The Third Chapter of an Extraordinary Journey: Eyes are the Windows to the Soul
They say the most important feature of a person’s face, that singular feature which determines their physical attractiveness, is the eyes.
But what is it about a person’s eyes that makes them so important to our facial construct? Is it the gentle crease of an eyelid, helped by the arch of a brow, or the tiny shards of liquid luminosity peeking from the depths of an iris?
Or perhaps it’s something more elusive, more persuasive — like the secret meaning behind a single look or glance?
Stamped forever, on my mind’s eye, are the deep, chocolate-brown eyes of the boys and girls from a beautiful village called Ahmadbass.
June 21, 2018. Ahmedabad Village. 9:43 A.M.
Eyes everywhere.
Narrowed eyes, widened eyes, and confused eyes.
All three kinds watching me, drinking in my every move and waiting for the next.
Shielding the unforgiving, red-hot sun with a cupped hand, I looked around to find myself totally enclosed in a ring of some of India’s rural children; children who, despite their dirtied clothes and calloused feet, sadly represent the more fortunate youth of the village. While some of the tiny boys and girls I passed on the way to the village’s Digital Literacy Center neither had clothes nor an education, these kids at least were gifted an education their parents could not only afford financially but also understood the value of.
Standing in the center of that lopsided circle with my gray Converse shoes, I had never felt so naked in my life; they and I, the lone figure inside the circle, seemed to be strange specimens of two completely separate worlds. Yet because we are people and because we were woven from the same tapestry of mankind, I think there was this weird mutual desire between us: a very simple, natural desire to reach out to the other with an outstretched hand and to close the chasm that cut in between our lives.
But you, reader, probably don’t understand. And that’s okay. That’s normal.
It does not take a single person such as myself to tell you: there are things in this world you simply cannot understand without first having experienced for yourself.
That day, I was dressed in traditional Indian attire: a blue kurta wrapping around my torso and arms with loose cotton pants billowing about, and an embroidered shawl hugging my suntanned shoulders. Yet the entire time, why did I feel so gaudily dressed? Why did I feel so self-conscious and out of place?
When I take the time to peel back all the onion layers of emotions that mummified me, one by one, only then does it slowly dawn on me that there was an underlying fear making us, the reluctant strangers inside and outside of the circle, hesitant on both sides to approach the other. Rather than the language barrier which complicated communication between me and the villagers, the possibility of breaking some deep-rooted cultural code was more of what held me back from taking that courageous first step.
An eye boring into mine from the shadows of a squalid home: blink, blink, blink. Rubble everywhere. Rusted tin roofs glazed with a dull green-brown finish, the bitter odor of earth mashed together with cow manure, and silent women peeking through little ant holes, their soft, womanly curves cloaked about in shawls of muted colors: blue-black, dark gray, earth tone.
Most of all, a broken civilization that seemed to barely exist but still breathing, still struggling to rise above its slovenly poverty.
This was my first glimpse of Ahmadbass.
Since June 21, I’ve “gone out to the field,” a favorite jargon tossed coolly back and forth between the interns, which took me a while to realize really meant “visited the villages.” Each time my eyes register the same dark-colored lake on the way to the villages and back, or the small flocks of Muslim women scrubbing clothes by its waters, the rugged scenery of rural India somehow becomes more and more regularized to me.
To me, my gradual familiarity with village life marks a sad yet hopeful change.
To put things into clearer perspective, do allow me to go off on a tangent with an anecdote of mine.
On the 90-minute drive back to Sehgal Foundation after a long day’s worth of hard work at Ahmadbass, my uber-intelligent (did I mention hardcore feminist?) mentor Shipra asked me if, out of all the things I’ve seen or heard, there was anything, anything at all, that stood out to me in particular.
My answer was immediate — there was this special, single sentence that refused to leave my mind from the moment it was softly whispered by a shy girl wearing a pink hijab; it was almost as if I were waiting for Shipra to ask me this question.
“That one girl who told me her lifelong dream is to walk among the mountains when raindrops fall,” I said in response.
Above the mechanical hum of loud engines and the deep crunch of gravel that made for great white noise, I then proceeded to tell Shipra how it saddened me to know that this girl’s wish, which to me seemed more a preference or a tendency than anything else, could potentially be something more preposterous or creative for many others.
As I repeatedly deliberated the words of this girl who looked about the age of my younger sister, it was impossible for me not to feel guilty knowing that her wish — walking among the mountains when it rains — is something I could potentially do whenever I want to (provided that it rains, of course). And, as much as I hate to admit it, I felt even guiltier for the almost cruel satisfaction, the calm relief I quietly derived from this bittersweet knowledge.
But lost in those dark doe eyes of hers and even more at a loss for words, it hurt to hear such a young and eloquent girl tell her life’s story, about her restricted mobility as a woman in the village and her ingrained subservience to men. Further, through her interview and from my own observations, the fact that patriarchy in Ahmadbass is like an unquestioned law, blood deep in its dominance over land and people, was not a difficult one to discern.
When I was done unloading my dilapidated wreck of emotions on Shipra, there was this strange, sympathetic smile that crept across her face. She thought for a while before gently chiding me, “You can be upset, that’s perfectly fine. But you can’t keep on being sad; use your frustration as a motivator to instill change.”
“Use your frustration as a motivator to instill change.”
So like Shipra said, I decided to shift my perspective and view things in a brighter light.
The first change I wanted to make was to conquer my fear of reaching out to the villagers. Instead of staying stoic and stiff, or too scared to tread on uncharted territory because of the anxiety that comes with being stared at like some mutated circus animal, I made it my goal to smile more often — even if it meant I’d have to shoulder the stares, the whispers, and the gasps that were barely audible but still there.
Today, I visited Ahmadbass again and saw familiar eyes, familiar faces.
A cross-eyed boy with legs crippled by fluorosis, a white terrier with a missing eye, and an old woman with a hard, judging stare — oh yes, they were all there.
With a heart that thumped and thudded like a bass drum gone solo, I managed to maintain a watery smile upon stepping out of Sehgal Foundation’s freezing icebox of a van and onto Ahmadbass’ hilly, red-brown land.
During my time interviewing digital literacy students of all shapes, sizes, and statures of both the female and latter sex, I made a conscious effort not to break eye contact between the interviewee and I, except to occasionally transcribe notes or reminders into my notebook. In doing so, I wanted to show the children that I come as their equal, that they were worthy of my attention and time (and I theirs, hopefully), and that all one hundred percent of me was immersed in what they had to say. In other words, I wanted to foster a warm and amicable atmosphere during the interview, not just for the heightened possibility of yielding better results, but because I actually wanted to befriend these children who had eyes as playful and pure as their personalities.
In the beginning, it was a wary smile, a gentle curve of the lips and slightly-raised eyebrows that spoke, “I’m interested in what you have to say,” on my face.
In the beginning, it all seemed so calculated and unnatural.
But like I said, that was only the beginning.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I was conducting the interview, there must have been this weird, dorky grin across my face, as I would later find out with a mixture of horror/entertainment/amusement after micro analyzing the photos my mentor so graciously took of me.
Although I found the interviewing process to be more or less similar to previous ones I’ve taken part in, thanks to my many years of writing news, entertainment, feature, and sports stories as a seasoned student journalist (go TPHS Falconer!), the questions seemed to flow smoother and quicker than usual because I was thoroughly enjoying my time with these precious children, and unknowingly so. The eight to ten profile interviews I conducted with Ahmadbass’ digital literacy students, boys and girls alike, were so profoundly different compared to the rather formulaic ones I would conduct for my high school newspaper, that I was eager to see how they would respond to the carefully-crafted questions and Focus Group Discussions (FGD’s) I’d literally spent hours fussing over.
Among many other things, my experience at Ahmadbass Village was crucial to my recent appreciation of body language’s largely understated power: how the slightest body movement, when carefully analyzed, holds the key to a multitude of different nuances that lie just beneath the surface.
Ahmadbass’ patriarchy bled through in the way the village girls drew their hijabs closer around their angular faces, in the way they crept around the schoolyard in small clusters like little ghosts, and in the way they timidly lowered their heads in the presence of Satvik, a fellow student intern at the Sehgal Foundation, solely on the grounds that he is a male and thus more powerful and worthier than females by default.
I could spot the girls’ lack of confidence a mile away from the way they would throw a concerned glance over their shoulders, time and time again, to make sure a friend or two remained by their side over the course of the one-on-one interviews.
Because the unsurprising truth in that village is that its girls are scared of being left alone.
Or maybe, just maybe, they were scared of being themselves for once under the ever-suspecting eye of society.
