in my village there are about 30 people, almost all of them having special physical and/or mental needs. the average physical age of villagers ranges from 20 to mid 70's, but psychologically, from infant to brilliant. social and emotional skills are just as far ranging. there is a man, for example, in his mid 40's who is multi-lingual, taught me how to milk a buffalo, needs help showering, still cries over a long-dead grandmother, and sometimes wets the bed. the 32 year old woman who leads yoga every morning is completely nonverbal and schizophrenic. there is a man who completes complex mathematical computations in his head for fun but must be reminded to wipe drool from his mouth. from the villagers i learn how to survive, how to wring a living from the land, and in return i mend their torn shirtsleeves, mash their food into a digestible, gumable mush, turn on their night lights and count their pills for them.

the official term for the 'non-normal' people who live in my village is 'special friend' which i think is actually a more pejorative term than tard or mongol (which is what the kids shout as they pass through the village on their way to school). it's a euphemism, which is kitschy, and i don't do non self-conscious kitsch. therefore, i choose to call everyone who lives here the Village People. a few:

prashand:
speaks either marathi or gibberish (it's hard to tell because he's had a lot of dental work, but not as much as he needs), hypochondriac, nail biter, super autistic, fond of the fist pump. a classic moment:

vijiathai: omkar will be spending the night in the clinic in poad to recover from his seizure this morning, so let us all remember him today.
prashand: (vigorous fist pump) Woo! Doctor!


hashish:
will eat most things (including paint, soap, and toilet water), able to speak three languages but generally chooses not too, able to fall asleep almost anywhere, and yes that is his real name and yes, i also wonder if somehow his parents knew...


nandan:
tucks his arms in close to his sides and squats a little bit when he runs which makes him look like a raptor - and he runs everywhere, able to say his name and place of birth (nandan, gujarat) constantly for upwards of an hour without stopping, sometimes posing it in the form of a question (nandan...gujarat?)


ankit:
owns over two hundred keys and spends about an hour every morning choosing which 70 or so he should stuff into his pockets, has an uncanny ability to know immediately when someone has touched/taken/moved one of his keys, the weight in his pockets (due to his keys) combined with the demands of his strangely feminine build lends him a silhouette which requires frequently mended pants



ravi:
bed wetter and biscuit stealer, surprisingly violent for a crier, desperately wants to go home to see his dead mother, will only stop crying if 'we shall overcome' is sung to him, currently learning to fight the urge to touch other people inappropriately


xavier:
likes to hide food and pills in his pants, has a habit of reaching his arm around your head and covering your mouth while pulling your ear toward his face while he talks, only able to say 'ho' and 'ha' so when he tells a story it just sounds like he's laughing, which is nice

vasanti:
has but one tooth, hits herself with a small chalkboard and bites (gums) herself when angry, speaks an unidentifiable language and hasn't caught on yet that i don't speak the same, pulls weeds with gusto, unfortunately enjoys nothing more than having her toenails clipped

my coworkers:
the mangler and the shanker:
she is a no-nonsense house mother who keeps a knife folded into the pleats of her sari (just in case), and he, a reckless yet somehow wreck-less (and somewhat feckless) van driver. i like to think of them as a tag-team wrestling duo known as The Mangler and The Shanker, and choose to mispronounce their names this way whenever i can get away with it. a sidenote: The Shanker has one long pinky nail. i don't think he does coke, but what else might this mean? i'm currently watching for further clues.

there are also two germans here (i don't know why) whom i secretly call 'J.C.' and 'the dumpling':
J.C. is slight, with shoulder-length hair and a short beard that does nothing to fill in his sunken cheeks, but which does make him look like one of those headshots of the impossibly aryan Jesus that hang in sunday school classrooms. he enjoys computer games, hygiene, and not reading. he also serves as the head gardener, demanding complete silence and attention before proceeding with his daily assignment of chores. as a result, chores are rarely assigned and J.C. does most of the gardening alone. in silence.

the dumpling is equal parts doughy and pasty, so, pretty much, german. he lists 'being an artist,' among his hobbies, which is sort of cute and probably also the reason that i disliked him from the very beginning. he is persistent in his attempts to converse with the Village People in german and gets frustrated when they don't respond in kind. although many of the special friends are multi-lingual, german isn't really the lingua franca in the boondocks of india. as a result, dumpling is basically useless. also, he is disgusting. to illustrate:

dumpling (in broken, heavily accented english): the thing that is really the most traumatic just happened on me.
me: you survived a holocaust?
dumpling: no, it is worse. i stepped on a frog with my feet bare in the bathroom.
me: goodbye.

in retrospect, mentioning the holocaust to a german was probably in poor taste. i mean, if i was german i wouldn't even want people talking about ovens in my presence. and just forget about having a friend named sohpie - what if she was ever forced to make a choice around me? no way, not worth the risk. having this understanding of the delicate nature of the subject, i honestly wasn't trying to make a german joke - it was just the most traumatic thing i could think of off the top of my head. now i see that it really shouldn't have been made light of, german or no. i would like to say, however, that i think the display of poorest taste would have to go to the german who posits that squishing a frog is worse than the forced internment and mass extermination of millions of people, but who am I to judge? not a german, thank god.

this is all beside the point. putting this admittedly improper discussion of propriety aside, i would have to say that the most appalling thing to me about this exchange was the discovery that dumpling walks around barefoot in the indian squat toilet bathroom, which is both disgusting and unforgivable. the toilet is actually the floor so, essentially, he rubs his feet on the toilet. 'never again' will i be able to think about him without shivering a little.

simple:
simple (which isn't actually his name, but no one knows how to write it in english and that's the closest phonetic approximation i can come up with) is a boy from the village, aged somewhere between 16 and 24, who runs the candle workshop. simple doesn't speak much english and i don't speak much marathi, so our conversations usually consist of a lot of pointing, exaggerated facial expressions, and a little bit of drawing. one english phrase he does know, however, is 'decorative fish tank.' in this village, where water conservation is literally a way of life and owning a phone is a luxury most people cannot afford, simple makes and attempts to sell decorative fish tanks. farming and candle making pay the bills; goldfish and colored gravel stoke the embers of his soul.

daredevil:
on saturdays a blind man (whom i christened 'daredevil') comes to the village to lead a sing along with the Village People. he wears a white, collarless button-down shirt, baggy white pants, brown chappals, and a white hat with points at the front and back, like a canoe. sometimes he tucks a striped towel into his waistband. the outfit makes him look like he's on a perpetual smoke break from bussing tables at the local denny's, which i know is not true because 1) i haven't seen a pancake in months and, 2) denny's franchises don't operate outside of the contiguous 48 united states. this impression is complicated by the oversized, gold-hinged jackie o. sunglasses that he always wears, which are so incongruously glamorous that they sometimes make me wonder if he didn't just disembark from a private jet in a flurry of paparazzi flashbulbs on his quest to adopt a small, puff-bellied village child. i don't think he's a particularly good singer, but i guess being blind makes up for it.