Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki

Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki

I have a standing joke, if there is such a thing, with one of the customers that comes into the restaurant every Saturday night where I work. He asks if I’ll be in church tomorrow, and I always reply with some stupid one-liner or another. And perhaps, after awhile, I am a little afraid that the roof will collapse if I go.

But several weeks ago I went to a Sunday service. Don’t get the wrong impression; I didn’t pay attention to the sermon, of course. The organ’s tones were deafening and the crowd of people rising and lowering at arrhythmic intervals might have been distracting if the lighting in the balcony hadn’t been so perfectly conducive to getting lost in thought.

Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan is a collection of memoirs of his life as a Dalit shortly after India won its independence from Great Britain. Though untouchability was indeed outlawed in the country’s constitution (an untouchable, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, provided the document’s framework), Valmiki demonstrates in heartbreaking detail the prejudice and injustice that still prevails. And yet, up until that day, nothing had very deeply stirred me about this book.
Hunched over the book’s final pages in the last pew of the sanctuary, I discovered it. It was a little sliver of a line, nearly ten pages from the end, that brought the story full circle for me, and it was all hinging on this single, unintentionally poignant axis. It wasn’t even about an event that had happened in the author’s life, but rather a curt blurb about a Maharashtra community of Dalits sacrificing a child in order to persuade the gods to bless them with enough grain to survive another year.

I was suddenly and irrevocably grateful for my little brother sitting next to me, for being born into a country with an (at least supposedly) non-discriminatory public education system, for being able to eat dinner at a table every night. Or every other night. Or, okay, maybe I can’t remember the last time I ate dinner at a table, but it was dinner nonetheless. These things, which I’ve taken for granted on far too many occasions, now came crashing into perspective at once. I was filled with a sort of joy and despair all at once, a ‘malegria’, if you will. I handed my brother a relatively squashed Tootsie Roll from my purse and volunteered for the community CROP Hunger Walk the next week.

Maybe, I think, it’s these small gestures that count the most.