The poor break through
McGowan, Jo
THE POOR BREAK THROUGH 10 mcgowan SOLILOQUY FROM NEW DELHI I was walking in Connaught Circus, the "fashionable" shopping area of New Delhi, the other day, trying to figure out how I had...
...I asked...
...But it's true...
...How true it is...
...We talked for some time, and I asked them again about their husbands...
...This is quite literally true...
...So far, I am still searching...
...Down on the street, two young women were breaking up a pile of bricks while their babies lay on the side, both howling...
...386 Common weal...
...That evening they returned (well before he was expected home), and again we gave them tea and biscuits...
...She thought she heard a baby crying and went to the 19 June 1987: 383 balcony to look...
...I love so nobly in my dreams...
...To even think that one can face all the sadness and injustice of the world without a deep-rooted faith in God is ridiculous...
...We no longer believed their story...
...When he turned out to be an Indian, their whole attitude changed...
...Their main interest seemed to be get out as quickly as possible...
...The first woman spoke to her sharply in a dialect I didn't understand and the other woman quickly controlled herself...
...Now, so many months later, I can see things a little more clearly...
...384: Commonweal Dorothy Day often used to quote Dostoevsky in this light: "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing, compared with love in dreams...
...The contrasts are so stark as to seem contrived...
...I want to give, but not all...
...But beyond the physical (and perhaps even more teflBously clung to) are the attachments to time, space, pri-V40< freedom...
...Twelve for the taxi, five for the coffee, five for the postcards, five for the magazine, twenty-eight for the pants, five for the ice cream...
...I can see how silly this is now that I have written it down...
...Twelve for the taxi, five for the coffee...
...They were ungrateful...
...Recently we moved to a new apartment...
...I am willing to make incredible sacrifices, to be gracious and full of charity, ever patient and kind...
...There is no moment free of them...
...What stops me is the knowledge that the only real breakthrough involves me and my attachments...
...As for me, I am quite sure it is no coincidence that a middle-class kid from Fall River, Mass, (who hates hot weather with a passion), should find herself living in India, one of the poorest countries in the world...
...We gave her money and food, and she left...
...They are attachments so vast and diverse as to stagger the imagination...
...I am no match for the circumstances I meet here...
...When I look at their lives and compare them to mine, I feel powerless to make a beginning...
...Growing up in America, with its strong belief in self-sufficiency, is at the heart of the problem...
...our friend) offered to buy them blankets...
...How old is she...
...I remember longing to meet poor people, to be asked for food or clothing, to find a baby on my doorstep...
...But I knew I had started out with nearly a hundred...
...And why should they be satisfied with what we chose to give, seeing, as any fool could, that we could easily give a hundred times more...
...The children of the shantytown play with sticks and dirty water...
...I know that they will wonder, as I did on first arriving: "How can you be so indifferent...
...One woman began to answer while the other suddenly began giggling, so hard the tea spurted out of her mouth...
...The women motioned Alison that they wanted food and she came in to ask me what we could give them...
...Somehow it never occurs to me to give it over to God, to let her provide me with the strength I need...
...The next morning when they turned up at 7:30, I was amazed to discover that I was already weary of them...
...I am coming to the sad realization that my whole concept of love is similarly middle-class: I want to love, but on my terms...
...Alison took it all down to them...
...I was quite moved (especially by the babies who, at eighteen months were two-thirds the size of my twelve-month-old, and both unable to walk) and told them that if they came back in the evening we would arrange for clothes and blankets...
...One day, the face of a child or an old man's smile will touch some unguarded spot in my heart, and down go the gates and I am flooded again...
...The women had continued to Delhi...
...That linear view is certainly true, but within each age is another "always": the poor, once you let them into your life, are always there...
...She contributed ' 'Marriage versus just living together" to the March 13, 1981 Commonweal...
...I have lived in India for nearly six years now and I am no closer to understanding poverty than I was the day I arrived...
...If it were true, why did the woman burst out laughing when I asked about her husband...
...We went back and forth, back and forth — justifying them in one breath, condemning them in the next...
...They had boarded the train without tickets, however, and their husbands were arrested and jailed in some tiny town along the way...
...A few days later I saw them on the road with their husbands...
...I never know what to do then...
...Now, a bit jaded, a lot numb, and more and more caught up in my life and its complications (children, a home, work), I notice less...
...Until then, the women had assumed my husband was also a foreigner...
...I JO McGOWAN wrote regularly for the National Catholic Reporter before moving to India...
...How I would help them...
...I went down this time and because I speak Hindi, talked with them...
...To just plunge in, with no end in sight, is too terrifying even to contemplate...
...We had so many guests coming to stay with us for long periods of time that we finally decided to rent a really spacious apartment...
...We have two bathrooms...
...The babies, who were very scantily clothed, were both sick...
...They told me a long involved story about having left their village in the neighboring state and, with their husbands, coming by train to Delhi...
...I used to understand the word "always" in a linear sense — that through all the ages there would be poor people...
...My situation suddenly seemed preposterous...
...When I was in grade school we used to be told stories in religion class about countries like India where the poor lived in the shadow of the rich and the rich never did anything for them...
...Then at least, I was full of innocence and rage, grieved by everything I saw, moved to impossible gestures...
...Meanwhile they were sleeping on the street, with no blankets and no food...
...But still, the poor break through...
...My children have a tricycle, books without end, and toys they hardly glance at...
...I started writing this article a year-and-a-half ago...
...Six days...
...they have to go into the fields...
...Every time one of us (Alison or I) was alone in the room, they would immediately ask for money...
...By some strange accident of birth, I am on the inside, with my husband and our beautiful children, surrounded by books and pictures, full cupboards and bureaus, and a well-stocked refrigerator, while they, by some equally strange but much crueler accident, are on the outside, struggling against hunger, sickness, want...
...He was right...
...It all added up to sixty rupees, plus the fifteen I had in my pocket made seventy-five...
...The next day both arrived...
...My parents are coming to visit us next month and I am dreading their reactions...
...I am slowly coming to an understanding of what Jesus meant when he said, "The poor you will always have with you...
...I invariably do too much in the beginning and too little in the end...
...It is the tragedy of our age — more tragic, indeed, than poverty itself, for it is indifference which allows poverty to continue...
...They returned at around 5 P.M...
...The next morning, after he had left, one of them returned, saying she was now alone because the other had set out for the village...
...In everything I do, there must be a "reasonable" limit, set, of course, by me...
...The whole scene had become comical — or would have been if it weren't for the sight of those two babies, so malnourished and lethargic, so different from my own chubby, well-fed children...
...Six-days-old and out on the streets earning a living...
...When they finally left (the babies having peed on the rug and spilt tea all over everything) Ravi told us that we had better decide in our own minds just how far we were willing to go...
...But it is not simply demands of this type which can be satisfied and considered done with...
...At this point my husband arrived, accompanied by a friend of ours — an Indian settled in California...
...We asked the two women to return the following morning to collect them...
...This is not mere sentimentality...
...He told us that they would be back, that they would keep on returning, on one pretext or another, until they felt they had gotten all they could...
...Let's go over it again...
...Strange as it may seem, I have never asked God to let me know what she wants of me...
...I put it away because I couldn't finish it...
...They were never satisfied...
...When I lie awake nights berating myself for being such a terrible person, I invariably drop off to sleep resolving to try harder to be good, as if the answer lay in my own efforts...
...Their plan was to earn enough money in Delhi to pay the fine and get them all back to their village...
...and we all sat down (they sat on the floor, refusing, as all the poor in India do, to sit on chairs) for tea and biscuits...
...And the mother, underweight, no doubt anemic, six-days-post-partum and already on her feet, looking for the next meal...
...the trick is in figuring out who we are and where we fit in the grand plan...
...It is the greatest strategical error one can make...
...There are all the physical comforts, to start with: food, 19 June 1987: 385 dsMBng, a home...
...We gave her some money and food, but told her this was the end...
...Meanwhile we gave them a few saris, baby clothes which Alison had gotten from a neighborhood relief center, and some money to buy food...
...But reality is so infinitely more difficult and complicated...
...This particular complex is still under construction and we are one of the few families to have moved in...
...And yet, I do not feel indifferent...
...For us, prayer, contemplation, and meditation all require the luxuries of time, quiet, privacy — luxuries which most of the world (the ones who will inherit the Kingdom) have never heard of...
...I was interrupted by a beggar and the irony did not fail to strike me...
...Just now only the four of us are here and I wander from room to room and think of the people just outside our windows who are living in rooms the size of our kitchen...
...ipten in my present, very limited involvement with the poor (tawfcfoman who comes every day for food, the laborers who as|H>r water, the children who clamor at the window for cUWls and toast), I find that they invariably arrive at an "^Knvenient" time — usually when both kids are asleep and 1 flk trying to get some work done...
...A few days later, the other one came, saying she had returned to the village, found no work, and so had come back to Delhi...
...We are called to be ourselves...
...every time you turn around, a hand is outstretched...
...Six days...
...After I told their story, P.K...
...The other, perhaps less serious mistake lies in second-guessing God's will...
...I sit here by the hour, staring at the little shacks, at the half-naked children, the pregnant women, trying to think of some way to break through the walls that divide us...
...They made one more rather feeble attempt after that (calling up to me from the street), and then gave up...
...There was no money for medicine...
...There are many gifts, but the same spirit" is not an idle statement, but a profound truth...
...A certain openness seems to be necessary, an eternal readiness — to talk, to listen, to be there...
...We quickly heated up some lentils and rice and got some bread, fruit, and milk...
...there is nowhere to hide...
...After they had finished, they signaled for water...
...We could hardly bear to hear ourselves and yet we could not stop...
...It is in a complex partially financed by the city authorities and designed for middle-class people who would otherwise be unable to afford a home of their own...
...I would never turn away...
...Previously we were in a two-and-a-half room place — this one has five...
...How much longer I can elude the Hound of Heaven, and the shape my life will take once I am snared, is what remains to be seen...
...I wanted to wrap it all up neatly, to somehow rationalize away my dilemma and come out in the end still looking like a good Christian...
...I finish feeling vexed and dissatisfied and determined to find some better way...
...Right outside our window (twenty feet away) is a little shantytown — temporary hovels set up by the migrant laborers who are still at work building the place...
...Now, age twenty-nine, surrounded on all sides by the poor, I find myself in the unlikely position of the stereotypical, indifferent, rich woman...
...Why should they be grateful for what was as much their birthright as ours...
...My husband, Ravi, who was deliberately taking a back seat in the whole affair, listened in silence as Alison and I discussed our suspicions and resentments in the kitchen while we prepared their breakfast...
...And probably, at age ten, I would not have...
...The more you give, the more you will be asked...
...thought of my two children, born into health and warmth and security, and of myself, in for a week after their deliveries, waited on by family and friends...
...None of them, babies included, was wearing any of the things we had given them...
...We gave more money but it was clear to them that they were nearing the end of our patience...
...It was a puzzle and a shame...
...Then the extras: butter, cakes, cookies, cqtf$, four pairs of pants, six shirts, two nightgowns, a rug on thtMOor, pictures on the walls, music, windchimes, potted plMf...
...One day in January I was preparing lunch for my children and our houseguest, Alison, a young woman from Connecticut...
...I haven't seen them since...
...Whether I am meant to be Dorothy Day or not, I know I am meant to work with the poor...
...I have always just assumed I knew: she wants me to be Dorothy Day...
...Of course it was impossible and I gave it up in despair...
...Perhaps I am further away...
...We kept reminding each other that even if the story were not true, these people were still poor and needed help...
...THE POOR BREAK THROUGH 10 mcgowan SOLILOQUY FROM NEW DELHI I was walking in Connaught Circus, the "fashionable" shopping area of New Delhi, the other day, trying to figure out how I had spent ninety-five rupees in less than;six hours...
...She was a tiny shriveled woman holding the smallest baby I had ever seen...
...We felt miserable and wished we had never started the whole thing...
...Henri Nouwen speaks somewhere of how middle-class the spirituality of the West is...
Vol. 114 • June 1987 • No. 12
