Poverty

“India is two countries in one: an India of Light and an India of Darkness.”

This is a line from the main character in Aravind Adiga’s book, The White Tiger, which recently won the Man Booker Prize and excellent reviews. I read it last week and thought it was pretty average, but this line struck me as very accurate as I tour India and uncover many different worlds inside this massive country. Every day, the truth in these words becomes more evident.

As if enveloped in the Darkness, poverty in India is suffocating. It is a part of every living moment and there is no escaping it. In the big cities, everywhere you look, you see literally millions of people each day who could only wish to approach the poverty line. The more I understand about India's poverty, the more I see that the universal definition of poverty does not do any justice to a person who is truly poor. My own definition of poverty is out the window - the fact is I am just beginning to understand this concept I thought I knew so much about. In places like New Orleans and even Nashville, I have seen poverty - bad schools and worse jobs, bad health care, awful prisons and the like. But that kind of poverty, the "one textbook for 25 kids" kind of poverty, does not begin to describe what I have seen in the India of Darkness.

In Chennai (Madras), one place to escape the poverty is the English bookstore. There are only rich, healthy and clean looking people with white teeth in these bookstores - they come from the Light. Everywhere else I look I can only cringe and try to keep walking. If you make eye contact with a beggar, things can be tough. They will literally crawl after me if they don’t have feet, or try to put their tiny, lifeless baby in my purse, or thrust their ghostlike children out into oncoming traffic to keep up with me. I can’t really describe how it feels to see people in this condition – there is nothing like it. It takes a lot of energy to justify not giving them money - 10 rupees (20 cents) could feed them for a week. But the second you hand out a bill, the whole city seems to descend on you, naturally wanting a piece of the action. It can be dangerous and scary. And it will never solve the problem.

In the village where I teach, a different kind of Darkness exists. Next door to Vidya Vanam is a brick kiln - there are thousands in the countryside in every state in India. Land owners recognized long ago the value of a combination of dirt and cheap labor: a profitable business of brick making. The growing populations and buildings in the villages mean endless demand and cheap labor to supply it. During my visit to one of the kilns in Anaikatti, I realized that this is not just cheap labor, it is indentured. Land owners altruistically loan money to villagers in their times of struggle in exchange for labor in the kilns. They will even offer the laborers a place to live. Entering into this deal, most villagers do not understand that they will never earn enough to pay off this debt, and as they continue to borrow from their employer to pay for weddings, medical expenses, water during a drought, etc., their debt deepens and their options vanish. Their children will help to pay off this debt by taking part in the labor, thus assuming the debt when their parents are too old or ill to work. The cycle has begun.

To be fair, these land owners are far from wealthy. In fact they may technically be considered poor, in relation to the poverty line. But there are many more levels of poor below them – non-land owners who never make more than enough to buy food for one day. And as summer approaches I am realizing that most of these villagers will not die of starvation, but of dehydration. Maybe not this summer, but one day. The rivers and creeks that I see on my walks are drying up at an alarming rate, and the rains will not come here until late June. The air is so dry it hurts my skin – the little guys I see on the road have cracks in their lips and faces from lack of water and nutrients. One little boy is so dehydrated I swear he looks sixty.

It wears me out thinking about it all - no wonder the politicians never get anywhere and end up using funds on a new cricket stadium. A cricket stadium shows progress. The millions upon millions of people I have seen suffering from starvation and nutrition deficiencies, deadly health conditions, zero education or job prospects have very tough lives, now and always. They may work 19 hours a day for the next twenty years and barely earn enough to live meagerly. They do not know progress. They do not have a place in the Light.

Let me be sure to state that I love India. I will never forget the things I have seen here. But that feeling of walking past a young woman with three kids, skin and bones, picking knats out of each others hair, silently begging for help with expressionless eyes, is a feeling only the strongest can learn to live with. It is the Darkness.