April 5, 2016

 Touched

A leper slapped me on the arm today as I walked down a French Quarter street in Pondicherry, India. A few moments before, I had left the Notre Dame des Agnes church. The leper was an old, shriveled man, shorter than I, dressed in a white robe and orange scarf, a corner of the white robe held in his teeth. He may have been a priest of some sort. He begged as I inched past him declining to contribute to his personal charity, his hand dry and whitish and missing all the fingers. Safely by him, I thought, I felt him slap me on my right arm with that very hand. I was horrified and rushed the few blocks back to my hotel to vigorously wash the shirt and my arm. At about the third washing, I recalled the man from the Bible who was told to dip in the river seven times in order to be healed from leprosy. Maybe I will need to do that, too, I thought. The irony of having just left the church did not occur to me until later.

It’s not the first time I’ve been slapped by a beggar here in India. It may have been in Kolkata when I approached an old woman crouching on a street corner holding out her hand. I had no intention of giving her anything; I was just trying to cross the street. She hit me on the leg as I walked by and shouted something at me. This was a little bit funnier than being hit by a man with leprosy. Nevertheless, all of the history of the world’s injustices were contained in these mild rebukes.

You see a lot of beggars and homeless people in India. Children, dirty from head to toe in filthy rags, will do gymnastic tricks while you wait in your tuk tuk for the light to change, then ask for money; women in sarees holding out their hands with limp babies at the breast, intoning in quiet, urgent voices, “Money. Money.” You’ll see people living on the street in makeshift tents of cloth, tin or banana leaves, with bamboo supports, their little cow dung or kindling fires heating small pots of food, the children naked as they toddle around the campsite or sleep like the dead in the heat. Many families sleeping on the train station platforms are likely homeless. One man with enormously swollen feet and legs (probably afflicted with elephantiasis) wheels himself around the Agra train station parking lot on a makeshift rolling platform, begging. I saw him first in November 2014, and two times since.

We are told that beggars are part of an Indian mafia of beggars; that you should never give to them because the money goes to the Fagin-like head boss or the drunken husband. People have reported seeing these men lurking near shops or roadsides watching their “employees” ply their trade. India has social services, you are told. You learn to go about with a certain skepticism and even disdain. “No, no, no,” you say, and shake your head, because you get tired of it, the incessant intrusion as you are trying to see the sights; all you want to do is to be left alone to see the sights. Is that too much to ask?

Of course, this is the side of India that everyone knows about. This is perhaps why Westerners may be afraid to travel to India, or any developing country, to be exposed to poverty, compared to, say, how we live at home. But I assure you that this side of the West exists, too. Go to downtown Detroit, or to the Appalachian hollers, or to a Native American reservation. But if you ask me how often I’ve come face to face with such deprivation in my lifetime in the West, I’d tell you, “Not very often,” because I don’t have to; this truth is very well hidden from view. In India, all of this is very out in the open. Not much seems to be hidden in India.

 In the West, we avoid or blame others for that which makes us uncomfortable or challenges us to rethink our understanding of the world. We would rather turn away than consider evidence that might make us change our minds or even our lives. A reading on Easter Sunday at an English mass at the Catholic cathedral in Varanasi got me thinking about a different kind of person: Peter. The priest read the resurrection story from the Gospel of John (20: 1-10). In the story, the women who had followed Jesus during his ministry were planning to attend to his body now buried in the tomb. That morning they discovered Jesus’ body was gone and returned to tell the disciples about what they had seen. Peter and another disciple ran back to the tomb, and although the other disciple arrived first and knelt to look inside, Peter actually entered the tomb first. What was it about Peter that made him unafraid to investigate? What did he expect to see? Either way, a severely decomposing body or an empty tomb were surely life-changing events, events requiring a new world view. Yet Peter apparently did not flinch but flung himself into the moment, a future that would require decisions and further action. At that moment, he faced, head on, the horror of his leader’s death, of dashed dreams, and now unexpected, and even confusing, possibilities. If he had been afraid, or refused, to look into that tomb, to go inside and explore, his life may not have taken the direction it did. As it was, new dreams were born. But regardless of his response, what happened in the tomb would still have happened. In other words, difficult or unimaginable things don’t go away if you refuse to recognize them; it just means you’ll be unmoved, unchallenged, and untouched by other ways of experiencing the world. Peter ran into that tomb ready for anything.

In Kolkata, a few days before Easter Sunday in Varanasi, I visited the Missionaries of Charity, the Catholic organization founded by Mother Teresa in 1950 to serve the poor. I visited her tomb; then, I walked through the small museum dedicated to her life. It contained her few belongings: her sari, sandals, cup, crucifix. I visited the simple bare room containing her bed and desk. I learned that she felt called to be a nun and a missionary at the age of 12, and dedicated her life from then on to first teaching the poor, then eventually to caring for the sick and the destitute via the establishment of the congregation of Missionaries of Charity. She did not recoil from those suffering from any illness, including leprosy, nor did she refuse to serve those less fortunate when she had the wherewithal to do so. When faced with such an example, how does one respond? Every day of my privileged life is built on the backs of the less fortunate. It’s one thing to know this intellectually; it’s another thing entirely to be personally slapped with the knowledge.

I don’t know what it means for me in the long term to be touched in this way–to be hit by a beggar woman, to be slapped by a leper. The poor and sick in India have definitely got my attention. I’m unlikely to become the next Mother Teresa, however. But if, like Peter, I’m eager to rustle around in this unbelievable mystery we call “life,” unafraid of what I’ll find, I’ll continue to be challenged to confront my prejudices about poverty, inequality, and injustice. Maybe like Mother Teresa I’ll do something about it.

Maybe in some very small way it will make a difference.

Mother Teresa. Missionaries of Charity, Kolkata.