Teaching the Foreign Teacher How to Travel

IT'S NOVEMBER IN DELHI, and the streets of Nizamuddin Basti are covered in blood. Groups of men cluster in the narrow lanes of this once medieval Sufi village, texting celebratory messages to their loved ones as they watch the ritual goat sacrifice during the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Adha. Except for the occasional glint of sequins through a curtained doorway—accompanied by an outstretched hand clutching a hunk of freshly cut meat—women are nowhere to be seen in the streets. Beggar children play on ancient, crumbling graves, vendors hawk green-gold prayer cloths and blinking LED clocks, and, inside the dargah to the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, women moan and toss their hair to exorcise evil djinns, their fingers gripping the latticed wall of an unmarked tomb.

I am on my way to Sana’s house; she is part of a group of teenage Muslim girls to whom I have been teaching English conversation for about two months now. As I walk through the maze of alleyways, smiling unsurely at a group of young men who cry “Eid Mubarak!” at me, part of me wishes I had covered my head—and part of me wishes I had brought a camera.

I first came to Nizamuddin Basti in August, when I accompanied an army of SLR-brandishing tourists, fiddling obsessively with their makeshift headscarves, on a ‘hidden history’ tour led by a local NGO. I became obsessed with this part-medieval, part-21st century village tucked into the heart of Delhi, fuelled by a desire, born of many a heated college debate, to find other, non-Western ways of existing. I was on a Fulbright scholarship to study Dalit literature, the Narratives of the Oppressed—or something like that—and my head was swimming in grand academic concepts, brewed in the gothic classrooms of the University of Chicago: Modernity, the Postcolonial Experience, the Other. The Veil. And so, on a quest to find the Untranslatable—which I saw in the ghostly otherworldliness of this bustling, impoverished neighbourhood that had burst through the ruins of an ancient cemetery—I signed up to volunteer at the local NGO’s informal school for girls.

I arrive at Sana’s family’s two-room home. Sana, in a baggy burqa that engulfs her tiny frame, shooes me inside, scolding me for walking through the streets alone. The girls are huddled in a circle on the floor, dressed in glittering Punjabi suits and high-heels, their faces caked with make-up; they sip Coke and giggle about their favourite Bollywood stars.

“Rehana’s getting married,” Amina, who is wearing jeans for the special occasion, whispers to me. “No, I’m not!” shrieks 16-year-old Rehana, slapping Amina. The girls smile at me sweetly, offering me Lay’s chips, which they have carefully arranged on a small plate.

With a mouthful of biscuit, Rehana announces proudly that she will start wearing a burqa on her next birthday. Fatima, who is about 17 with short, cropped hair, smiles bashfully. “I want to wear one, but my mom won’t let me because she thinks women who wear burqas are more likely to run off with men,” she shrugs, laughing. Sana’s older sister Shazzia, a spunky 20-year-old who teaches the Quran at the nearby girls’ madrasa, shoots the girls a disapproving look and turns to offer me more biryani.

After much discussion of everyone’s newly acquired jewellery, I ask the girls, playing innocent, if men also wear burqas. Amina bursts into uncontrollable giggles while the other girls attempt to stifle theirs; but once they have calmed down, they become solemn. Shazzia smiles at me, and with a wise glint in her eyes, explains to me calmly:

“When you go outside, you never know what evil, shaitan, awaits you. You don’t want that evil to touch you, to possess you. That’s why you wear a burqa.”

AUTUMN

IFIRST MET THE GIRLS IN SEPTEMBER, at the tail end of the monsoon that washed away the departure lounge of the Delhi airport’s brand-new domestic terminal and the beginning of Ramadan. On my first day of teaching, the girls marched into the classroom boldly and squirmed into their seats, staring at me with wide-eyed curiosity. “We want to learn English so, so badly,” Gulshan, a bubbly girl with puffy, rosy cheeks, said in Hindi. I was struck by the girls’ exuberance and sincere desire to learn, which seemed to be worlds away from the angsty, moody teenager I had been.

Classes were punctuated by the sounding of the azaan prayer, at which the girls would hastily re-adjust their matching white dupattas, nudging each other to do the same; sometimes a younger girl would gesture to my unfurled dupatta, indicating that I should cover my head, which elicited chiding laughter from the older girls. We began with the foundation of Western conversation, and I would start every class by going around in a circle and asking, “How are you?”—until I began to be barraged by an extremely chirpy chorus of “I’m fine, ma’am!”

I began to get little glimpses into the girls’ lives. They wanted to be singers, doctors and airhostesses, but were confused as to why windows did not open on planes; they had elaborate birthday parties, but didn’t know how old they were; they all had cellphones, but barely left the house; their fathers and brothers often worked as auto-rickshaw drivers or cooks. Sometimes, amidst much giggling and blushing, the girls would ask me whether I had a boyfriend, or, as in one class, they asked me to “once, just once, let down your hair,” and I obliged, to a chorus of ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaaahs.’

In December, I took the girls on the first outing in a long series of Sundays on which we took—somewhat forbidden-feeling—trips around Delhi. I hadn’t exactly asked the NGO for permission, and, as I saw it, these outings were purely extracurricular. As we piled into an auto-rickshaw to go to the German Embassy’s annual Christmas Market in Chanakyapuri, a thrill of excitement shot through the vehicle at the novelty of leaving their homes, the novelty of a rickshaw ride. I had obtained their parents’ permission without difficulty. Sana’s mother had asked, her eyes weary, if Sana would have to take off her burqa; I assured her that she wouldn’t, hoping that this was in fact the case, suddenly feeling very protective of Sana. Before I met the girls, I probably would have had the opposite reaction—one of pity, disbelief—to a burqa-clad woman walking around in a secular, public place, but now I was ready to have it out with anyone who so much as looked at Sana funny.

We walked through the metal detectors into a world of glittering Christmas ornaments, Westernised Indians and expats. Amina wandered around the market in a trance, stopping to caress the pink children’s frocks and Barbie dolls. I was worried the girls would feel as if they did not belong to this Westernised, affluent world, but they were perhaps too young to fit themselves into categories like that, and they were incredibly curious about everything. After multiple rounds of the market, we sat down in a park, exhausted, and watched people walk by, some carrying trays of beer. Amina, wearing new jeans, wrinkled her nose and whispered, “Gandi aadat hai. It’s a filthy habit.” Women in mini-skirts and tight tank tops walked by; the girls stared open-mouthed. “I don’t like it,” Amina frowned, and then grinned, “but I like watching!”

For our next outing, I had planned a tour of Nizamuddin—but I could see the girls had envisioned more exotic destinations, whispering to each other, “What’s in Nizamuddin?” After the girls grew bored of chasing each other up and down cement construction mounds on the edge of the basti, they pleaded with me to take them to the church across the road. Amina grabbed my hand, as if to protect me, as we walked under the flyover where beggars were smoking drugs—“Smack,” Amina said disapprovingly in English.

In front of the church, the girls marvelled at the LED flashing Jesus idols, plastic rings and tiny Bibles for sale. As we were about to enter the church, Rehana hesitated, looking uncomfortable, “I can’t go inside,” she whispered to me, her face reddening. I looked at her quizzically, then, realising she had her period, assured her it was okay.

We stepped into a bare, sparsely decorated hall with white-washed walls and a lone cross at the pulpit and Amina asked, without hesitation, “Where do you pray?” I wasn’t sure, but since the church was empty, I pointed to the velvet altar under the cross. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, Amina marched towards the altar, Rehana lingering behind her, and knelt down in front of the huge cross, cupping her hands upwards, closing her eyes and murmuring intensely. I knelt next to her. I had never prayed in a church in my life. When she opened her eyes, she looked at me and smiled. “Did you take a picture of me?” she asked softly. “No, I didn’t want to,” I said, although I had been tempted. She patted my hand and said, in English, “It’s okay.” We sat for a while longer in the silence of the church, and for one moment, the giggling, smart-alecky teenager was gone.

“Who were you praying to?” I asked her later.

“Allah, of course,” she said.

WINTER

IN JANUARY, THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED DRASTICALLY, Line 4 of the Delhi Metro was inaugurated, and Fatima’s sister-in-law gave birth to a tiny girl. They named her Zareen Khan, after the famous Bollywood actress.

In class, we had made progress, and had now covered a variety of answers to ‘How are you?’ including the ever popular ‘I’m not fine.’ “I’m not fine,” a girl would say, prompting the other girls to chorus “Why?” “Because my head is hurts,” she would say. At their request, I taught them, “My head hurts, my eyes hurt, my health is not good, I have a fever.” From them, I learned the Hindi for ‘I’m dizzy,’ and the difference between ‘my aunt died’ and ‘her brother hit her,’ which use the same verb. One of the younger girls, who had recently run away from her prostitute mother and was given to spells of toxic moods, began leaving messages on the chalkboard in Hindi: “I am a ghost, I will kill you all.”

I taught them how to bargain with rickshaw drivers and vegetable sellers in English. I taught them how to say, ‘But this is very good quality, ma’am,’ and learned some useful phrases from what they hissed under their breath, slipping into colloquial Hindi when the other side wouldn’t back down. They knew the English words for mascara, lipgloss, eyeliner, but still couldn’t conjugate a verb. We practised doctor-patient dialogues, in which a sick girl, often accompanied by a very giggly husband, would produce a long list of ailments to a doctor who was all-too-ready to prescribe medicine. When I asked them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” 15 smiling faces answered confidently: doctor, singer, airhostess, actress, beautician, etc.

We continued our outings, but they had begun to feel aimless to me; I felt the need to make them part of a project. And so I developed a new idea: our outings would become part of a history project, and perhaps prompt the girls to take an interest in what to me was the fascinating folklore of Nizamuddin. At the end of January, the girls came to me with a request. “Can we go to Humayun’s Tomb?” the girls had asked with wide-eyed anticipation, “It’s for the history project.”

And so, on a cool Sunday, we walked to Humayun’s Tomb, the girls, dressed in their best outfits, leading me past the bloodied carcasses of the morning’s freshly butchered chickens—Amina, seeing me wince, confided in me that she was a vegetarian because she loved animals too much—past the vendors hawking pink roses outside the dargah, past tiny shops advertising ‘mobile repair,’ past the outstretched, maimed limbs of beggars asking for alms, past the all-male headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat sect—I could feel the girls walking faster—past the leering rickshaw drivers, past the Delhi Police sign warning of terrorist activity in Hindi, down the dank, underground pedestrian subway, onto Mathura road with its blaring cars where we teetered on and off the crumbling sidewalk and finally, through the gates of the ancient tomb. I felt the girls take a breath. Gulshan looked at me, gesturing to her burqa, “Shall I take it off?” I shrugged; she took it off.

The girls gallivanted through the vast open spaces around the tomb, wanting photos of themselves everywhere. I explained the history of the tomb to them, and they listened dutifully; I told them to read the explanatory plaques and watched them stumble through the over-Sanskritised Hindi listing the number of pentagonal pillars. Some of the girls were scared to enter the tomb at first—it was dark and they feared ghosts—but they went inside, touching their faces in a sign of worship. I gave up on trying to lecture them on the tomb’s history; for all the effort the Archeological Survey of India had gone through to siphon it off as an historical monument, to the girls it was, like the tombs in Nizamuddin, a place of worship.

On the platform of the tomb, the girls danced and sang, taking my video camera and filming each other. Afterwards, I sat down in the grass facing the monument, exhausted, watching them play tug-of-war and spin each other around, their dupattas tied around their waists, pink chiffon, sky blue, deep red and orange sequin-studded fabrics flying in the wind, against the backdrop of the tomb, its red sandstone and beige marble hues basked in a warm, late afternoon sun, until they all fell, exhausted and happy, to the ground.

Our outings soon became a secret the girls whispered about, knowing, on the one hand, that the trips were legitimised by my status as their teacher, but also that they crossed a certain line—the boundary between teacher and friend, between what was possible in their world and their nomadic Sundays gallivanting around Mughal ruins. After class, they would gather around me and speak in low tones, “This Sunday? Ghumne jayenge? Are we going exploring?” Every Sunday, I would leave my cushy apartment in Lajpat Nagar, and, after telling my Punjabi landlord where I was going—usually eliciting a questioning, ‘why-would-you-ever-go-there’ look, after which he would say, “But there’s this really good kebab place there…”—I’d meet everyone at Fatima’s house. Her house had become a kind of second home for me, and I began to look forward to those hours spent joking and eating with her 62-year-old but ancient-looking widowed mother and her sister-in-law. Every Sunday, the sister-in-law, who was 24—my age—but who looked 35 and had two small children, would jovially wave us off on our adventures.

The groups got bigger, and the girls brought their little brothers, nieces and nephews; the girls became bolder, climbing the crumbling walls of ancient forts in their high-heels. At the majestic but crumbling Purana Qila, Gulshan grabbed my hand and told me she was sometimes overcome with a sadness she couldn’t control, and that her family was running out of money. At the ancient dargah in Mehrauli, I waited outside the tomb of a Sufi saint with Sana, who told me that she was Sunni and that they didn’t kneel down to anyone but Allah.

In late March, Fatima and I went to Sana’s older sister Shazzia’s wedding. The bride and groom had never met, and Shazzia was to move to a remote village outside Delhi with her husband. Sana’s Lucknow-born family was modest and devout—they didn’t own a television and prized the education of their girls, as well as a deeply-rooted sense of hospitality—and the wedding was a simple affair. The ceremony took place in a large hall separated by a wall, with women on one side and men on the other. The vows were exchanged quietly between the two families. After several hours, the bride finally emerged, dressed in a crimson, gold-studded suit; her head bowed, covered in heavy jewellery. She moved as if she had weights on her feet, her sisters holding her arms for support. Shazzia sat down a few feet away from me, and I smiled at this girl who had been so vivacious when I first met her, but she could barely muster a smile back. Her cousins tried to feed her biryani through her enormous nose-ring until she finally waved away the food in frustration; it was too painful. “My sister-in-law didn’t eat anything for ten days before her wedding,” Fatima told me on the rickshaw ride home.

SPRING

IN APRIL, THE TEMPERATURE SHOT UP and Amina took me to the local Monday market. At a small stand, she bought two goldfish for ten rupees and told me her father had forbidden her to go on any more outings. Their globular bodies floated in murky green water in a plastic bag, which Amina clutched tightly, looking at the blobs of gold tenderly. They died two weeks later.

My last project idea for the girls was to do a play that reflected issues—of gender and religion—they faced in their daily lives. The girls were excited, and I was about to suggest meeting in a quiet park to discuss ideas when Rehana said, “Ma’am, we have a request.” The girls exchanged looks—“Can we go to the Qutub Minar?”

And so, on a hot Sunday in April, our last outing became the culmination of Islamic architecture, as we went to see the world’s tallest brick minaret. It took us three buses to get there, and by the time we did, we were sweating profusely. We entered the grounds and the girls stared in awe at the 72.5-metre spire curving into the blue sky. The girls spotted a black pillar they had read about in their history textbooks—according to legend, the pillar has special wish-granting powers—and scrambled to get their pictures taken in front of it. “People say there are ghosts in the pillar,” Rehana whispered to me, giggling. “ Hum to sab bhoot hai. Aren’t we all ghosts,” said Sana dreamily, half-joking, almost to herself, twirling in her burqa until it expanded with air.

It was too hot to stay at the monument, so we went to Sarai Kale Khan, a poor neighbourhood of congested tenements sandwiched between the railway tracks and a moat of ditches dug up for the Delhi metro, where Gulshan and Rehana lived. “Sometimes, I wish I had a gun so I could shoot them,” Rehana told me, warning me not to make eye contact with the leering Gujjar boys. We crowded into the room that housed Gulshan’s eight family members—the family shared a bathroom with ten other families—and discussed the play.

“We should make it about how girls should finish their studies before they marry,” said Rehana. “Girls shouldn’t get married until after 25!”

“How girls and boys should be treated equally! How we should be treated like our brothers!” Sana said, adding, “I want to be a writer.”

“I want to get married,” Fatima giggled, “because when I get married, I’m going to get a car!” Everyone laughed. I nodded towards Gulshan, who was unusually silent, squatting in a corner preparing chai. She looked at me tiredly and shrugged. Her brother had just been arrested for being in a knife fight.

Our last classes were sporadic and disorganised; we spoke mostly Hindi. The NGO had nixed my play idea, saying it would create “conflicts with the community.” I spent the last few weeks in a haze, trying to tie up loose ends, finish projects, although I wasn’t sure what I was concluding; at Sana’s house, I frantically scribbled down the family’s biryani recipe, only to find that I couldn’t understand every other term.

“In the beginning, there was nothing,” Fatima’s mother said. “Nizamuddin was a vast cemetery, wilderness, jangal hi jangal. There were ghosts everywhere.”

It was a few days before I left India, and I was meeting the girls one last time. It was a sweltering 45 degrees Celsius, so we sought refuge in Fatima’s house, where her mother sat preparing her morning paan. “What happened to the ghosts?” I asked her. “Light aaya! [Electric] light came!” she said matter-of-factly.

She paused briefly to gesture at the girls and Aisha, her five-year-old granddaughter who was the first of the family to attend an English-medium school. “They are going to become something, just wait,” she wheezed. I took the girls’ hands and told them, in broken Hindi—I had tried to memorise the phrase beforehand, but it came out jumbled—that they shouldn’t ever let anyone tell them they can’t do something.

The Hindi word ‘ghumne’ means, roughly translated, to travel—but this is where literal translation falls short: it implies wandering aimlessly, almost to promenade; to take a trip, to go for a ride, to explore without a precise goal. For all my attempts to make our outings into some tangible project that would somehow capture the girls’ lives and pin them down into categories, I had missed the point. The girls had taught me to wander for the sake of wandering, and, most importantly, they had allowed me, a complete stranger, to wander into their lives, without ever once questioning my cultural norms or seeing me as foreign. They had not yet formed the narrow categories that pitted them against the rest of the world, and the world was still a place to be explored, for now. In the twilight of their adolescence, the cement jungle of Delhi was their playground, with its fenced-off relics of bygone empires, its tiny parks tucked into slums with slides too hot to touch, with Nizamuddin’s crumbling graves, its neon, glittering trinkets and the corrugated metal sheets indicating metro construction that were gradually forming a wall around their homes.

But already, their lives were changing, and in a split second they would be adults, mothers, their dreams of becoming singers or air-hostesses dashed—Gulshan was dropping out of school and moving back to her village, and Rehana, seriously this time, Amina assured me, was going to get married. And while the activity of ghumne, when you are in the midst of it, can seem endless, unbound by time, it is by default ephemeral—an exception, not a rule. I couldn’t change their lives; I could only hope that they would keep that spirit of exploration with them.

And so, saying good-bye, I walked out of Nizamuddin for the last time, wrapping my dupatta around my head to protect myself from the scalding sun, the heat beating down through the dark-blue, beaded fabric, stinging my eyes.