The blazing, off-white dome overhead casts light without shadows, as it often does in the National Capital Region of India. I arrive at the dusty lot and rough lean-to that houses a migrant family from Madhya Pradesh. The little toddler, Divyansh, greets me as he waddles around alone, pantsless as usual, like Winnie the Pooh.
I say namaste to the little fellow, which he returns with his palms together, teetering as he works to maintain his fragile verticality. When I ask about his sister, (“Diddi?”) he immediately points away to my left. I see a string bed sitting at the edge of the lot, with a blanket over it, which stirs to reveal Khushi, emerging from a nap under open skies.
As she blinks sleep from her eyes, I ask her through Google translate where her elder sister is, as we had planned to meet at 4. She says something about a saree in Hindi. Uneducated, the energetic, mischievous 14-year-old (she once snuck into Prince’s home to scare me while I was writing at my desk) speaks no English. Rani arrives a few moments later with a bag in hand, and giggles as she heads into the makeshift home to get ready for what I understand to be a walk through Ghaziabad to their aunt’s place.
Prince (my host) and his family have an interesting, contradictory relationship with this family of migrants. He often warns me about spending time with them. He repeatedly says, “They are notorious,” and I needle him for more. Prince’s father had long ago talked to the lot owner on their behalf, to convince him to allow a temporary home on the property, across which I often see Sunita (their mother) sweeping dust in small clouds that migrate from one corner of the lot to the other.
Prince’s father had also contributed a significant sum of money toward Rani’s wedding, to a husband she now only speaks of with melancholy. She explains that he went away to Jammu and Kashmir three years ago for construction work, and was back only once. I ask about him, and I get only vague, downcast answers. Prince tells me the rumor is that the man had remarried and had no intent of returning to his young wife and two baby boys. The last time he was in town, Prince claimed he wanted to go over and fight the “bastard,” in his own words.
A few minutes later, Rani emerges from the hovel, radiant in a bright pink saree wound lavishly over an elegant white lace top, and is beaming smiles in fresh makeup and colored bracelets. My jaw rests on dry ground as I witness what is happening, myself accustomed to seeing the young mother in tattered, dirty clothing as she walks the streets with one of her two little boys. At this moment, she lives up to her Sanskrit name, as Rani translates to “queen.”
Khushi also emerges in a new outfit, shiny purple pants and a white sweatshirt, all smiles (her name translates to delight), and soon the three of us — each young woman shouldering one of Rani’s boys — move through the streets to wherever it is they’re leading me. Prince’s father is sitting outside his shop and seems puzzled at what I’m doing with such a colorful entourage. I just nod to him and smile when he gestures over to the seat next to him.
Soon, we’re in the busier streets of the Govindpuram district, and it’s impossible not to notice the stares of passersby. Indians are known for the habit of staring, and anything longer than two or three seconds truly becomes hard to bear. Their looks and their energy seem to be of distaste and scorn, and I don’t realize how it begins to affect my demeanor. Khushi asks me something in Hindi as she pads along in flip-flops next to me. To my horror, “You are sad to be walking with us?” appears on my phone screen.
My heart jumps out of my chest and I reassure her that no, I’m happy to be with them and excited to meet their extended family. I’m ashamed that the energy of others is able to affect me so noticeably, and don’t understand why this should be such a spectacle. Alone, I would often attract stares here in Delhi’s far-flung outskirts, but these looks were different, somehow judgmental.
Prince had more to say about his family’s connection to the migrants. He claimed that his family sometimes would send leftover food and bread, and hire them for various projects around the house. But they maintain a distance that I don’t understand. Prince’s brother avoids them entirely, for as Prince says, “he knows what they are.” He says the family is known to engage in violent conflict, and Prince’s father went over to restrain the girls’ father when he found he was beating their mother in the hovel.
A young son of the family died tragically of typhoid, and Prince was disgusted by the fact that he saw that they had left his body discarded outside, exposed to the elements. These are all second-hand accounts, so I can only take them as such, though he assures me that their benevolence toward me is because of my status as a foreigner and that they are known to talk behind the backs of almost everyone in the community.
Unsure of what to believe, I trust in the smiles and energy the youngsters send my way at an earlier invitation to tea and biscuits outside their makeshift home. They hosted me almost in disbelief, as neighbors in the vicinity stared down at us with what looked like disapproval from their balconies and doorways.
Khushi and Rani often ask me about my own family, specifically my sister’s plans to marry Prince. It seems as unreal to them as it does to me, as my sister has known Prince for eight years but has only met him once in person.
The translator app communicates my English to them seemingly accurately, but when they speak their fast, colloquial Hindi into my phone, it often struggles to pull something coherent together for me, and the conversations become mostly one-way. The alternative would be to bring Prince along to translate, which unfortunately would bring noticeable discomfort to all parties.
Khushi takes my hand, shouldering Rani’s infant son with her other arm, and leads me through the packed bazaar, squeezing our way past wooden carts and stepping over a beggar cradling an unconscious boy. The bazaar is buzzing and awash with light at night, and motorcyclists zip through the crowds, their handlebars threading past my ribs with centimeters to spare. Fruit, vegetable, shoe, and jewelry stalls line the streets, often with the smoke of incense drifting up in thin tendrils to keep mosquitoes away.
We stop at a couple of food stalls, for momos (Tibetan dumplings) and chaat (a catchall term for snack, often found at street stalls), which Rani pays for at my objection. After threading through a market, we come at sundown to a small park, and off to the side are a trio of shacks similar to the one Rani’s family lives in. It reminds me of the scattered encampments across my hometown of Des Moines that I encountered before I left in September.
I’m introduced to family members in the darkness and then led into the hovel itself. A young woman is sleeping on a bed in a room lit by a single LED bulb. She wakes up at Khushi’s behest, and welcomes me in English to this intrusion I hadn’t asked for. Her name is Khushu, and being a cousin, I immediately see the family resemblance to Khushi and Rani. I don’t know if I could show the same amount of eagerness upon being awoken at another’s insistence.
Eventually, more and more members of the family are brought into the room and are bunched together in the doorway straining to catch a glimpse of the foreigner sitting on the bed chatting away in broken Hindi with three of their cousins, who are laughing at what I am or am not saying. Their aunt arrives and asks if I want coffee. Khushu prepares it on a portable electric stove sitting on the dirt floor in the corner and mixes instant coffee into the boiling water, which is soon served to me along with a bite of sweet, sticky jalebi.
Selfies are taken and smiles light up the dark from through the doorway. Youngsters present themselves and giggle as they address me in English. One of the boys is especially welcoming to me, and his name is Bharat, the Hindi word for India itself. Rani’s infant starts crying, and Divyansh is poking at me playfully from his seat on the bed. I give Khushi my pocket film camera to take a picture of us, but the flash won’t trigger in the darkness and everyone laughs as the shutter button resists Khushi’s repeated attempts to take a picture.
Seated there in that hovel, I feel the most bright and benevolent energy — nothing of the destitution most commonly assumed to be experienced by slum residents. I feel that somehow, they have much more to give than the wealthiest of princes. On the dark walk back through the bazaar, Rani offers to buy me a watch, and I do my best to politely decline.
A month later, I would be sick and alone in a vast room on the 10th floor of a Radisson in New Delhi, looking out over a vast, dusty plain fringed by a smog-choked city. India is full of contradiction — slums around every corner, even opposite the most ornate and lavish palaces the world has ever seen. How is it that these are always cold and full of sorrow, yet in a slum over dirt floors I could feel the most warmth and wealth of a different kind?
I returned to Govindpuram a few days later, still recovering from my illness. On my last day in Delhi, I walked over to find Khushi and Rani, and presented them with silk scarves I had bought for them in Varanasi. They beamed in disbelief and immediately wrapped themselves up in shawl style.
When I remember the two months I spent in India recently, my mind first returns to that evening in the hovel—and this sense that this way of life will one day become more familiar to many of us.
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