I’ve never done something like this before, but in casual conversation, I often seem to say things that make people curious/shocked/confused. Hopefully this will help clear up confusion, because I don’t like to continue turning innocent chatting into heavy depressing talk about the injustice of the caste system, but quite a few people so far here have expressed an interest in hearing about my background.
My twin brother and I grew up in the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India. Our mother died when we were infants, I believe - at any rate, I do not have any memories of having any parents. In the caste system in India, Dalits are the untouchables - the lowest caste, or, more accurately, the casteless - those people to whom all the dirtiest “polluting” types of jobs are given. My brother and I were Sikkaliar - that is the lowest sub-caste of dalits in our community, and to us were given all the worst of the dalit jobs. The sikkaliar community is responsible for removing all the human and animal waste from the town, and also for removing from town any animal corpses before they degrade and make sickness come. From the time I was very young, maybe 4 or 5, I had to begin working. In our village most of the latrines were dry latrines, toilets without plumbing, basically just holes in the ground. My job was to go in with a basket and sometimes a broom or a pan or sometimes just simply my hands and scoop all the waste from the toilets, put this all in my basket, and carry it on my head outside of the village. By law, this practice of cleaning human waste manually is illegal in India; still, it is a widespread practice and always this job falls to the lowest of the dalits. For many of us, we fall ill often from this work, and die young, it is very unsanitary, and the feces it gets into your eyes and your everywhere and many of my community become alcoholics because working while intoxicated is the only way to put up with the smell. In the monsoon season, especially, things are bad for working, because the rain floods the basket and the waste leaks all over you and it is so hard even after the day is over to get rid of the smell; for most of the monsoon season I would be ill and unable to eat very much if at all.
So since I was young, this is what I did every day of my life; and from the time I started until the time I left my village I never once received any payment for this, which perhaps makes it slavery. My wages supposedly were somewhere around 150 rupees per month (this is maybe $3.40 each month) but I was never once paid, because I am Deaf and in India, having some disability, then people feel free to treat you like you are nothing. My brother he some months would receive payment, some months no, but this is hardly enough to eat for long, and mostly we had to live on the scraps of food, often rotten, that the upper-caste people whose toilets we cleaned would throw to us.
Aside from the work, being an untouchable is hard. We were forbidden from touching (even accidentally) any people who were higher caste; even making eye contact was something I sometimes would be beaten for. Sometimes, sikkaliars would be beaten to death for making the mistake of touching someone outside their caste. If we tried to buy something in a store, we have to pay only in coins, because people will not accept money directly from us; generally if they accept our money at all, they have a dish that we must drop our coins into, then they will pour some water over it to purify it before they will touch it. In places like tea shops, they keep separate dishes and cups for our use; often these are broken and frequently dirty. In schools, the teachers will often refuse to teach the sikkaliar children; they will keep us seated far from the rest of the class and will not allow us to touch the books or papers or pens or other materials we need to learn; so hardly any children go to school because there is no point in it when you are not allowed access to the learning and the teacher only the whole time tells you how you are worthless and are polluting her classroom.
Also, being an untouchable does not seem to apply when it comes to sex. During the day, I could be beaten for looking at someone above me. At night time, the men in town, they could come and take me for sex; since I was very young, maybe 6, 7, 8 years old this happened frequently. On the times that my brother or I tried to resist them, we still were beaten for raising hands against the Thevars (Thevar, that is the higher-caste people who we often would work for) Very often, dalit girls are forced into prostitution, so then it seems that it is alright to touch us when someone wants sex with us. I was not made a prostitute, because I am male; in India homosexuality it is frowned upon. But still men would come and force sex, from the time I was a child. I think for me it was harder than for some of the other Sikkaliar boys, because I am Deaf, and since I was a child they told my brother that he should just kill me because I am only a cripple that is not worth living. As I said before, it is already very difficult for dalits to get education - it is even more difficult for Deaf people to get an education. I was never taught of anything such as “sign language”, and since I was also never taught to read and write, this made communication near impossible. I learned after a time to lipread well enough, but I still could no verbalize; and so when things happened like rape, there was nobody to tell, and even if I had managed to communicate what was happening to someone, nobody would believe me or care - this is just the normal place of a dalit.
So that is how I have grown up, I was born into a sub-human caste, and treated accordingly. To me, rape and this unpleasant work, that was a normal everyday kind of thing in life. This August I have come to America, and everything is so frightening and new. Until this August, I had never in my life had a roof over my head - not ever. I had never had a bed to sleep in. I had never known what it was to have enough to eat. I had never known what it was to have a friend. I had never known anyone who regarded me as equal to human beings.
So if I sometimes seem a little bit out of place, it is because I am. If I make comments that are confusing, it is because I was raised this way, in a totally different culture, in a place where nobody ever treated me as a human, but only a bhangi cripple - that is worse than dirt. I am adjusting to many things, here. I am adjusting to learning a new language, to having people treat me with kindness, to learning about strange new things like computers and the internet and couches that turn into beds and back, to supermarkets full of food and shopping malls full of lights and people and things, to a place where sex is something that is fun and special and not something that is just forced upon you and you have no say in when or how.
This is all very new to me. I hope that you can understand.
