Diwali, the "festival of lights", is one of the biggest Hindu festivals on the calendar. Across India, people celebrate by shooting off fireworks, cleaning and decorating their homes with lights, painting colorful designs on the floor, and setting out little lamps to welcome Lakshmi the goddess of wealth inside. We were in Delhi for a short visit during the height of Diwali celebrations, and had a blast introducing A.'s cousin to India as he happened to be passing through for a couple of days! But we made it home in time to set off a few fireworks with the neighborhood kids and eat sweets with a few of our neighbors.
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We’ve now spent just over a week in our new community, but it feels like we have been there much longer. For the first few days, we had a constant stream of children and adults visiting our room, giving us suggestions on how to set things up, watching to see how we would make food, and asking us how much we paid for each thing we brought home from the market (we usually paid too much, and they were sure to let us know!). One day, to make sure we got a fair price, our landlady took us to the market to bargain for our wooden bed platform. She drives a pretty hard bargain. After we bought it, the bed was loaded on top of a cycle rickshaw, we sat on top of it with our landlady’s 10-year-old daughter, and the three of us rode down the main road all the way back to our community, like a slow-moving parade float in the midst of car, bus, and motorcycle traffic whizzing past us! Slowly, we’re learning how much we should bargain things down in the market, how to knead dough for chapatti with the perfect ratio of water to flour, which spices to crush together for a meat dish.
We’re also getting to know the people who live around us, their families, and their stories. Many of those stories involve loss, because sisters or daughters have died in childbirth, parents have died in the prime of life from disease, and family members have been injured in accidents or suffer from chronic health problems. We are amazed by people’s resiliency as they deal with so much tragedy and death, and by the strength of the families here and their ability to care for the orphans, the elderly, and the otherwise vulnerable people among their relatives. It’s not uncommon to see a single son supporting his mother and sisters, saving up his earnings to pay for their dowries one at a time, or a single mother taking a job as hired help in a rich family’s home to be able to keep sending her children to school. A. has spent a lot of time wandering around with the guys in our neighborhood, drinking chai and visiting their workplaces—most of which are recycling-collection stands or workshops where they make beautiful wooden furniture by hand. I’ve spent a lot of time visiting women, many of whom are literally hidden away from the outside world because cultural tradition, a conservative mother-in-law, and/or fear of sexual harassment (a threat which has some basis in reality but which is also trumped up and used as a means of control) keep them from ever leaving the house. We’ve both spent time visiting the families who live in crowded plastic and bamboo tents on the alley behind us, several feet lower and closer to the black river which surely expands during monsoon. As we fill our water drum from the leaky hose in the morning, we watch women and children from that alleyway haul water back and forth by hand in small containers because there’s no morning hose service to their homes, and they’re too close to the sewage canal to dig a well. And when we head over to our landlady’s back courtyard to use the toilet, we look over a low wall into that same alleyway where we know that there are no toilets at all. There’s a custom in Indian culture that when guests are invited over for dinner, they eat first while the hosts watch. The hosts actually don’t eat until after their guests leave. When we first came to India, we found this an awkward and obnoxious arrangement, but the longer we’re here the more we come to appreciate it. In our community, a dinner invitation from a poor family is a big gift to begin with. Offering the guests food first—after you’ve already spent hours preparing it and are feeling hungry yourself—is sacrificial. You’re making sure that the guests eat until they are full, even if it means that there may not be enough left for you and you may go hungry, and even though you’ve just spent a large percentage of your income on that meal. In the past week and a half, we've already received this sacrificial gift many times over. We still don't feel comfortable being given food first, but it has challenged us to give to others more sacrificially than we are used to doing. The more we learn, the more we realize there is to learn, and we feel honored to be welcomed into our neighbors’ world. We feel humbled by how much more our neighbors have been able to offer us and to teach us in the past week and a half than we have been able to offer or to teach them. Coming as outsiders with nothing, as yet, to contribute, we have no claim on their generosity and friendship, much less their patience with our own ignorance and unintended faux paux. But if grace is undeserved favor, then our Muslim and Hindu neighbors are mediating our Father’s grace to us in abundance, and teaching us a lot about Him in the process. Tonight will be our third night in the new place. We piled all of our belongings into an autorickshaw and a cycle rickshaw and essentially made the move in just two trips,but since then we've been making multiple trips to the market to pick up various things-- a mirror, a dish rack, bamboo shelves, a mosquito net, a wool blanket to sleep under, now that the nights are getting colder. The first day was intense as we tried to clean and organize our room under the curious scrutiny of our landlady's family and our new neighbors. A flood of children ebbed and flowed into our room throughout the day, and we were talking with people constantly as we tried to get the room set up. We killed a few of the big spiders lurking around and tried to get organized, but it was hard with so many people helping us. By nightfall, there was still no sign of the electrician who we thought was coming, so A. set up the wiring himself by cell phone light and we sighed with relief when the light bulb flicked on. At the end of that first chaotic day, we fell asleep exhausted from meeting so many new people and from speaking in Hindi for hours on end, but we were thankful for all of the ways we already felt accepted into the community. While we were moving that day, some neighbors found out that we hadn't brought our stove and gas cylinder yet, so they shared their lunch with us while we worked and then invited us over for dinner. We found out that the water drum we had just bought was leaking, and a group of guys stopped in to repair it for us on the spot. And our landlady's little girl was so excited about us moving in that she took the cleaning supplies out of our hands and enthusiastically mopped our floor while we tried to take the job back from her and eventually gave up! So many people have invited us into their homes, and so many people have stopped by our home, that the slum is already beginning to feel familiar. As we continue to gradually put together our new living space-- going to bargain for a bed at the market with our landlady, commissioning wooden shutters for the window, and hopefully in the next few days cementing the holes in the floor-- we continue to feel that strange mixture of stress, thankfulness, tiredness, and excitement. We had thought that as we moved into our room we might feel as though we had "arrived", but now we realize that this is just the beginning-- and we're looking forward to what comes next. |
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Photo used under Creative Commons from matsuyuki