The Indian Villa

My village days are a long time gone. A series of fortunate events have led me to make my home at the house of Sujeeta's mother on a quiet street in Coimbatore. Sujeeta Ma'am, as the students call her, is one of the lecturers at Nirmala College for Women, and since her mother moved out of the house, it has been vacant. Living in six months of dust is no problem! My friend Heidi and I scoured the stone slabs in the kitchen and immediately began cooking western food: french toast, toast with butter and jelly, peanut butter and jelly...well, cooking is a relative term. And yes, everything we've been eating involves yeast bread. Except the other night I tried my hand at coconut rice on the gas stove, and it was pretty good!

One or two of my fellow students frequently pop in to spend a night in the city, and when Sydney came she named our little cottage full of Christian wall-hangings, mothballed trunks and dusty dishes "The Indian Villa." We'll see if the resident mosquies and cocky-fellows (mosquitoes and cockroaches) will take to it.

Now that I'm close to the city, my research project is speeding along. My main focus is on collecting student's written responses to Indian literature and evaluating their critical analysis skills, but for context I do interviews and observe English classes. In the process of doing this, I've made an important discovery: the people I know personally are far more fascinating than the writings of authors far removed from me that I've been studying for years. Living, breathing stories are in each of the women I interview and from whom I gather writing samples. Their writing feels so much more real because I eat, talk, and argue with them, the authors. Literature has a context, and until I've felt and known it, my only interaction with that literature can be as a pupil. Having now felt and known India a bit, I feel better prepared to analyze its stories.