TWO
GET AN EDUCATION
It’s remarkable how many books fall into the category of self-help. Why, for example, do you persist in reading that much-praised, breathtakingly boring foreign novel, slogging through page after page after please-make-it-stop page of tar-slow prose and blushinducing formal conceit, if not out of an impulse to understand distant lands that because of globalization are increasingly affecting life in your own? What is this impulse of yours, at its core, if not a desire for self-help?
And what of the other novels, those which for reasons of plot or language or wisdom or frequent gratuitous and graphic sex you actually enjoy and read with delighted hunger? Surely those too are versions of self-help. At the very least they help you pass the time, and time is the stuff of which a self is made. The same goes for narrative nonfiction, and doubly so for non-narrative nonfiction.
Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the reader as a form of selfhelp. Textbooks those whores, are particularly explicit in acknowledging this, and it is with a textbook, that you, at this moment, after several years in the city, are walking down the street.
Your city is not laid out as a single-celled organism, with a wealthy nucleus surrounded by an ooze of slums. It lacks sufficient mass transit to move all of its workers twice daily in the fashion this would require. It also lacks, since the end of colonization generations ago, governance powerful enough to dispossess individuals of their property in sufficient numbers. Accordingly, the poor live near the rich. Wealthy neighborhoods are often divided by a single boulevard from factories and markets and graveyards, and those in turn may be separated from the homes of the impoverished only by an open sewer, railroad track, or narrow alley. Your own triangleshaped community, not atypically, is bounded by all three.
Arriving at your destination, you see a whitewashed building with a plaque declaring its name and function. This is your school, and it is wedged between a tirerepair stall and a corner kiosk that derives the bulk of its revenues from the sale of cigarettes. Until the age of about twelve, when the opportunity cost of forgone wages becomes significant, most children in your area do in fact manage to go to school. Most, but by no means all. A boy your height is working shirtless in the tirerepair stall. He watches you now as you pass.
There are fifty pupils in your class and stools for thirty. The others sit on the floor or stand. You are instructed by a single hollow-cheeked, betel-nut-spitting, possibly tubercular teacher. Today he takes you through your multiplication tables. This he does in a distracted chant, his preferred, indeed only, pedagogical tool being enforced rote memorization. Parts of his mind not responsible for control over the tissue and bone of his vocal apparatus wander far, far away.
Your teacher chants, “Ten tens, a hundred.” The class chants it back.
Your teacher chants, “Eleven elevens, a hundred
twenty-one.”
The class chants it back.
Your teacher chants, “Twelve twelves, a hundred
thirty-four.”
One foolhardy voice interrupts. It says, “Forty-four.” There is a hushed silence. The voice is yours. You
spoke without thinking, or at least without thinking sufficiently ahead.
Your teacher says, “What did you say?”
You hesitate. But it has happened. There is no way back.
“Forty-four.”
Your teacher’s tone is soft with menace. “Why did you say that?”
“Twelve twelves are a hundred forty-four.”
“You think I’m an idiot?”
“No, sir. I thought you said a hundred thirty-four. I made a mistake. You said a hundred forty-four. I’m sorry, sir.”
The entire class knows your teacher did not say a hundred forty-four. Or perhaps not the entire class. Much of the class was paying no attention, daydreaming of kites or assault rifles, or rolling nasal residue into balls between their thumbs and forefingers. But some of them know. And all of them know what will happen next, if not the precise form it will take. They watch now in horrified fascination, like seals on a rock observing a great white breaching beneath one of their own, just a short swim away.
Most of you have in the past been punished by your teacher. You, as one of the brightest students, have drawn some of the most severe punishments. You attempt to hide your knowledge, but every so often bravado gets the better of you and it comes out, as it just has, and then there is hell to pay. Today your teacher reaches into the pocket of his tunic, where he keeps a small amount of coarse sand, and grips you by the ear, the sand on his fingertips adding abrasion to the enormous pressure he applies, so that your earlobe is not only crushed but also made raw and slightly bloody. You refuse to cry out, denying your torturer satisfaction, and ensuring thereby that the punishment you receive is prolonged.
Your teacher did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to be a meter reader at the electric utility. Meter readers do not have to put up with children, work comparatively little, and what is more important, have greater opportunity for corruption and are hence both better off and held in higher regard by society. Nor was becoming a meter reader out of your teacher’s reach. His uncle worked for the electric utility. But the one position as meter reader this uncle was able to facilitate went, as all things most desirable in life invariably went, to your teacher’s elder brother.
So your teacher, who narrowly failed his secondaryschool final examination but was able to have the results falsified, and with his false results, a bribe equivalent to sixty percent of one year’s prospective salary, and a good low-level connection in the education bureaucracy in the form of a cousin, secured only the post he currently occupies. He is not exactly a man who lives to teach. In fact he hates to teach. It shames him. Nonetheless he retains a small but not nonexistent fear of losing his job, of somehow being found out, or if not losing his job then at least being put in a position where he will be forced to pay yet another and indeed larger bribe in order to retain it, and this fear, augmented by his sense of abiding disappointment and his not unfounded conviction that the world is profoundly unfair, manifests itself in the steady dose of violence he visits upon his charges. With each blow, he tells himself, he helps education penetrate another thick skull.
Penetration and education, the two are intertwined in the lives of many around you. In the life of your sister, for example. She is sobbing when you return home. Lately she alternates with alarming frequency between suppressed but globular tears and calm airs of smug superiority. At the moment it is the former.
You say, “Again?”
“Sit on my dick, you little pussy.”
You shake your head. You are too weak to retort appropriately, and what’s more too drained to be confident of dodging one of her quick-fire slaps.
She notices something is wrong with you. She says, “What happened to your ear?”
“Teacher.”
“That sisterfucker. Come here.”
You sit beside her and she puts her arm around you, stroking your hair. You shut your eyes. She sniffles once or twice, but she is done crying for now.
You say, “Are you frightened?”
“Frightened?” She forces a laugh. “He should be frightened of me.”
The he she refers to is your father’s second cousin, a decade her senior, to whom she is now betrothed. His first wife recently died in childbirth after two earlier miscarriages, and no time has been wasted in arranging him another.
“Does he still have that mustache?” you ask.
“How should I know? I haven’t seen him in years.”
“It’s enormous. That mustache.”
“You know what they say about the size of a man’s mustache.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“So are you frightened?”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Of leaving. I’d be scared to move back to the village all by myself.”
“That’s why you’re still a boy and I’m a woman.”
“You’re a girl.”
“No, I’m a woman.”
“A girl.”
“I bleed every month. I’m a woman.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Maybe.” She smiles. “But a woman.”
Then she surprises you. She does something you associate with women of girth and substance, not with slender slips of girls like your sister. She sings. She sings in a quiet and powerful voice. She sings a song that mothers in your village sing to their newborns, a song that your mother in fact sang to each of you. It is like a lullaby but more upbeat, meant not to put an infant to sleep but rather to communicate a mother’s presence when a task takes her beyond touch or out of sight. You have not heard it in years. It feels strange to hear your sister sing it, oddly relaxing and unsettling at the same time. You lean against her as she sings, and you feel her body swell and diminish like a harmonium.
When she stops, you say, “Let’s play river.”
“All right.”
The two of you leave the room shared by your family, similar in size to the room you shared in your village, but made of brick instead of mud and perched precariously on the third and highest floor of a tottering, narrow building. You dash down the stairwell and from there find your way to a small, secluded alley, or inlet, rather, since it branches off the street but leads nowhere, and is circumscribed by dwellings on three sides. It contains a hillock of trash, behind which is an uncovered sewer.
Viewing the scene from the lenses of an orbiting reconnaissance satellite, an observer would see two children behaving peculiarly. He or she would note that they display undue caution in approaching the sewer, as if it were not a trickle of excrement of varying viscosities but rather a gushing torrent. Moreover, although the sewer is shallow and could be crossed with a modest hop, the children stand warily on either side of it, cupping their hands to their mouths as though shouting to one another from a great distance. Agreement reached, one picks up a piece of metal, the discarded spoke of a bicycle wheel, perhaps, and seems to use it to fish, albeit with no string or bait, and no prospect of catching anything. The other takes a torn strip of brown cardboard packaging, long and jagged, and jabs it repeatedly in the direction of the sewer. Spearing transparent turtles? Fending off invisible crocodiles? It is difficult to gauge the purpose of her frenetic movements. Suddenly the girl squats, pantomiming the gestures of lighting a fire. The boy calls out to her, and she tosses him one end of her shawl.
You grip the shawl firmly. In your hands it becomes the rope you will use to ford the river. But before you can do so, and without warning, the spell breaks. You follow your sister’s altered gaze and see that a formerly shuttered window is now open. A tall, bald man stands inside, staring at your sister intently. She takes her shawl from you and throws one end over her head, the other across her still small-breasted chest.
She says, “Let’s go home.”
Your sister has worked as a cleaning girl since shortly after your family moved to the city, your father’s income unable to keep up with the rampant inflation of recent years. She was told she could go back to school once your brother, the middle of you three surviving siblings, was old enough to work. She demonstrated more enthusiasm for education in her few months in a classroom than your brother did in his several years. He has just been found employment as a painter’s assistant, and has been taken out of school as a result, but your sister will not be sent there in his stead. Her time for that has passed. Marriage is her future. She has been marked for entry.
Your brother is sitting in the room when the two of you return. He is exhausted, a fine white dusting of paint on the exposed skin of his hands and face. It is also on his hair, like a play actor’s makeup, and he resembles a boy about to go onstage as a middle-aged man in a school drama. He looks at you wearily and coughs.
Your sister says, “I told you, you shouldn’t smoke.”
He says, “I don’t smoke.”
She sniffs him. “Yes, you do.”
“The master does. I’m just around him all day.”
The truth is that your brother has smoked on several occasions. But he does not particularly like to smoke, and he has not smoked this week. Besides, smoking is not the reason for his cough. The reason for his cough is paint inhalation.
Each morning your brother walks over the train tracks, using the crossing if it is open, or if it is not and the train is moving slowly, making a dash for it with the urchins for whom this activity is a game. He catches a bus to the century-old, and hence in city historical terms neither recent nor ancient, European-designed commercial district. There he enters, through a tea stall, an open space that was formerly a public square, or public trapezoid rather, but is now, because of illegally built encroachments that have filled in its entryways, an entirely enclosed courtyard.
The courtyard is a marvel of mixed-use planning, or non-planning to be more precise. The upper floors of its constituent buildings contain family and labor residences, guest rooms of a run-down hotel, workshops occupied by tailors, embroiderers, and other craftsmen, and also offices, including two belonging to a pair of aging private investigators who harbor an abiding hatred and can be seen watching each other through their windows from either side of the divide. At ground level, the fronts of the buildings, which is to say their noncourtyard-facing sides, are given over to shops and unprepossessing restaurants. Their courtyard-facing backsides, on the other hand, are devoted to small-scale manufacturing, to operations that because of their sonic, aromatic, visual, or chemical noxiousness are unpopular in a high-density neighborhood such as this one, and therefore utilize the enclosed courtyard as a partial veil.
The painter your brother assists is an air-gun spray painter, and their work today was an assignment for an interior designer of remarkable valor and renown. Your brother began by unloading a set of custom-made, builtin bookshelves, still unpainted and yet to be built in, from a tiny flatbed truck. He carried them with great care, in small hop-like increments because of their weight, through the tea stall, out into the courtyard, and back into the entrance of the painter’s shed. He taped plastic sheets to the corrugated ceiling, forming curtains to prevent paint particles from drifting onto the surfaces of other objects already painted and awaiting collection. He taped newspaper around the halogenlighting fixtures and the brushed-metal electricity switches that were built into the built-in bookshelves. He lifted cans to the painter’s instructions, mixing paint and primer. He located extension cords to power up the compressor for the air gun. He then stood behind the painter, sweating in unventilated, infernally hot conditions, as the painter held the gun and proceeded to make hundreds of straight-line passes across the wood of the bookshelves, like a robot in an automotive assembly plant, but with slightly less precision and considerably more swearing, your brother dashing off every few minutes in response to grunted commands to clean a spill, move the ladder, get some water, get some bread, or reconnect exposed wires with electrical tape.
Your brother’s work is in some senses like being an astronaut, or slightly more prosaically, a scuba diver. It too involves the hiss of air, the feeling of weightlessness, the sudden pressure headaches and nausea, the precariousness that results when an organic being and a machine are fused together. Then again, an astronaut or aquanaut sees unimaginable new worlds, whereas your brother sees only a monocolor haze of varying intensities.
His occupation requires patience and the fortitude to withstand a constant sense of low-level panic, both of which out of necessity your brother has acquired. In theory it also requires protection in the form of goggles and respirators, but these are clearly optional, as your brother and his master have neither, placing thin cotton rags over their mouths and noses instead. Hence, in the near term, your brother’s cough. Over the long term, consequences can be more serious. But a painter’s assistant is paid, the skills he learns are valuable, and in any case over sufficiently l
ong a term, as everyone knows, there is nothing that does not have as its consequence death.
As your mother prepares dinner that evening, a lentil stew thickened with chunks of onion, not because onions are her favorite ingredient but because they appear to add substance to a meal and today in the market they were cheap, it may not seem that you are a lucky child. Your wounded ear is, after all, more visibly painful than the expression in your sister’s eyes or the residue of paint on your brother’s skin. Yet you are fortunate. Fortunate in being third-born.
Getting an education is a running leap towards becoming filthy rich in rising Asia. This is no secret. But like many desirable things, simply being well known does not make it easily achieved. There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village. Third means you are not working as a painter’s assistant. Third also means you are not, like the fourth of you three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree.
Your father comes home after you have eaten. He has his meals with the other servants at the house where he cooks. All of you crowd around the family television, a sign of your urban prosperity. It is powered by a wire of communally stolen electricity that runs down the front of your building. It is archaic, a black-and-white, cathode-ray-tube device with an excessively curved and annoyingly chipped screen. It is narrower than the distance between your wrist and your elbow. And it is able to capture only the few channels that broadcast terrestrially. But it works, and your family watches in a state of hushed rapture the musical variety show it delivers to your room.