The Village Mad Boy
India, Day 9
Today's India images are a little hard to look at.
Tim Johnson was not much more than a speck in the distance, but he was closer to us. He walked erratically, as if his right legs were shorter than his left lefts. He reminded me of a car stuck in a sand-bed.
I thought mad dogs foamed at the mouth, galloped, leaped and lunged at throats, and I thought they did it in August. Had Tim Johnson behaved thus, I would have been less frightened.
Nothing is more deadly than a deserted, waiting street. The trees were still, the mockingbirds were silent, the carpenters at Miss Maudie's house had vanished.
- To Kill a Mockingbird
This chapter from Harper Lee's opus came back to haunt me halfway through my eighth day in India. Much like Tim Johnson, the mad dog whose appearance portended the coming maelstrom in Maycomb, the arrival of this boy eclipsed every other immediate sight and sound. It was my first such encounter.
My host and I stood in the center of a village street, fresh from one of our many outreaches. The grey-brown slurry of mud had hardened in the middle but was still soft around the edges. Then, he appeared. A malnourished, heartbreaking personage. Completely naked, he half-staggered, half-shuffled down the center of the street.
"What is wrong with him?" I asked, keeping my voice low; my organic Western tendency to minimize the unpleasant suddenly reemerging in India's boldfaced culture.
My host had seen this boy before. "He is mad," was his simple reply.
I watched him come down the street. I would have been mesmerized, but I still wasn't sure if I should give the boy a wide berth. My discomfort and perverse fascination grew as the boy drew closer, then stopped, dead still in front of me. He looked at me hard. In this respect, he was like everyone else in this remote area of India: I was white and therefore a novelty.
This boy would have been memorable for his condition if his condition had been the only thing to set him apart. If that had been the case, I would have marked him down as another sad case of mental illness. The lower half of his face was filmed in the mucus from his unwiped nose, and his bony body was peppered with grains from the reapings currently drying in front of every house. But for all this, it his look held me spellbound. Because it wasn't just a look, it was a glare. There was hatred in that look; an overarching, resentful disgust for the world at large. His unblinking eyes bored into me with merciless loathing.
I do no ascribe every minor inconvenience or disagreeing circumstance to be a direct act of Satan, but I believe strongly in spiritual forces. And when I looked at this child, and he looked back with such unabashed spite, a single word came to my mind: possession. This feeling felt validated when I raised my camera to take a few closeups of the boy after he stopped in front of me. I edged closer to capture his visage, and he immediately turned away and stalked off between some huts. Even through the grey haze of his "madness," something in him did not want to be photographed.
There could be a dozen different explanations for this boy's unpleasant intensity. Perhaps he was a simple case of mental disadvantage. Perhaps there was abuse. Perhaps an occult village ceremony, performed in an attempt to correct his mental handicap, opened the unknowing child up for outright demonic possession. I'll probably never know. In the meantime, this boy stands out in my mind as one of the most remarkable encounters I had on my non-stop, episodic eighth day of my journey through India.
The first image in this series contains nudity. [nsfw]
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Travel Blog: India, Day 8 - The kids at the riverbank.
While at my host's cheerful home village, an oasis in the middle of abject and depressed poverty state in India, we met a group of children doing laundry in the nearby river. Let me see...
A gaggle of village kids. India. A river. An open field of epic proportions.
Why, yes, a photo op was in order.
Every time I visit India, I am always amazed and overjoyed by the people's capacity for kindness, unhindered friendliness and hospitality, and their sheer willingness to participate. Shy though they were, this group of children stayed true to Indian hospitality by eagerly smiling and waving at the camera when I started clicking the shutter. They giggled and laughed elatedely when I turned the SLR around showed them their photos in the camera's monitor. I took dozens of photos of the little guys. I don't know what these children's lives are like on a normal day, but in that environment, with those kinds of smiles, they made this scene look absolutely idyllic.
India, Day 8 - Rice Field Respite
As we Bolero'd our way through impoverished villages and shantytowns of eastern India, my host leaned forward and gave fresh directions to our intrepid driver. After he finished with the rapid, rolling-R burst of localized Hindi, he turned to me and said that we were going to detour through his home village. I was to see the place of his birth and the rest of his tribe. I told him that I couldn't wait to see the place. In my last entry, I posted about the incredible poverty to which I bore witness in this area. Future entries will show even grittier images than the ones I have posted thus far. You drive long enough through certain parts of India, and things start to look alike. Endless, pitted roads of repetitious cell phone recharge stations, machine shops and samosa stands. Villages of identical thatch huts appearing in the middle of rice fields that extend to a sensible horizon darkened by palm fringes. Even after just a few hours, the effect can be oppressive.
India is second only to China in world rice production; the last available measurement from 2010 placing its production at 120.6 million metric tons. As a staple food for its 1.2 billion citizens, most of the rice grown in India is traded within the country; the only variety to be traded outside of India to any substantial extent being the gourmet basmati variety. That said, large-scale farms still buy seeds from Western agriculture companies like Monsanto; and, like most other scenarios involving Big Pharma or industrial food production, the unethical policies of the seed producer has done exponentially more harm than good in India. I highly recommend that you watch this video of Dr. Vandana Shiva to learn more about these problems. As the Fair Trade movement gains traction in cultural consciousness, don't limit your awareness just to the sources of your coffee and chocolate. When you see images of smiling Kenyan or Ethiopian coffee farmers--remember these photos and consider the people who made your plate of basmati bryani possible.
That said, my host's home village represented a striking contrast to the usual scene. Conditions there were not only different, they felt...freer. I left with the impression that their agriculture was based on subsistence rather than subservient cultivation for the local rice barons. The people here seemed content and happy.
We pulled to a stop at the rim of a rice field. My host and I jumped out of the Bolero and he led me down to meet the people of his village who were busy planting the summer rice crop. However, they weren't so busy that they couldn't take a break to smile and meet the gora with the camera. The women were a bit shy, exhibiting the conspicuous modesty common among Indian females, but they seemed to truly get a kick out of seeing their likenesses in the monitor of my camera. Hanging about on the fringe of the crowd, a goat herder wandered up and showed himself to be an outright ham as soon as the camera turned his way.
This little episode, lasting no more than ten minutes as I photographed the people in groups and as individuals, but for a newcomer to the area, it was happy respite from the depressing scenes I had been in the middle of for the first part of the day, and would continue to see for the next five in this area.
India, Day 8 - Village Outreach
Recapping day seven took forever. It was like flying west--the day just never ends. After arriving in my second location and being greeted by the "cast of thousands" that live with my hosts, we all took a good night's sleep and were up with the sun the next morning. The day began with a group devotional before the orphans went to school. If you have never heard a group prayer in India, it's a unique thing. Everyone prays aloud simultaneously, and I have to confess that it caught me off guard when I first heard it.
Devotions over, kids at school and breakfast eaten, my host and I set off in the Bolero once again. Our project for the day was village outreach. This area is home to a myriad of transient "gypsies" who move in during the harvest seasons, live lightly on the land until the harvest is over, then move on. We went to reach out and speak with these people. We didn't take any gifts, we didn't raise a tent, we just walked up, spoke to the people, and moved on.
More than anything else, this felt like pure missions work. My host reminded me of Paul. Go into the center of a community, speak, and continue on your path. It was at this point during the trip that I began reading through the book of Acts in earnest, trying to learn from the example of Paul, whose restless and often reckless devotion to his calling has been matched by very few individuals since. This week, I would read, watch and learn.
Poverty is hard to look at, no matter where you are in the world. But poverty without hope is even worse. When you walk into a mass of crude tents to visit a people group who neither know nor have imagined a life any better than the one into which they were born, it's hard to watch. And we had nothing to offer. We couldn't make their lives any better materially, and we did not lead them to believe that we could. We simply tried to give them a little hope. I don't know what kind of impact our visits had on the people we spoke to, but we can hope that they took it to heart.
India, Day 7 - The Welcome Wagon
Upon arrival at my second host's home in India, I was greeted by a fresh crowd: the orphans he cares for. I had met this group of children on my first trip to India, several years before. I never got the chance to get to know them, but my time with them on this trip more than made up for it.
All of these children are supported by Compassion International. Compassion is a wonderful organization, and the support it provides to children all over the world, including India, Africa, Central and South America, allows them to have education, skills training, food and water. They might still live in open-air houses without utilities, but their lives are enriched with nutrition and knowledge.
This group, by American standards, have no right to be as happy as they are. They live in an unsealed cement house with no running water and a few hours of electricity a day. They go to school for eight hours a day and spend four more in homework and revisions. They work hard and study hard. Yet they have the biggest hearts and smiles you could ever dream of. Whenever they have visitors, they welcome them into the house with songs and a dance or two. Even though I was only one person, they still put on the full show.
I spent a love of time with the kids in my off hours between projects with my host. We played games, I helped them with their English and sat with them to do my own journaling while they worked on their work every morning and evening. My contributions to their days always felt minimal at best, but the whole crew still treated me like one of the family, and when I got sick a few days later, they were insistent about doing as much for me as possible. I defy you to find a sweeter group of children anywhere on the planet.
