The Peace Corps Survival Manual: Nahin!

We entered the villages where we would live for the next two years like visitors from another century and another world. In most cases we were given a lot of latitude when navigating the labyrinth of customs and traditions, superstitions and taboos that we encountered every day. We were new Peace Corps volunteers culled from a large group of applicants; we were carefully selected for our adaptability, work, social, and language skills. We studied Kannaris the language of Karnataka State in South India and as part of our training did imaginative role-plays, mock encounters that would help us to better understand the Indian society, mitigate any culture shock we might experience and spare us the embarrassment that improper behavior might cause. However, despite a rigorous selection process and detailed preparation, we were still just young men learning as much about ourselves as about how to live in an entirely different culture.  Cross cultural training was one thing, but the realities of village life were another. 

The rhythm of the village was tuned to the sun; one rose with it and went to sleep when its light waned. If the dawn prayer-call from the minaret in the Muslim quarter didn’t wake me, the creaking of a bullock cart’s wobbling wooden wheels near my unshuttered window, and the bells jingling from the oxen harnessed to it, did. I resisted the urge to pull the sheet over my head and roll over and sleep a while longer because it was market day and I wanted to get there early. I heard a commotion on the roof when I went to the outhouse. I climbed up and chased a troop of foraging monkeys away from my pumpkins and then checked to see if they had gotten into Mike’s chicken coop. As I ate my breakfast I watched gecko lizards, rubbery green like small cereal-box toys, dart across the ceiling and up the walls hunting the insects that had snuck through the screens. I woke to a tickling sensation during the night when a mouse scurried back and forth over me and made a mental note to plug the drain hole that served as plumbing in the kitchen. Cows, sad-eyed and emaciated, foraged outside my door and vied with the goats and donkeys for anything edible, cellulose would do, be it paper or the dried palm thatch from a bungalow roof. I saw razorback pigs and roaming dogs squabble over the sausage like piles of human excrement that littered the nearby fields, remnants of open defecation, and a practice that was the tradition throughout India.  It was the ordinary start of an ordinary day, and I didn’t find anything strange or exotic about it.

It was still early morning when I cycled to the market and the crimson sun that bulged up out of an intense blue sky held the promise of the heat that would come. Kolar was in the middle of its ten month dry season, a recurring drought that seared the fields and hills and where any wisp of a cloud would have been a welcome guest. I left my bike outside the market area and made my way through a warren of paths and lanes, past stalls and intricately patterned sheets spread on the dusty ground laden with pyramids of fruits and vegetables and bags of spices that were almost as colorful as the sari clad women, ornamented with bangles and nose rings that sat on them.

I stopped at one of the tiffin stalls and drank thick, sweet chai and ate a dosai, a spicy pancake that was a breakfast staple in southern India. After, I wandered through the throngs of farmers and villagers, greeting Hindu acquaintances “Namaskara” with clasped hands and a slight nick of my head, and greeting Muslim men with “Peace be with you" “asalaam alaikum”  again bowing slightly in respect, touching my forehead, lips and heart with the tips of my fingers. I addressed my elders with the respectful titles appa or amma, uncle or aunt, and my peers with the term brother or sister. I met my friend Basha and greeted him formally, “asalaam alaikum” and he returned my salutation with “walle kum salaam, Prancis” “and peace be with you too,” his tongue and gum formed by his native Urdu rendering him unable to articulate the combination of consonants f and r in my name. He was standing together with a group of young men, his relatives I later learned, half-brothers and cousins from his father’s second family that lived in a neighboring village.

Basha and I spoke of inconsequential things, just the normal social small-talk, as much as my Kannaris would permit, but I was to learn that being conversant in a language wasn't always the same as understanding when to speak and when to listen. Sometimes I felt as though I was trapped between two languages, using the language of one culture without being aware of the nuances or the correct value of the words, my brain saying speak; speaking in the correct language but losing something in translation from my mother tongue. The results could be humorous or embarrassing, and at times it seemed as though I stumbled over my words and fell into one of those holes covered with branches that have spiked poles at the bottom to impale unsuspecting prey. My simple question on that market day was one of those times.

I knew that Basha’s mother had been ill and politely asked him how she was doing.  I had no ideas that by inquiring about her health that I would in some way besmirch the family honor. It was many years later that an understanding of the strict rules and codes concerning Muslim women and the rigid patriarchal aspects of Sharia law would be better understood by Westerners. I was Basha’s employer and friend. We also employed his father and went to the weddings of family members. I had been present when the village barber circumcised his frightened but proud younger brother, deftly snipping off his foreskin with a straight razor while he sat on an earthen cauldron, his father and an uncle holding him with a steady grip under each arm. We celebrated the occasion by eating a pudding made from the first rich milk of a buffalo that had newly calved. But that was the world of men and was where you obviously drew the line. I was yet to learn that you never asked a Muslim man about a female relative. We had been taught in training never to enter a Muslim household abruptly. Knock then step aside in order to give the women a chance to withdraw out of sight. The complexity of the cultural codes and behavioral rules behind that advice were never explained to us.

Nahin! Basha shouted in Urdu, the guttural “h” coming deeper down in his throat than usual, his normally cheerful voice more urgent. The men had closed a circle around me when they misinterpreted my solicitous question about his mother and my interest in her as being prurient and an insult to the family honor. That I showed interest in a female relative, especially someone’s mother, as innocent as it was, could have cost me dearly. The men and their friends, almost on que, had become aggressive and tightened into a threatening circle with me in the middle. Basha stepped between them and me shielding me from the consequences of my unintentional cultural clumsiness. Nahin! No! He said again. He doesn’t know any better; he is a foreigner and then signaled me with his eyes to move on.

I got up on my Raleigh and pedaled home having learned another cross cultural lesson the hard way.  But it wouldn’t be too long before I’d get snagged in those verbal thistles and thorns again by inadvertently insulting a Hindu woman’s virtue by using a poorly chosen word. A man from the village came to the workshop and asked me to look at his wife who was ill. In as much as I had a Jeep, a wrist watch and a Peace Corps issue first aid kit, I was considered the most medically knowledgeable person in the village so his request wasn't all that unusual. She was laying on a straw mat on the floor drifting in and out of consciousness. I saw pretty clearly in the half- light that the whites of her eyes had turned to pale ochre and that she had an acute case of jaundice, probably hepatitis or some other liver ailment and that we should take her to the government hospital immediately. We laid her in the back of the Jeep and in her delirium she must have heard me use the Kannaris word for “bad sickness,” which her fever muddled brain construed as venereal disease, something that “bad women” contracted. I should have used the word serious instead of bad of course, but neither my bedside manner, nor my vocabulary was that advanced. As soon as she returned from the dispensary and was well enough to walk, but still in a fever I imagine, she burst into my bungalow like one of those small dust devils that whirled over the parched fields. She held one of her sandals high over her head and screeched hysterically, "where is that dog,” meaning me. I really didn't know what was going on until her husband ran into the room and tackled her knocking her to the floor. Mani my housekeeper heard the racket and calmed the woman down. When I asked about all the commotion her husband told me that she was going to avenge her honor because she thought that I had accused her of being a loose woman.