India | Poonam
Hampi, India
Poonam has beautiful soft brown eyes, is a mother of two boys, and makes the best chapati in Hampi. We met one day along a cobbled road between my guesthouse and the little tourist town of Hampi.
I stayed in Hampi for two weeks while my boyfriend sweated his way through dengue fever. It was an incredibly stressful time: dealing with foreign hospitals, learning cultural boundaries around illness and the woman’s role, fighting with doctors, caring for someone so sick. All within the context of India where the plight of people is confronting on a daily basis.
Each day I would walk the road alongside the river to the shops to get Tristan lunch. Walking the path with my outlook altered due to the level of stress and heaviness in my heart I connected with people on a different level.
It was on one of these days that I met Poonam. She was selling jewellery by the side of the road. I stopped to look and she implored me to buy a brass arm bracelet shaped like a leaf. She continued to lower the price as I hummed and haaed over whether I wanted it. In the end, I bought it for the initial price.
The next day as I walked passed she called to me ‘Hello sister’. I stopped and sat with her, we cried together and we shared food. She was crying about the stress of having her third child on the way and not having enough money to live off. I was crying because I didn’t know if Tristan would get any better. She didn’t mind that my worries were minor in the grand scheme of things compared to hers. From that day on we would see each other twice a day and I would sit with Poonam and listen to her story
Poonam is 22 and pictured here, she is 8 months pregnant with her 3rd child. She was married at 17 after her husband’s uncle saw her when he was visiting Hyderabad. He made enquiries and their families agreed to the marriage. She did not meet her husband, Shashi, until after the wedding ceremony. She laughed as she told me that she refused to speak to Shashi for the first 3 months that they were married. He was a stranger and she was so far away from home.
Poonam would stand up each time a tourist would wander over to her table and casually pick over the items on display. She talked about being tired of having to sell jewellery to fickle tourists who would mull over a piece, ask her the price, scoff at her response and walk away. As tourists we have little idea how much hope is held in the moment of indecision when we think about whether we are prepared to pay $1 or $2 for something.
I sat beside her one day when a man drove up to her stall on a motorbike. He didn’t say a word, or look her in the eye. She stood up, gave him most of the rupees she had earned that day and he drove off. She explained that he was a loan man and showed me her book of loans. There were pages of small loans of 500 — 1000 rupees (NZ$10 — 20) to be paid back with interest, lots of interest. These men arrived daily and she paid what she could each time. Some days she would pack up her stall early to avoid them as she had nothing to hand over.
Yet she maintained an incredible generosity of spirit. She would share her food with the women with stalls either side of her. She would cook for me daily and call me over telling me I had to eat if I was to keep up my energy to look after my ‘husband’. She was convinced that all Tristan needed was to eat chapati and he would be healthy again in no time.
One day, Poonam called to me as I was passing. I was in a rush and too caught up in my own woes to have the energy to listen to hers. I needed to get food to Tristan and he wasn’t showing any signs of getting better. I tried to brush her off; she persisted and sat me down. She said ‘you look like a mad woman! You can’t let yourself go like that just because your husband is sick!’ She sat me down and combed my hair with the severity of a strict mother. She pulled it tight back across my head into a braid and slicked it down with coconut oil before taking the clips out of her hair and using them in mine to keep it in place. ‘Now you can go’, she said. ‘That’s much better.’
Once Tristan was better Poonam invited us to her house for dinner. We arrived with eggs and took in our surroundings. The house had two rooms. We entered into a living room / bedroom which was mostly bare except for some cushioning on the ground, a cot in the corner and a small gas stove on the floor. There was also a TV and her sons Ishan and Gourab were watching a cartoon on high volume. Through an open door way there was a kitchen area and a customary shrine. She had hung a Ganesha that I had given her as a gift to bring good fortune among the photos of her parents and her favourite deities.
For the rest of the evening, the six of us sat in the living room around the small gas stove and passed the time chatting about their lives.
Poonam prepared a dinner of two-minute noodles for the children…
Which was followed by the preparation of the chapati…
We sat together and shared a delicious egg curry as well as a special chicken curry that her parents and law had made especially so that they could offer us (as their guests) meat.
They spoke of having few choices. This was the path that life had created for them and it was a matter of getting by as best they could. There were moments when we would try to make suggestions. Poonam is from an area that makes beautiful crockery. We suggested they sell that because it was different from everything else on offer in Hampi. We gave them tips on their sales pitch and tried to explain the perspective of a tourist that is constantly being called to and approached in India. These remarks were dismissed. Thinking back, I realise that they wanted us to listen to their story, not try to fix it. I’m not sure how I was expecting that she would carry a tables worth of crockery the 20 minute walk from her house to her stall every day with 3 children in tow.
Over the evening Gourab fell asleep in his dad’s arms and Ishan sat up with his picking the egg yolk out of the eggs and just eating the whites. Poonam and Shashi were reluctant parents. They were very loving and affectionate with their boys but it often took a moment for the initial frustration to pass and that loving smile to cross their faces. It was as if they were torn between a place of slightly resenting the position they found themselves in life — young, with kids and struggling to make ends meet — and the joy that their children clearly brought them.
On my final day in Hampi, Poonam came to find me. She had gifts that she hoped I would remember her by and food for us to take on our journey out of Hampi. She had made us a mountain of chapati. She hugged me and asked me not to forget her. As she was leaving our guesthouse the owners took her aside and spoke to her. She looked forlorn. I followed her out and asked her what they said. They had asked her never to come onto their property again. They had assumed that she was harrassing their foreign guests when in fact she had only shown us generosity and kindness. We hugged once more and she walked away.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy another of my photo essays: India | a family — https://medium.com/culture-club/india-a-family-baa779bad89
