CHILDREN OF CANE From a chapbook, Writing India Schools (2000, with 2nd printing, 2005, presented at 1st International Conference for Qualitative Inquiry, Champaign, IL) (If you want a copy, just email me.) © 1999 Jane Piirto I check out of the Hotel Regency at 9:00 a.m. A sunny December day, with the special light only India has. Suresh drives through the diesel exhaust-saturated streets of Pune, expertly winding and dodging the autorickshaws, the two-wheelers, the cows, dogs, sleeping bodies, and garbage piles infused with pink and blue plastic. Men stand on the curbs brushing their teeth, residents of the villages within villages, warrens of huts underneath corrugated tin. We cross a river bridge, and I wonder whether this river is the Mula or the Mutha. Traffic is fast as it’s early for India.

We go, with him asking only twice for directions in his native tongue Marathi, to the Jnana Prabodhini School but no one is there yet except a cleaning woman and a guard. Indian schools start later than ours in the U.S. where high schools usually start at 7:30 a.m., and elementary school at 8:30. The guard, in a tan uniform, watches me and smiles a welcome.

I am visiting India to see K-12 schools. Pune, a city of 2.3 million, is situated near the western coast of India, approximately 115 miles south-east of Mumbai (Bombay). We landed in Mumbai last week, and I took the express train here. I have visited the women’s education program, observing village women learning how to count money and to braid sisal, and the United World College, observing teenagers from 75 countries learn together in a magnificent hand-hewn stone compound on the top of a "hill" of the western ghats nearby. Pune is one of the many cities situated on the Deccan plateau, which forms the triangular portion of India, below the Tropic of Cancer. It’s famous for its many educational institutions and for being the place where Gandhi was interned during World War II—the Aga Khan’s palace, a decaying Victorian raj-influenced mansion I visited on Sunday.

The lift broken down, I climb the shallow steps to the fourth floor, look down into the open courtyard from the balcony by the principal’s office and watch the cleaning woman clean. Bent over her waist-high, stiff bamboo brush, she pours water from a bucket and just moves the water around on the stone tiles where the water will soon evaporate. No soap is evident. No one I know would call this "cleaning." I’m a former school principal, and pay attention to such things as the state of repair and cleanliness of school buildings. I get an insight: perhaps schools, even the elite colleges, look so cheerless here in India because those who must clean are from the lowest castes, and those from the more upper castes don't clean, or deign to do so. "I don’t do windows." So no one tells this woman she's just moving dirt around and she's not really cleaning. It's beneath everyone's dignity to do so.

I’m here because the head, an 80 year old with burning critical eyes, whose Ph.D. is from London University, where he did research into creativity and tested troops for famous psychologist Philip Vernon, seemed to challenge comfortable western me to visit the sugar school when I talked to him the other day. Always one to take on a challenge, I asked for an appointment to go. The sugar schools started in 1992, with 7 to 8 districts, or 6 lakhs of people. Geeta, the chief coordinator of the sugar schools, has said I can go along with her on her weekly visit. Two 10th form girls, Vidyut and Prajakta, join us. They must do community service volunteer requirements at Prabodhini, a school for gifted children. They are along to teach Marathi folk songs to cane workers’ children.

The two girls are siren-lovely— smart, funny, 16-year olds. Their black hair pulled back into thick braids, they exude dignity and stark cleanliness. The loveliness of Indian women is beyond imagination. Elegant, they sit sidesaddle in their saris behind their men on speeding motorbikes with two babies wedged between them, their fingertips softly circling the torso of their husbands. Statuesque, they walk along the roadside in the country carrying metal water bottles on their heads, or they kneel straight-backed with baskets to pick up ox dung for fuel and for plaster. Graceful, they clutch their infants to their breasts at intersections as they and their toddlers utter twin murmurs of "m’m’m’ma-a-a," their hands doing the upside-down grasping movement for begging, faces pressed to closed car windows. Aristocratic, they bow and stoop, pounding stones into ever smaller pieces along the construction sites, working along with their husbands, carrying loads of cement up the bamboo scaffolding in assembly lines. Decorous, they cover their heads with gold-threaded shawls to take Communion in high Anglo-Indian churches, and kneel before the lingam in Hindu temples, kissing the phallic stone in clouds of sandalwood incense in hopes of or thanks for getting pregnant. The men in their white shirts and dark pants are nothing to write home about, the dare-you eyes of Deepak Chopra and the young Krishnamurti notwithstanding, but the women? Beauty and grace beyond imagination.

The two girls sit in the front seat without seat belt. This turns out to be the only car I ride in for the month in India which has seatbelts in the front seat—for the whole trip, ever—in the omnipresent Ambassadors that look like 1954 Fords. Drivers seem insulted when the front seat passenger buckles up, and now these two girls sit in tandem unbuckled, whispering teenage secrets to each other in the death seat while Geeta and I struggle to understand each other’s English in back. But I say nothing here, today, even though my own children have been belted in since the mid-1960s, and my infant grandchild sits always buckled into her car seat in the back seat, what with all the stories about children smothered, necks broken by front seat air bags. Air bags. What a world away. But when I get back home while I run errands in town, I find myself not buckling up as faithfully as I usually did before. A residue of Indian fatalism I’m sure.

Geeta is a young single woman, in her late 20s, dressed in a soft-yellow and beige dress, with scarf. She lives at home, as is the custom. Young, single career women do not move into their own apartments. The high school girls have soft lavender and orange-brown dresses on, longish dresses, simply cut, curved into the waist, a lot like the simple two piece with set-in sleeve patterns I made when I was a teenager sewing in the 1950s. They wear shawls, dupattas, thrown around the shoulders in several configurations, mostly from shoulder to shoulder, ends dangling in back, but sometimes dangling along sideways. The ends of the dupattas seldom dangle in front, as we wear scarves in the U.S. Indian women shrug and smooth a lot, adjusting their shawls, as the silken material slips. Even shawl adjustment seems more comely than when performed by western women. It must be in the bones.

A sari is 5 or so meters of fabric about 45 inches wide, tied and pleated in ancient ways that my friend Aruna, an Indian American, can do in an automatic minute. She has tried to teach me, but I’m retarded as soon as the ten pleats for the waist get tucked somewhere around the side before being hitched to the shoulder. Back in 1986, in New York City, where I was a principal of the Hunter College Elementary School, on Asian Day, Indian-American parents fastened me into a sari. I wore it for the whole day. I have had respect for folds ever since. I must have seen tens of thousands of women in saris while in India, and not one sari alike. Sari designers create remarkably variable patterns in the same style. Sari stores abound, and one can glimpse women shopping, sitting at counters pointing to neatly piled colorful folded fabric, soon dramatically unfurled by two of the sari shop owner’s many assistants.

Geeta is from the Youth Wing, whatever that means. Jnana Prabodhini is a school that emphasizes social-political consciousness. It sounds vaguely communist. The communists have had virtually the only rousing success I can perceive in education in India. They won the southernmost state of Kerala in 1957 and immediately instituted free and compulsory education. Now statistics show that the literacy rate in Kerala is 99 percent, but nationally, the illiteracy rate is more than half of the total population— 52 percent. The illiterate citizenry in India totals more than the combined populations of Canada, the United States, and Japan.

Geeta, who is patiently tolerating my American English accent, tells me "The poor only want motivation. Motivation is first. Then they can do anything." How about a federal law for free and compulsory education? I think. The Sugar School is also called the "100 Days School." The idea is to provide children of migrant cane field workers with some basic education while their parents work for the sugar factories here in rural Pune District, Maharashtra. The children’s home is the state of Madhya Pradesh, which has literacy rates of about 30 per cent.

As in the United States, education is a state responsibility, and so the government in Dehli cannot impose itself upon recalcitrant states that won’t require basic education as a right of the citizens. Only 14 states and four Union Territories have voluntarily enacted legislation for compulsory education. The federal government makes policy, though, and can supercede state legislation with a directive for national free and compulsory education, but in this new democracy, the gridlock is so great and the party infighting so intense that the 83rd Amendment Bill, which would require all states to enact and enforce laws for free and compulsory primary education, has been tabled again, still waiting to be discussed, during the current session in Parliament, .

We drive down a side road through green ripe cane fields, weaving around ox carts piled high with cut cane, driven by hunched over ox drivers. Many carts have a young school-aged girl in vivid sari standing on top of the cane. My school teacher mind wonders, "Why aren’t you in school?" We arrive in the town of the sugar factory and turn into the school, in a field behind an empty warehouse. The teachers keep school in the old Indian way, outdoors, arrayed under the trees in a dirt grove. No grass. Dry leaves litter the ground showing that it is, indeed, winter, although the trees do have leaves, and they do provide shade. About 25 pre-school children line up in a fan around the teachers, young women in pink and pale orange saris with rings in their noses, one of whom sits on the ground next to the tree, a slate propped up next to her, the other standing, tapping a tambourine. The children sit on gray splintered, weathered boards, cross-legged. Boys and girls seem to be in equal numbers in this class.

As we circulate to the next level, kindergarten and first grade, I count fewer girls. By the second and third levels, the boys outnumber the girls significantly. I ask why. Geeta explains. "The girls are married at age nine. Their parents need them at home to take care of the younger children and to clean and keep house." She tells me that the cane workers often drink a lot of alcohol at night and there ensues much violence, also. The parents who send their girls to more school, after the first two grades, would be called "enlightened."

We walk through the scruffy copse, our sandals taking the brunt of the rough dirt beneath our feet. All the children go barefoot, as do some of the teachers. They hold slates, paperback books, pencils, paper. At the third level class, a few boy children rise, one by one, as Geeta approaches, and bring her their slates for her to make up problems they can solve. They concentrate, focus, flip their fingers in and out, counting, and then make the sum, most often correctly. She nods and hugs them in approval. About 35 million of Indian children between ages 6 and 10 do not attend primary school at all. Around 37 per cent of all children who are enrolled in primary school drop out before reaching the fifth level. For adults, the female literacy rate (43 per cent) is 26 percentage points below that for males (69 per cent); there are, in other words, 91 per cent more adult illiterate females than males. India even boasts an illiterate woman Chief Minister, Rabri Devi, from the state of Bihar, which has a female literacy rate of 29 percent.

Geeta says the students like mathematics but hate language. I see 7 years olds doing sums such as 831 + 420. Accurately. In the U.S. such problems are introduced at least one grade later. One of the children is especially proficient, very quick and clever. And as I observe him, counting on his fingers, the fingers flopping in a mental reckoning, and then scrawling the (English!) numbers on the slate for Geeta, I think about her comment in the car: "they only want motivation. Motivation is most important" and wonder where this bright boy will get the motivation to continue with his education beyond the 5^th form. I tell her to keep him in her focus, to refer him for the special testing that the Jnana Prabhodini school offers to the rural districts with scholarships to their school for academically talented rural students. But she reminds me he will be returning with his parents to their state after the 100 days sugar school is over, even though they may return next year.

I am led from tree-class to tree-class. Our sweet high school girls sing for each group, and each class sings with them, beautiful singing, as naturally performed as it used to be in my childhood. Now children I know in the U.S. are afraid to sing spontaneously, perhaps because they listen to the radio and television, and judge their voices by the professionals. I remember when our parents, my sisters, aunts, and high school friends used to pass the time in the car on long drives by singing in harmony. "Oh We Ain’t Got a Barrel of Money." "Don’t Fence Me In." "I’ve Been Working On The Railroad." "Mares Eat Oats." Those days are so long gone I cannot recall doing much singing as such with my own children on long trips, except once or twice. I was one of those pre-baby boomers of World War II, coming to adulthood in the sixties, disdaining the olden ways, to my regret nowadays.

As I stand there by each class under a tree in a grove, trying to unobtrusively observe the classes, one child from each springs up from the group on the gray weathered fanned planks, and asks me questions: "Why don't you wear a sari?"

"In the United States, women can wear whatever they want, and so I am wearing what I want. But I might wear a sari back home to see what they think."

"Why are you so pale?"

"My grandparents came from the far North, in Finland. People up there—have you ever seen Finland on a map?— look just like me." In fact, my looks are so odd in India, that I was told that children followed me pointing and saying "Whitey" as we walked on the beach at the southern tip of India where the three seas—the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea— meet. When I visited the zoo in Pune one Sunday afternoon, I felt as if I were one of the animals, as I was the fairest one there, the only westerner among the crowds of Sunday afternoon zoo-going white shirt-clad fathers, kaleidoscopic saried mothers, with daughters in lavishly ruffled dresses and sons in pressed shirts and shorts.

"Why do we have to talk English and you don't talk Marathi?"

"If I would stay here in your district, I would study Marathi. But tomorrow I'll go to a place where they speak Kannada, and next week to a place where they speak Tamil Nadu. In India you speak many languages, and the only one that I know is English."

"How far is America? How did you get here?"

"It is very far, about 10,000 miles, thousands of kilometers, and we came on an airplane, just like the ones you see above."

"How do the airplanes stay up in the sky?"

"It's something called hydraulics, and aerodynamics." Well, who knows how an airplane stays up in the sky? I think

"Where are your children?"

"They are older than your parents, probably. They are 29 and 34. They live in the cities of Denver and New York. I am a grandmother." They look at me in amazement. In their experience, grandmothers stay in the house and don’t travel around the world visiting schools and schoolchildren.

"Where is your bindi?"

"In the United States we don't tell whether or not we're married by a bindi. We tell by whether or not we wear a ring on our left hands, third fingers." I hold my ringless left hand out. I don't say more. Divorce is not in the lexicon. "I have never worn a bindi, and if I did, people would laugh at me, because I don't look as if I would naturally wear a bindi, but as if I were trying to be a fake Indian."

All these answers were translated by Geeta, to much laughter by the children, the teenage girls, the teachers, and Geeta herself. She praises me for my frankness, and her kindness shows.

After we made the rounds of the classrooms beneath trees, the teachers murmured something to Geeta about inviting us for tea. I saw her slip them a 10 rupees note for fruit, after I refused the tea for fear of the water. She said, "They are inviting you to their homes for lunch. I said we'd come."

"Do you want to see my house?" a child, a girl, asks.

"I would love to," I say. So while we wait for the teachers to return, we walk past the warehouse, across the dirt road, beneath the smoke-spouting, skyline-domineering high chimney of the sugar cane factory, among the bullocks taking naps, to the field full of cane huts, the homes of the migrant cane workers. Threading our way over the cow pies, cane stalks, sleeping dogs, and piles of plastic-riddled dirt and rubble, we follow her.

"Here," she says, and sweeps her arm to invite me in. I duck beneath the cloth covering the low opening, enter, and stand up. "See?" she says, gesturing. Her home is about 10 feet round, with an open clay cook hearth lined with stones along the wall, with a couple of coffee mugs hanging from hooks on a bamboo slat. A single wooden board shelf holds cooking utensils and rolled up bedding. The hard packed dirt floor, recently swept, bears evidence of care. "You keep a clean house," I say. "Yes," she answers, and seems quite proud. I ask if I can take a picture of her clean house with her in it, and she gives me permission. The flash lights up the place and the photograph turns out much brighter than the room itself was to my light-sensitive eyes from bright day to dim cane hut. The children crowd in the doorway watching and chatting.

"Can I give you a present?" says one boy.

"I don't need any presents," I say. "I have too many already. But thank you for asking." I am feeling grotesquely corporeal in this minimal society of slates to write on, weathered boards to sit on, trees as shade from the noonday sun, bare ground, coffee mugs on bamboo sticks and stone-ringed cooking hearths.

"He wants to give you some sugar cane," says Geeta. "I'll tell him you don't want any." She seems embarrassed that he would offer such a gift to a western visitor.

"Sugar cane?" I say. "I'd love some sugar cane."

A couple of boys run off and return with arms full of cut sugar cane. I say, "Oh, that's too much! I can't carry it all. My suitcases in the back of the car are already full. But can I take a few stalks?" I do, and carry them about India and into Switzerland, until the very last day, when I leave them in the wastebasket in the youth hostel where we stay in Zurich, in anticipation of the U.S. customs rule not to bring vegetable products in. In Cincinnati, the customs agent let me right through with just a nod. I could have smuggled the cane in to put on the small sacred circle outside my back door where I keep the rocks I have brought home as souvenirs from my travels, even one from my great grandmother’s grave in Finland.

We walk the students back to the grove where lunch is being served in one of the former sugar buildings. We get into the car and Geeta directs Suresh, both of them speaking rapid Marathi, into the small village, where we stop, alight, and enter the home of the teachers. There's a shortage of 1.25 million teachers in primary schools. India has only two-thirds of the teachers required for the children already enrolled. I spoke yesterday to school psychologists, who told me that some primary classrooms have as many as seventy children. These teachers at the 100 Day School possess bachelor's and master's degrees and teaching certificates from the Indian government. All are young, unmarried women, except for the one young man who teaches the sixth form, a small class with two girls and two boys.

The teachers’ home we enter over the one-step threshold seems darkly stark and cool after the lush noontime sunlight outside. I am rather shocked at its shabbiness. Flaking dark turquoise plaster walls circle the 10 foot square. Two windows, a door, and a passageway to other similar rooms make up the view. A wash basin on a stand. The floor covered with thin striped cloths, one bookshelf along the wall about 4 feet up, and two plastic lawn chairs for me and Geeta. The teachers sit cross-legged on the floor cloths. I bite into an apple-like, hard green fruit, quite sour, sliced and peeled with the community knife and try not to be concerned about unwashed hands. I bite and eat a couple of slices as we talk. I snap many pictures, wanting to show my teacher students back home how Indian teachers of migrant children live.

The talk companiable and concerned, my discomfort with this deference escalates. These teachers, social activists, have taught in the 100 Day School for several years, going to receive their training in between. What have I done that is remotely comparable to this? I tell them that when I went to graduate school I studied teachers such as them, in the state of Ohio in the United States, young unmarried women who attended training courses in between harvest seasons, when they taught the children of the hordes of immigrants who came to the United States in the mid nineteenth century. The schools they attended were called female seminaries. These first female teachers in the United States were young secular missionaries, just like the female teachers who helped settle the U.S. Katherine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

We don't stay long, as I must be back to catch my train back to Mumbai. As we walk back to the car, I ask the two girls to sing some more, and as the car starts up they sing folk songs as we wind past the heaving oxcarts loaded with sugar cane, back to the main highway, the Pune to Mumbai road. A "main" highway has two paved congested lanes groaning with swaying and heavily battered, brightly painted beeping trucks with shrieking air horns, all trying to pass each other. Motorcycles and autorickshaws belch diesel exhaust from oilgas two stroke engines. Rickety tippety blue government buses bear down faster than is necessary past people walking on the edge of the payment among cows, goats, herds of sheep, and slow moving oxcarts. This takes place in between rows of large banyan trees painted in white and red warning stripes. Anyone hitting such an immovable object would add red blood to red paint. Behind the trees are small "hotels," roadside stands, and shops selling everything from auto parts to audio tapes. One you must be joking sign at a gas station said, "Exhaust Monitoring Station." An Indian told me that his doctor told him when he went for respiratory problems, "I’d be surprised if you didn’t have respiratory problems."

The Indians don’t need amusement parks to scare themselves silly. They can just take a drive a few miles on a "main" or other, highway. My fear shows in my clenched teeth grimaces and in my wide open eyes behind my sunglasses. They laugh, and say, "Well, it’s just India. We’re safe." Sure, I think, as I recall the stories in this morning’s newspaper about the several fatal accidents on this highway last night, and the story about the doctor jogging who was hit by one of the many hit and run drivers the police never arrest.

"Do you girls know how lucky you are?"

"Yes, Madam."

"If you were a cane child, you'd be already married and have one or two babies." I’m using my stern schoolteacher voice. I tell myself to lighten up.

They giggle. "But we live in the city, and we won't get married for a long time. In the villages it is different." They have been silent, polite, obedient, demure, throughout the whole trip, and I am not sure they know what they have just seen.

No mention of caste. The notion of helping the poor, the Scheduled (the name for those who receive affirmative action consideration for government jobs and places in public programs and schools) is part of these girls' lives, and part of the mission of the Jnana Prabodhini school. The philosophy is that their bright students must pay back to society the fact that they were born with intelligence and middle class privilege, and must be socially active. But few anywhere, intelligent or not, seem to notice the bent-over woman sloshing muddy water on the stone tiles of the school's courtyard, tied in this life to her lowly untouchable position, or the sweepers in gaudy saris outside in the streets, or the women and men cooking lunch for naked babies on open fires on the urban curbsides outside the shacks with corrugated tin roofs. I'm as confused about caste as ever after this day at the cane school. I understand one thing. I will never understand India.

When we get to the station, they insist on helping me take my bags right into the compartment of the train, and they tell me to dismiss Suresh. I send him away with a smile and a suitable tip (I hope) for his four days of driving me hither and yon to schools and sights such as the bullock cart race we stumbled on when we went to the mountains to visit the United World College school north of here. Hordes of men in white lined up along the road beating our car with switches to tell us to get off the road! "Get off the road!" So Suresh wheeled quickly down a steep embankment into a field just as the next bullock racer, whipping his painted horned team to a galloping frenzy, came around the bend. Spectators clinging to branches between their crotches in the trees, sitting on flowing limbs and listening to the loudspeaker with the announcer shouting comments on the action, laughed and pointed at me with my white skin and my straw hat. When we got back on the road, Suresh waved acknowledgment to the men, and they laughed back, pointing at me buckled up in the front seat instead of in the back where Madams are supposed to be.

"I'll just hire one of the bearer in red hats," I say as we enter the Pune railroad station, pushing our way past the crowds there. Geeta says,"absolutely not," and buys a platform pass for the three of them and we rush down the length of the train, she and I with my duffel bag straps one to each of our hands, and the girls pulling my heavy wheeled suitcase up the ramps and down to the first class compartments, where she checks the roster posted outside the car for my name. We heft my heavy suitcase onto the stairs and up into the compartment. She finds my numbered seat, and the girls hand me my smaller bag. I stand on the seat and put it above me. I have a window seat. We say our goodbyes, breathless, and I want to hug them, kiss them, and thank them more profusely than they are willing to receive. Who in the United States would see a guest right onto the train?

"Madam, we will write you a letter very soon," say the girls. But I haven't gotten it yet. I look at the photographs I took that day and wonder that I was let into their lives with such compassion and tenderness, that the children at the sugar school were so ingenuous and so welcoming with me. This afternoon in the south of India in December, 1998 I was privileged to be able to walk in their school grove, eat their hard green fruit, hear their mellifluous singing and rush alongside these three Indian women leading me to my first class compartment on the train.