Are you want conversation?

I spent the last three days in Bigha, a village of 5,000 people set upon the Bengali plateau that stretches from the ocean and jungles in the south to the Himalayas in the North. I've been assigned to write about the community-run school that Vikramshila started 11 years back. I was accompanied by Atanu, the only male member of Vikramshila senior staff, and just about my favorite person I've met. He's easy to laugh, and puts people immediately at ease. We took a train to Bhordhumon, the capitol of the district, and then hired a car to take us the last 40km.

It's as flat as Indiana. The terraced rice paddies and small vegetable plots, in pleasantly irregular shapes bordered by narrow grassy paths, extend to the horizon in every direction, interrupted by dense clusters of pacca buildings and palm trees.

In Bigha itself, narrow dirt roads wind between one and two story structures, built intimately close together; 5 or 6 man-made ponds provide homes for ducks, and water for washing and bathing and ox scrubbing. I stayed in the relatively large two story house that is Atanu's ancestral home. It has an outhouse and a hand-pump for water. In the walled courtyard, the two women who tend the property hang the clothes to dry while the two dogs wander and sleep in the shade. The whole thing is pretty darn picturesque. The sky is huge, and the air is clear. This year, when the monsoon seems to have avoided West Bengal temporarily for a lay-over in Washington, the dry mud streets are wonderfully pleasant on bare feet.

On Tuesday morning, after visiting the school, a few men from the village (I'm not really sure who they all are, actually) accompanied Atanu and I over to a neighboring village, just a mile away. It's significantly larger than Bigha, with a market and the kind of street vendors you see in Kolkata. We rode our bikes along the dirt and gravel roads elevated a meter above the paddies. The neighboring village was having a festival to the god Krishna. I was promised an explanation of everything, but the opportunity never came. I have to say, anyway, that I find explanations of religious philosophy and tradition pretty boring. Much more interesting to me is the way those ideas get played out--what people do in the name of the name of religion, how they see it affecting their lives.

As we rode in the village, we heard drums and bells being played up the lane, just out of sight behind a small crowd. We parked our bikes and followed. An older fellow named Pochu joined us, greeting Atanu and I warmly. Soon, we saw the train of drummers exiting a building and marching up the street away from us. We followed along with the crowd. As we curved around the vendors selling cheap plastic trinkets and fine Bengali sweets, Krishna's chariot, white and blue and pink, came into view. It was a wooden structure, about 20 feet tall, clearly build without any serious goal of transportation. A statue of Krishna, painted gold, adorned the driver's seat.

The drummers proceeded to the front of the chariot, arranged at the intersection of two thin streets. The other men I was with suggested that I take pictures from a position directly in front of the chariot--I said thank you, and continued to take pictures of the festival-goers, the small child dancing exuberantly between two of the drummer, his mother unsuccessfully trying to prevent him from becoming an inconvenience with a smile. They insisted, so I tried to oblige them.

After a few minutes, I heard, down the street, a new music, a rockous, joyful ensemble of drums with some sort of melodic instrument guiding the beat. I started to walk around the chariot to proceed back towards the entrance to the village. I had just got a glimpse of the scene--a few musicians and a throng of dancing men, marching slowly down the street in front of a cart fitted with an amplifier, two loudspeakers, and a car battery. The melodic instrument, it turns out, was a cheap casio keyboard set to "Mysterious Eastern Instrument." The player was holding the keyboard under his left arm and playing with two fingers of his right hand. The beat was thick and contagious.

Within moments, though, two of the men I had come with ran up behind me, obviously distressed.

"Please, just you stay here!" one of the guys, a young college student with a hip center part in his hair, said to me. He looked sincere and concerned. I smiled and continued to edge towards the festival. Finally, the Pochu asked me to follow him.

"I show you some things," he said. I agreed, despite the fact that the dancing was by far the most interesting thing I'd seen thus far. We walked back, past the worshippers at the big wooden structure, up a slight hill, and around the corner to a tall shed.

"This is where the chariot lives." Krishna spends days other than festival day beneath a tin roof support by 4 wooden posts. We stood, awkwardly, in the garage of God's departed chariot, for about a minute, until I said thank you and started to walk back toward the infectious music that was still echoed off the mud walls. The younger fellow, looking concerned again, asked me,

"Are you like the music?" I spent a fair deal of time with this fellow during my stay in Bigha. One main impediment to our communication is his grammatical technique of starting every question in the form of "Are you." As in, "Are you see the village?" or "Are you eat mango?" What's difficult is that such a sentence might mean, "Do you habitually eat mango?" or "Have you eaten mango before" or "Would you like a mango?" Indeed, he uses this structure for all of these things.

(At this point, it would be prudent to point out that I don't speak his language, and as I'm in his country, the burden of this communication dilemma rests firmly on me. I only mention this to accentuate the comedy of manners that is to follow.)

"Are you like the music?"
"Yes, I was enjoying the music very much," I replied, answering the question I figured he intended to ask.
"Are you enjoy?" I apparently had not answered the right question, or at least not the right way.
"Yes, I enjoyed it."
"The music is for the darankas."
"For what?"
"For Drunkards. This is why you are not enjoy the music." I laughed.
"But I was enjoying it. Very much." He laughed at me, saying "ok ok ok" dismissively. I laughed with him and headed down to the music, figuring I could demonstrate my preference better with actions than words.

Pochu and the young man followed me anxiously. I stood behind the loudspeaker, smiling, watching the men dancing. The young guy came up behind me, telling me that it was dangerous to be so close. I said thank you. Orun, one of my hosts, pointed at one of the men dancing, and said to me, "You are a drunkard."

"I am a drunkard?" I asked, teasing him. He blushed.

One of the dancers caught sight of me and began beckoning me into the crowd. They were dancing in a manner both uninhibited and undisciplined, so I felt fairly well-qualified to participate. After a moment's consideration, I strode into the crowd and began dancing, head down, arms up, to the great delight of the drunken men who quickly surrounded me. The moment was fun and awkward. I felt like I, and the men around me, all understood that I was joining them as an outsider, but the recognition of this felt somehow accepting. I was throwing my body around to the music, they were throwing their bodies around to the music, and there was solidarity in that.

Five seconds later, the Pochu had his farmer's hands firmly around my arm, pulling me forcibly out of the crowd, down a street, and into a bedroom in his house, where his sister-in-law immediately produced some mango and sweets and a diet coke. The man began fanning me. Everyone looked contented.

At this point, I am very confused. Twice now, I have been sternly ushered from a scene which I clearly found entertaining and interesting, to a scene of intense boredom. Pochu, too, realized that there was some discrepancy between what I wanted and what he thought I wanted. He said,

"The language problem is big problem." I smiled and agreed emphatically. It was the first time all day I felt like Pochu and I had actually communicated.

Compounding the absurdity, after taking a bite of the mango (because, why not?) two of the other men in my entourage ran into the room, inquiring as to whether I wanted to dance more. There followed a quick discussion as to whether my health would tolerate such activity. Finally, someone asked me if I wanted to go back out. I said I did, and everyone sprang to their feet, affectionately pushing me back in the street, around the corner to the revelers. I was content to watch and listen from a little way up the hill, but the men behind me were dedicated to correcting the wrong they had committed. I was thrust back into the crowd of dancers, but this time with a line of chaperones watching over the festivities like parents at dance for Mormon teenagers.

I felt intensely awkward nearly instantaneously, and, aware of the stir my presence was creating, I elected to leave the dancing to find Atanu and tell him I was ready to leave.

******

On the evening of the second day in the village, Atanu told me about the river 5 kilometers from Bigha. I suggested a morning bike ride, and he agreed. Unfortunately, a change in plans made Atanu unable to come--and I was again put in the care of the three men who had accompanied me to the festival.

We departed at 5:30. The sun had already crept above the horizon, but it looked unusually large, and land and sky to the east were flooded with light like an over-exposed photograph. To the west, the paddies were a luminous shade of green. It was just cool enough to push hard, and I found myself continually pushing ahead of my hosts. We finally came to the end of the road; the hosts paid a nearby rice farmer a few rupees to watch our bikes as we trudged along the paths between the fields, to a rise in the land and a clump of trees a half mile away.

It was a wonderful time, despite an almost complete inability to communicate. The young man continually asked me questions I did my best to interpret. In a tiny village of 35 families, a mile from the road, and without any electricity or phone, the young man asked me,

"Are you [unintelligible verb] the goat?" I said yes, assuming he was asking me if I liked the goat, or saw the goat. He smiled, mischievously, and ran over to clutch the small black animal around the belly. He looked to me for approval. I waved at him to put the goat down--my presence was already making a scene. No need to manhandle their farm animals.

The most awkward moment of the trip was a stop at the village's school, a shelter with a thatch roof and no walls under which the young children sat on a tarp on the ground with their two women teachers. We walked upon the scene, and my guides asked to fetch me a stool, firmly told me to "Sit now" and began fanning me. The young children stared at me.

"Take rest for 5 minutes," I was encouraged.
"Do you want to rest?" I asked. The young man said yes. "Well, then I'm going to walk around. Tell me when you're ready to go." I stood up. He immediately followed.

After a couple of completely pointless boat rides across the small river, which were observed by children from the village atop the river bank, we began walking back to our bicycles. We left the village and crested a small hill crowned by a wide tree with thick, welcoming, horizontal branches. I kicked off my shoes, and without my hosts realizing what I was doing, I grabbed the lowest branch and began hoisting my self up to a perch 25 feet off the ground.

The three men became increasingly worried as I ascended, laughing nervously and circling the tree to keep me in view.

"Sam? Ok, now, please get down now." I spent a few minutes gazing out over the landscape before yielding to their increasingly urgent demands.

I haven't been able to figure out why they were so worried about me--are they so concerned about all visitors, or just white people? In any case it was a good adventure, and I managed to be just obstinate enough to have a good time without ruffling too many feathers.

******

I've heard experts on adolescence say that what kids really want is to feel normal; I've heard other experts speculate that what teenagers actually want is to feel special. I think these people have found two sides of the same coin--the thing kids (and, I think, people in general) really want is the ability to control their anonymity. No one wants to be singled out when they don't know the answer, or don't want to risk embarrassment; and no one wants their voice smothered when they have something crucial they want to say.

It's this particular feature of huamn personality that makes me so uncomfortable with the kind of hospitality I was explosed to in Bigha. It made me feel like I was constantly on stage, and forever unable to escape attention and fall into anonymity. I can hear Rachel Lord saying at this point that my discomfort probably had something to do with how American's hate to recognize class; and that this hospitality constantly served as a reminder of the divide between me, a rich American kid, and these rural Bengalis. But I'm not sure these are different things; it's my social status, provided by my whiteness and my wealth, that makes me a constant source of attention here, and makes it impossible for me to fade into the background.

Another part of the failure to communicate came, I think, from the fact that Bengalis and Americans think about hospitality in completely different ways. I figure hospitality is really the ability to anticipate another's wants and needs. Part of the communication failure between me and these extremely well-meaning men was that they anticipated my needs incorrectly. They presumed that someone from American, used to the material comforts of affluence, would avoid swimming in the pond, or walking barefoot down the road.

But it's not just that the details of hospitality were slightly awry from Sam's perspective; it's that the whole apporach was alien. In Passage to India (it's a really good book, ok?) Forster writes that Indians often confused hospitality for intimacy; and I certainly felt that in the village. I also felt a kind of restrictive concern--constant inquiry into my health, my comfort, my appetite. Some of this was related to skin color, but I also think Bengalis are used to a more intense interference in a guest's well-being.

And finally, without the aid of a common language, it's very difficult to perforate these intense cultural barriers.

So all these things--social stratification, cultural difference, language barrier--contributed to a constant sense of a great divide between me and the Bengali's who were my hosts.

*****

I've told the story of my trip to Bigha somewhat backwards to preserve for a rhetorical reason. On the first day, Atanu took me to the farmers' meeting. When we had all sat down in the mango garden outside the school, Atanu asked me if I had any questions to ask the farmers. I was somewhat unprepared, which led me to do the smartest thing I've done this whole trip.

"No," I said. "I'd like to just listen to them talk for a while." Atanu said fine, and agreed to translate what was being said. The men initially discussed what to do about pesticide use, and how to best implement crop rotation, and continued planning their credit cooperative. Finally, after 30 minutes or so, one of them asked me a question, in Bangla. Atanu translated.

"He wants to know what the agricultural system is like in your country." I came up with a response, and the questions kept coming, from the obscure to the political.

"What are road conditions like?" "Do you have tamarind trees in your country?" "What do you think about Bin Laden?"

After a while, I asked a question about their organic farming practices, which Atanu graciously translated. We went on like this for a couple hours. Finally, it cooled off enough for us to head over to the soccer field, where we played a spirited game of 6 on 6. When we were all suitably tired, we sat down on the grass in a large circle, and the questions kept coming. One man, a member of the local communist party (the communists have been in power in West Bengal since the 70's) told me his theory about Bush and Bin Laden planning 9-11, and the US-India nuclear deal being a mere front for the establishment of US military bases on the subcontinent to control China. Most amazing, I think, was that when I tactfully but directly disagreed with him, it was fine. We eventually wandered off politics to other topics.

This, I understand, is a important tradition of rural Bengalis--to sit and chat in the evening before the late supper. It was also a moment of profound communication. I am quite different from these men. And yet, sitting in the circle, talking about those differences, made them seem really fairly minor. When it came down to it, we all liked playing sports, and drinking tea, and sitting around chatting for no particular purpose. When we had a venue where our differences (my differences, really) could be address directly and simply, recognized and dismissed; when the roles of host and guest could be subjugated to the roles of conversationalists; when we could sit and feel the tiredness in our chests and legs in the same way; it made me feel that there is an essential, universal human core that can be relied upon to direct our sense of what is good and fair.