Lakshi Fails PKG

On Saturday, Vijay and Lakshi got their "results."

"What are results?" Lakshi asked.

"How you did on your papers," her Mom explained.

"I didn't do any papers," Lakshi insisted. "Ma'am did them."

Nonetheless, off they trotted that morning, their parents in tow.

Vijay - no surprise - was first in his class and his teacher's darling. "Such a smart boy," she said enthusiastically. "He knows all the answers."



Absolutely true. Vijay is a brilliant boy - sharp, observant, curious.

But Lakshi is no less, in spite of having all zeroes. FAIL! Lakshi failed PKG.

Yet the other night, just for an example, Ravi went upstairs to close the door to the balcony. It's all swollen because of the rains and he had to slam it with a loud bang to get it to shut. Following the bang, there was a brief silence, then Lakshi's voice rang out from their flat in accusing tones: "Who's breaking our door down?"

When she comes in in the evening, wanting to help and I ask her to set the table, she knows exactly where everything is in our kitchen and exactly how it should all be laid out on the table (plates in the center, forks on the left, knives on the right, spoons to the right of the knives, glass positioned just over the tip of the knife).

She knows when I've made a cake and exactly how many slices are left and whose was bigger the last time it was served. She can pour, she can divide, she can measure and subtract.

Yesterday she ran to me in great consternation. "Mom!" she said (she calls me Mom). "It's a disaster! There are two worms in our house."

Lakshi is three.

But the school she attends seems unable to assess her bright, sparkling little mind because Lakshi can neither read nor write. How can they test her? The copy books she dutifully carries back and forth each day and fills with scribbles and x's and straight and slanted lines are meaningless to her. She humors her parents (if she's in the mood) by doing as she's been told, but in fact, she's simply too busy doing what a three year old should be doing to bother with nonsense like sitting still and making marks on a piece of paper.



Lakshi is three. At the moment, thank God, she has no interest in or use for our categories and judgments. Failing PKG is as irrelevant to her as flying to the moon.

If we all play our cards right, this child might yet grow up to discover a cure for cancer or to paint a masterpiece or to develop a new way to distribute water. But if we continue to be as stupid as we have been so far - even whispering the word FAIL anywhere in her vicinity is criminal malpractice - there's no saying what we will miss.

The promise, the expectation, the new dawn just over the next mountain peak: that's all hers. The failure, the downward spiral, the lost and irretrievable hopes - those are ours.

Lakshi is looking at us expectantly.

Have we got anything new, anything beyond false measurements and labels like "FAILURE" to offer her?

Where's That Net Again?

I hate to admit it, but I'm desperate. Again.

It happens with depressing regularity. Every three or four years, I take my eye off the ball. I go to sleep at the wheel. I stop firing on all four cylinders. (Or is it eight?)

Fundraising is a relentless and ever-expanding activity. There is no scope for self-satisfaction, no point at which you are allowed to push back from the desk and stride out of the office, secure in your right to a well-deserved rest. It never ends. People need their salaries every single month. The rent has to be paid. You've got to have petrol for the vans and the bus. The kids need crayons. What about a picnic, the training, the new books?

So you keep raising money and it keeps getting spent. The donor agencies preach self-reliance while the government taxes anything you earn. Yesterday everyone loved special schools, today it's all about inclusion. Tomorrow it will be clean rivers and HIV AIDS. You can't win, but you can't afford to lose.

So you keep running in the vain hope of at least staying in the same place. As the Red Queen explained to Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Sometimes, I admit it, I forget what I am supposed to be doing. Mid-stream, I suddenly stop running. My family needs me. I get distracted by a new project. My 53 year old body demands sleep. I. Stop. Fundraising.

That's where we are right now. There. I've said it. We need 36 lakhs ($84,000) to get through the next year and I have NO IDEA where it's going to come from.

Just leap, I have been fond of saying. The net will appear.

There is a fine line between faith and arrogance and a deep gulf between trust in God and reckless expectation. Time after time after time, I have faced the abyss and been amazed and overwhelmed by what seems like an outpouring of support from the universe: we are here, it seems to say. You will not fail.

Each time it has happened I have been humbled and awed and each time - so strange! - I have promised myself that I will not let it happen again, that I will take care to have systems in place to prevent financial ruin. And though I put the systems in, once again I find myself needing to leap into the unknown, hoping against hope that the net will, once again, appear.

It always does. It will again. This time, next time, the time after that. This road we are on is ordained. Not easy, not complacent. But steady and sure, if just a tiny bit unsettling and a little like a test one hasn't prepared for.

But we leap and we leap and we leap - ever higher, ever more agile.

That net, that darling net: it's there every time.

One Young Scholar, Two Young Dreamers

Every centre for poor children has at least one girl like this one - a child completely absorbed in the task at hand (a task most likely self-assigned), oblivious to the chaos around her.

I have, literally, hundreds of such photos: photos of brave, vivid children, busy with a painting or a sand castle or a game of badminton, completely and utterly immersed in a world of endeavor and achievement and imagination.

I salute them.

They astonish me.

They come in every day, full of energy and hope, ready to start all over again. They come from their homes where, in the monsoons, there may be three inches of water on the floor and they do their homework crouched on the bed, guarding their books from the leak in the roof overhead. They come from their families where Dad is out of work yet manages to find money to drink; where Mom holds three jobs to pay their tuition fees and keep them in sandals and the occasional ribbon for their hair.

They come in and they come in and they come in - day after day after day - because of an unquenchable desire for more in their lives; because of a belief that somewhere, in a book or a painting or a new vocabulary word, they may find a clue, an answer, a design.



They are our future and our legacy. They pin their hopes on us and we dare not disappoint them.

(Photo of the two young dreamers by Muir Adams)

Asian Green Beans

My sister Lucy is one of the best cooks I know. She cooks lavishly and with love and she usually has a funny story about each thing she makes.

Here's her recipe for and her story about the garlicky green beans many of us love in Chinese restaurants in the US.

I used to go to this fancy Chinese restaurant for their green beans. When we decided to move far far away from this fancy Chinese restaurant I went one last time to try to dissect this dish. I cracked the code in two seconds. I could have been making them at home all along. Quit spending so much money eating out! It's easy y'all.
INGREDIENTS:
1. Slightly blanched green beans (keep them crisp)
2.Chopped garlic
3.shoyu- soy sauce
4.olive oil

Get your pan or wok pretty hot, but not smoking hot.
Add some olive oil, green beans
and then a lot of chopped garlic
stir it until the garlic is golden only.

AS SOON AS GARLIC TURNS GOLDEN
Add several splashes of shoyu (that's soy sauce for those of you who don't speak Hawaiian)

Viola! You made the same thing as the restaurant and you paid 10 dollars less.

This has become my all-time favorite recipe. SO EASY. SO AMAZING. Try it. I guarantee you will love it.

I "let them eat cake" all the time . . .

Several people have asked me recently for the recipe for the chocolate cake I always make (birthdays, special guests, Core Group meetings, just because) . . . lately, since Lakshi and Vijay have become such helpful little elves in my kitchen, I am making it a lot more frequently. That's the one thing they always agree would be the perfect "job" to help me with.

This is the classic Joy of Cooking recipe, with a few adaptations for India:

Preheat oven to 200C.

Prepare your cake pans (two 9-inch rounds or an oblong 9x13): After too many sad experiences in which half the cake stuck to the centre of the pan when I tried to take it out, I have started lining the bottom with paper. Nothing fancy - I use ordinary brown paper if I have it or even an old large-ish magazine envelope. Trace around the bottom of the pan onto the paper (use a pencil, not a marker!), then cut on the inside of the circle/rectangle you drew so it's the perfect size to fit inside the bottom of the pan. Butter and flour around the bottom edge of the pan, then place the paper circle/rectangle inside and butter and flour that as well.)

Cook and stir on a very low flame, watching like a hawk as it can burn easily:

1 cup Cadbury's Cocoa Powder (don't skimp, and don't even think of using Weikfield's)
1/2 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1 egg yolk
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Remove from heat when thickened.

(Sift before measuring: I'm just putting this because all the books say you must - I never do it):

2 cups cake flour (maida)

Resift with:

1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Grind to a fine-ish powder:

1 cup sugar

Beat until soft (I do this in the food processor):

100 gms Amul butter

Add the sugar gradually. Beat until very light and creamy.

Beat in, one at a time:

2 egg yolks

Still in the food processor: Add the flour to the butter mixture in 3 parts, alternating with thirds of:

1/4 cup water
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla

Stir the batter until smooth after each addition. Stir in the chocolate custard. Whip (a hand mixie is best for this; if you don't have one, use a wire whisk or a fork) until peaks form and are stiff, but not dry:

3 egg whites

Fold them lightly into the cake batter (a quick whizz in the food processor will do it).

Pour into prepared cake pans and bake about 25 - 35 minutes. They are done when a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Turn the cakes out on to racks to cool.

Variation: You can also make cupcakes, which children adore. If you don't have a cupcake tin: use katoris, being sure to grease and flour each one carefully. Lining with paper doesn't seem to be necessary for small cakes. Cupcakes are fun to try different color frostings and decorations on - with a plate full of these, you don't need to worry about decorating the table!



When completely cool, ice with:

100 gms Amul butter, softened
1 1/2 cups Icing sugar, sifted
3/4 cup Cocoa powder, sifted
2 Tbsps Hot Coffee

Beat it all together well, add vanilla (1 tsp) if you have it (I usually don't, so I leave it out)

Taste to make sure it's the way you like it (add more sugar or more cocoa if necessary)

Ice the cake and decorate with sprinkles, fresh pansies, an artfully placed green leaf or two.

Serve generously!

Wordless Love

Moy Moy used to talk. Most people who know her now have no memory of how she once was, but a devoted little group still does. We tell the stories often to keep the memory green.

Moy Moy used to talk. She used to tell jokes; she even had - at four - a flair for the dramatic. Once on a Sunday, I asked her: "Moy Moy, are you ready to go to Church?" She raised both arms over her head like a born again zealot and said fervently: "Hallowed be Thy Name!"

And she had a sly sense of humor. Once I found her with both hands in a katori of salt - I said, "Moy Moy, no!" She looked up at me and said "Cake!" I said "Moy, that's not cake." and with a fetching little smirk, she said, "Fooled you!"

She was four years old.

At five, her sentences became phrases. A few months later, she only had two words at a time. Then one. And then it was back to babbling. She lost her language in the same order in which she had gained it.

As it became clearer to us that Moy was losing the ability to speak, that she was regressing, I often told myself I should record her, that I should capture the sound of her voice to remind us later of what she had once been like. I never did it. At the time it seemed like too much of a concession to reality, an admission of what we weren't yet prepared to acknowledge.

But now Moy Moy is 21 and she doesn't speak at all. I can still recall the last words I heard her say, after the prayer I would recite for her at bedtime:

Angel of God, my guardian dear
To whom God's love entrusts me here
Ever this night, be at my side
To light, to guard, to rule, TO _ _ _ _

I would leave the blank and Moy would fill in: "GUIDE!" with a shout of pleasure and triumph. Then she would say:

"Goodnight. I love you."
That response got shorter and shorter. The last time I remember actually hearing her speak it was those two words that she chose: "Love you."

Whether it's what I now choose to remember or whether it was what she actually said last doesn't matter. She loves us. We love her. It's the truth and, last words or not, it's all that matters.

How Can We Know the Dancer From The Dance?

When beautiful Meera came to visit, all I could think about was that she was a Speech Therapist. There aren't many people in the world who can appreciate the way some of us think about Speech Therapists, so don't laugh.

We always capitalize their title. They are Speech Therapists. We restrain ourselves from writing it as SPEECH THERAPISTS.

For us, they:

Walk on water

Are worth their weight in gold

Speak with the tongues of men and of angels

High school students, take note. If you want a career with respect, adulation and a sense of purpose from here to eternity - it's Speech Therapy. (Got that? SPEECH THERAPY.)

But back to Meera. All I could think was Speech Therapist. How did I forget that she was also a professional dancer?

So when I took her to Latika Vihar, I was surprised by the way she stood observing our young and trendy dance teacher (the one we are sending to Bharatnatyam classes to widen her amazing natural talent):



When I got a moment to speak with her, she said, also surprised: "I didn't expect to see Bharatnatyam here!"

"Oh." I said, blankly. "Is that what it is?"

"She's great, Auntie! She's doing it just exactly right!"

That's when I remembered. Meera is a professional, a Bharatnatyam dancer with a degree, who performs in public to wide acclaim. Immediately, I thought about how she could perform right here at Latika Vihar, how she could share her amazing talent with the eager children who would love to see her in action.

But before I could even suggest it, she had her own idea:

"Do you think they could teach me a Garhwali dance?"

Why hadn't I thought of that? Bring in the expert! was my idea.

But Meera, like a true therapist, preferred to build on someone else's strengths.



Because Speech Therapy isn't about showing off. It's about communication. It's about sharing gifts. It's about the joy of language and spoken thought and revealed wisdom.



It's about helping other people to celebrate what they already know and giving them ways to offer it to the wider world. It's about joining in and reflecting back what people already know but have lost sight of. It's about giving people a platform, a stage, a voice.



Meera, for all her youth, already knows that. Here is one SPEECH THERAPIST I'm keeping my eye on.