Impossible Missions
By LUCINDA NELSON DHAVAN
I
often find myself in odd places doing unusual things I don’t know how to do—such as trying to cram an unconscious woman into the backseat of a small Fiat. To complete this impossible mission, a four-year-old boy and a small circle of temporarily contrite women helped me get a grip on the woman's flopping arms and legs.
The neighbors peered through bushes or lace curtains; I could feel their interested eyes. They probably thought Maya (let’s call her that) had been murdered. The women had confessed to me that there had been a loud argument earlier that morning over whose turn it was to mop floors in the shelter home. It involved obscenities and hair pulling and stopped only when Maya dropped in a dead faint. At first, they thought she was faking, but after an hour of sticking feathers in her ears and ice cubes down her back, they called me.
Why me? I’m not a social worker. The only training I have in conflict resolution is what every mother learns from life. All I know about first aid is what I learned in Girl Scouts, and the essence of that was: stand back and call the doctor.
But I was on the spot, for various reasons.
The first reason is that the United States prides itself—or did when I last lived there—on being a nation of volunteers. Americans often come forward to bake pies, raise money, be Big Brothers or Sisters, campaign, fight—whatever they think is needed to set right whatever they believe is wrong. As an attitude for a nation, this may be problematic, but on a personal level, it’s rather sweet.
My mother overdosed on volunteering. She collected money for the March of Dimes and delivered Christmas boxes to unheated, tar-papered shacks that looked as if they were inhabited by axe murderers. She organized ice cream socials at the state hospital, and brought home a kitten from the shelter for battered wives at the Y.W.C.A. where she volunteered. (The cat stayed with us; the woman and her kids moved on).
Though I no longer live in the United States, this attitude still lives in me, and I found it is shared by quite a few Indians, especially women. In the State of Uttar Pradesh, where I lived, statistics revealed that over three hundred women a year were killed or driven to suicide because their in-laws wanted color TVs, motorcycles, or large amounts of cash in dowry. When they didn’t get what they requested, the girl died. It was not surprising that several groups formed to protect vulnerable women. Everyone agreed that a safe place was needed, a shelter home. When the Catholic Church offered half of an old house in our town for a shelter, it seemed to be the perfect solution. An order of social activist nuns lived in one half, while the other side could safely house a dozen women in distress. Once funds were found for a small staff and food, the doors opened.
It started as a shoestring operation. When the original nun left for church work and the single coordinator was out of town, volunteers were left in charge to manage whatever crisis cropped up. The unconscious woman was the perfect example of a daily disaster. No doctor could come to the home, so I was told to take the woman to the hospital. “Just bring her in.” a doctor barked over the phone, and then asked as an afterthought, “She isn’t pregnant, is she?”
I didn’t think so, but I knew very little about her. I knew the story she’d told a few weeks before when she was found wandering in a quiet residential area with a four-year-old boy who she called her son, carrying a plastic shopping bag containing extra underwear. But her story was so vague and lurid, her eyes so distant when she told it, that it left me with feeling that I was sailing into deeply troubled waters. I spent my college years in a place where you couldn’t throw a stone in any direction without hitting a therapist, or someone in therapy. I knew I had no business trying to counsel her; she needed professional help.
We started the shelter home on the assumption that women in trouble—solid, concrete, visible trouble—would seek shelter. But the majority of those who came to us were instead troubled women—women with so many problems that we had difficulty deciding which ones to tackle first.
Maya’s story was a shifting catalog of woes. Sometimes she said she had a stepmother, sometimes she said the person she called “father” was only a relative; both parents were dead. She claimed she was kidnapped, or sent to work; married, or sold to an old man; traded to a place like a brothel in an isolated rural area, from which she escaped; yet, she couldn’t quite say how. She said that the boy was her son and they clung to each other as though they both believed that. The police couldn’t locate any of the places she described, nor could they find anyone looking for Maya or her son.
It took at least fifteen minutes to get her into the car. One woman came along to hold her, while the others surrounded her weeping child, distracting him with silly songs and nonsensical promises that Mommy was going off to buy him a toy.
At the hospital, she lay on a gurney while I tried to make it clear that someone would pay the bill. She was put in the ward; tests were done. An unimpressed doctor shot her full of saline solution, antibiotics, and anti-anxiety medication. After a few days, she was declared fit to leave. No one gave a name to what had ailed her.
At about that time, because Hollywood often supplies the myths with which many people in the world frame their lives, someone said that “rehabilitating” the women who came to the home was “Mission Impossible.” Like the mission assigned at the beginning of the movie, each case was an impossible task. And as we worked on a case, we usually found that nothing was what it seemed to be; hidden motives often lurked beneath the surface, just as they did in the films.
We weren’t as cute as Tom Cruise, though, and lacked his character's special skills—and special effects. We seldom reached neat endings.
Maya, for instance, works in a private hospital now, where she started as someone who gave baths and emptied bedpans. The doctor in charge taught her how to give injections and now calls her “nurse.” She makes a somewhat honest living on her own but she has a strained relationship with her son, who is in boarding school.
What is as surprising as the occasional "happy ending" is that the original volunteers are still working there, despite the impossible odds against success. I have lived in another town a few years and recently came back to find the shelter home even more crowded. Added to the mix were a group of young girls raised in metropolitan red-light areas. People react to such children in many ways. Some assume that they are already too damaged to save. Some write about them or make documentaries on their lives—one received an Academy Award this year. And some, like the NGO (non-governmental organization) that “rescued” them, think they should be taken out of that environment and sent to safer places—especially if their mothers are dead, or if they plead for help. They assume that, even in a conventional society like India’s, there must be some sort of "better" life for these kids.
Three of these girls come to me for English tutoring now. They are taking their high school exams alongside teenagers with eleven years of formal schooling and regular home lives, compared to their checkered pasts and three to five years of actual school. Two think they’d like to be nurses, one wants to be a fashion designer. She has a sylph-like figure and a pretty face, and can imitate anyone, but I try not to picture her struggling to break into the elite ranks of India’s fashionable world. It gives me enough pain to read her awkward, garbled practice essays.
Maybe volunteers are masochists. The best of them never seem smug or self-righteous, or even very confident that they’re doing the right thing. Trying to help seems more like their way of showing respect—respect for those assigned an impossible task the day they are born. For millions of people around the world, just getting through the life they are given with a little dignity is nothing short of "Mission Impossible," yet they keep trying. Once you meet them, you learn how heroic that effort is.
BIO: LUCINDA NELSON DHAVAN first went to India on a Fulbright Foundation grant, immediately after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. She is still there. After several years devoted to domestic bliss, child rearing, and learning Hindi, she joined the staff of a regional newspaper. She now feels she may have learned enough to write fiction, and is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel.
Contact Lucinda at: ldhavan@yahoo.co.in
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