shaking hands

"Life is meeting and parting. One day we go there," she points upward at the cracked, peeling ceiling of the bus terminal "and we will not part." Sister Alice holds my hand between her fragile calloused palms, and I respond "I look forward to that day," and I mean it. I move onto the bus and back away slowly to the warning wail of carnival music, and then they're gone. I promised the girls I would try to come back and never forget them; that when the other children ask me about my family, "how many we are," I will tell them I have two brothers and nine chellis. I gave them a dream catcher with nine turquoise stones, one for each, and explained how it works until they understood and smiled at the thought of no more nightmares. At least I can take away a little pain. I taught the ones from Navageevana who were too tiny to say much to point to eye, chest, other, I...love...you, and they chanted it, one lounging in my lap and pronouncing Haw..pee, the first English I've heard her say on her own.
Mittapally is not a village as much as clusters of hay piled near the school and a long ruined wall from the days of ancient kings, slowly disappearing under gradual growth. I enter through rice paddies of rising mist and a mango sun slowly announcing work to come. The children here come from poor farmers who see little value in a good education and honor in hard labor. I teach them the song, "head, shoulders, knees and toes," and see several peeking through shoe holes when I bend over to touch my own. Others are barefoot and a few have no uniforms at all.
The students come running to me as before, but now they kiss me tenderly: my arms, my hands, my cheeks, holding me close, feeling my skin, afraid that I’m no more than a phantom, a strange feverish vision that will pass with night. They speak little English, but chant “Good morning, sister” each in turn. They don’t understand my lessons; even the action songs that match words with gestures and body parts come back as only mimicked sounds and eager eyes, a strange warped echo of telephone games.
Concrete shacks lean against each other for strength and support in the heat, souls intertwined, cut from the same slabs of raw rock by the men who sleep inside each night. As are the people. A child leads me through the town, pulling hard on my hand, introducing me to her father, mother, sister, brother, grandmother, other father, second grandmother, auntie, cats, cows, and cocks. She shows me her home: her tattered dolls, her woven blanket, her posters, her pots and pans. Buffaloes are the primary residents; chickens peck scraps dripping from their mouths; egrets perch on their mudluscious backs splashing damp shade over mangled hide. The people stare as we pass. Some smile, others scowl. Namascaram, I whisper and bow my head. Some laugh. Others turn away. When you decide to go off the beaten path you have to bush-whack, and fight your way through thorns and weeds to make a way. Luckily, I have hands to hold and help guide me along, and mine are never empty.