute the footage. But as an experienced producer, Julie knows that sometimes the best fix is to simply knock the director unconscious.

  I wake up Thursday, without a fever and optimistic.

  We have an appointment to meet with a composer and tabla musician named Anuradha Pal at her home near Mumbai’s Chowpatty Beach. “She’s a demi-diva,” Julie says over a breakfast of puri, pakora, and black, steaming coffee, “so we can start late. Nine A.M.”

  Our India research was so chock-full of strong candidates that we have taken to calling some of our subjects demi-divas. What may sound like a catty divatocracy is really just practicality. Anuradha, since she is merely a world-renowned virtuosa and musical genius, is relegated to demi-diva. That is, in all likelihood she will only get about five minutes in the show. The bar is high in India, a country where immense social problems create immense divas who draw on a long tradition of fighting poverty and injustice.