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Pology Magazine  -  Adventures in Travel and World Culture.
Travel and World Culture   
India
 Photo: VJ Sathish
India
 Photo: Michael Chen

Searching For Silence In India (cont.)

We arrive in Hubli around 6 AM. It is a travelers’ town, full of truck stops and cheap hotels. Ramakrishna has been here before, so he knows the way to the bus station. We find the Mundgod stand. It is already crowded with workers and families. They stare at us: a foreign girl, a deaf man, and a Nepali from the north. Samar tries to speak to them in Hindi, but they do not understand. The bus comes before long, and we cram onto one long bench. The driver carries a stack of newspapers under his seat for delivery. The sun is just coming up over the brown, sun-dried hills. There has not been rain for months, and the fields around are coarse and aching. Occasionally we see a patch of green—an irrigated rice paddy, a mess of shrubs.

In Mundgod we eat a breakfast of dosas and idlies. Samar tells me to wait inside while he negotiates a taxi; he does not want the drivers to see my foreign face. For the first time, the people we talk to know where the villages are. They name their price, but only vaguely knowing the distance; we guess it is too much. We walk out to the autorickshaw stand instead and pick a boy of nineteen who seems to know the area. He speaks Hindi but no English. We crowd into the back, and he starts barreling down the road. These are hills he knows, turns through villages he has passed through a dozen times. All the signs are written in Kannada, which none of us can read; so we just sit and wait, hoping he is taking us in the right direction.

The only other vehicles are bicycles and tractors loaded with schoolchildren. We pass through a few villages spread linearly beside the road. Women sit on their front steps braiding their hair or watching toddlers play in the red dust beside the road. They turn to watch us roll by, their eyes following us as we disappear into the distance.

Finally the paved road gives way to gravel and dirt. Our driver turns left down a hill, and the autorickshaw vibrates as it descends.. By the time we arrive at the village schoolhouse, a small crowd has gathered around us. School has not yet started; and a barefoot girl in a blue uniform, her hair tied up with white ribbons, sweeps the floor with a straw broom.

“Are you from the government?” asks a teenager.

Samar tells him no.

“What did he say?” Ramakrishna signs to me. Everyone turns to stare at him, his hands moving in the air. “Ask them if there are deaf people here.”

“Are you Jesuits?” asks a boy in English. “Loyola College?”

I shake my head. An older man leads us over to a small building in the center of town near a water tower. He sends a boy into the building to fetch straw mats, which they lay out on the concrete steps. We sit down.

“We heard there were a lot of deaf people in this village,” says Samar.

The villagers laugh. “We have an old woman who is deaf,” one man tells us. “And there’s that boy over there. You have to speak loudly to talk to him.” He beckons to the boy, who approaches us shyly. The man talks to him in Kannada, and the boy answers. Trying to prove his point, the man lowers his voice slightly and says something else. The boy seems unsure of what was said.

“See?” the man says.

A woman asks the old man who we are. We pick out the English word “government” in his answer.

“There aren’t any other deaf children here,” the man tells us again. “Go and look at the kindergarten. Then you’ll see.” He points to a small hut near the entrance to the village. Its clean white paint shines against the barren sky.

We walk into the schoolroom. Twenty five-year-olds grin broadly at us, jumping up and down. “Sit down, children,” the teacher announces in a crisp, sing-song voice. The children race to form a half-circle on the ground. They sit cross-legged, their chins settled roundly on their hands. They are still smiling.

 “Say ‘Good morning, Aunty. Good morning, Uncle.”

The words chime out as though they were the first lines of “Frère Jacques.”

“Which country?” the teacher asks,

“USA,” I say.

“India,” says Samar.

“You’re Jesuits?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Just visiting.”

She asks us our names. Ramakrishna shows them his sign, the letter “r” tapped against the right ear.

“He’s Hindu,” the teacher announces.

“Yes,” I say.

She nods her approval. The children have in the meantime formed a line leading up to us, their most recent artwork in hand. They show us their pictures one by one—they have drawn cows, families and rice paddies in crayon. I congratulate them as they display their pictures. They say, “Thank you, Aunty,” in turn, each giving a little, involuntary bow.

We start out the door. “Say ‘Goodbye, Aunty. Goodbye, Uncle,” instructs the teacher.

The children’s voices follow us outside onto the dusty road. We hear the rustle of papers as they move onto their next activity. Along the road, the villagers have all gone back to their daily routine. The women wash their hair on their doorsteps; the men tend to their cows. Our rickshaw driver sits on the steps of the town meeting hall playing carom with one of the local boys.

Ramakrishna tells us he has heard of another deaf village in Tamil Nadu. I say that I saw a television news segment about one in Kashmir. These might also be myths, but in the thousands of miles between here and there we can imagine they are real. We will make plans for our next trip later, maybe on the train home. For now, we stand looking at the weary-looking village, its thatched rooftops fading into the brown, bare hills behind them. The whole place looks wilted, as though the houses are about to shrink and wither into the dry earth beneath. The few slender trees flutter slightly in the arid wind, eerily silent as their branches drift back and forth in a bitter dance. 

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