Encounter
the Other
I was in Jaipur this weekend and had an encounter. What Emmanuel Levinas would call a demand from the Other — a radical Other that puts you in an obligation to respond. Having clicked profile-pic worthy photos, I was sitting at Patrika Gate with a friend. We were chatting, people-watching. There were at least half a dozen pre-wedding shoots going on. A man in a polished suit walking towards his to-be wife, holding her hand, and appearing to kiss her. The woman in her skirt or lehenga twirling. The photographers issuing directions. Some of them seemed to be in some kind of love. My friend said their love is enacted. I responded saying that perhaps all love is enacted, even that which does not need a pre-wedding shoot for validation.
In any case, we were sitting and witnessing the blossoming of the great Indian marriage industry. Then, the encounter. A child, barefoot, unwashed (I offer these descriptions with much hesitation, knowing that I am already engaging in some kind of violence but these are the markers that make such parts of the population visible to our bourgeois eyes so I choose candour over correctness). He walked up the steps, and addressing me as bhaiya in a most innocent tone, asked me if I could buy a slate for him from the street-vendor down there. There was a trained instinct in me to look away, as I regularly do at the traffic lights of Delhi when similarly looking children knock at my window. I sometimes pretend to sleep or look into my phone to save myself from my own embarrassment. But this time, that did not seem like an option. The child was in front of me, with no window to use as a shield.
So I decided to acknowledge his address. I accepted the title of bhaiya in this momentary exchange. Then, the second line of defence. Stepped in the upper middle class prejudice that all beggars are frauds, I asked him: will you really use the slate or will you resell it? I don’t know why I asked that question. What would a child about ten years old do with a slate except use it? But, you know, “there could a cartel somewhere, some big boss coordinating a racket of children for his benefit.” He, not flinching, in the same tone, said he wanted to use it. I accepted his sincerity and got up with my friend. We went to the vendor and I asked the child what he wanted. He pointed at a plastic slate with a pen. I asked the vendor how much it was for. Sixty rupees. iPhone. Google Pay. I handed the slate to the child. He took it and sat on the footpath. We went back and sat on the stairs.
I could now barely register any conversation my friend tried to make. My attention was absorbed by this child. In all probability, he did not care for me, and rightly so. I did not do him any favour. If anything, he did me one by giving me the dignity of being called bhaiya when my class and caste position are at odds with any kind of brotherhood with him. Having been allowed that indulgence, I looked at him. He did not go resell the slate. He sat on the footpath and scribbled with a pen on the slate. I kept looking at him. There was nothing else I could do, except mentally revise the Marx I have learned at university, pretending to know why there was such a gap between the child and me.
We were getting late for a Sunidhi Chauhan concert. The Patrika Gate photos had been clicked. The pre-wedding shoots were still on in full intensity. I told my friend I wanted to say hi to the child before leaving. I asked him what his name was. He responded with a single word, barely looking at me, engrossed in retracing the letters of the English alphabet that were there on the slate. I asked him if he went to school. He nodded no. I asked him why. He said “I haven’t gone there yet.” There was nothing more to be said or done (or perhaps there was or could be: there was nothing I thought I could at that moment). The encounter had ceased, I now realised, the moment I decided to buy the slate. The purchase was a transaction; the small talk a guilt-salvaging device.
The child did not care for my name. He was wiser than me, for he knew that even his name didn’t matter for me even as I asked for it. It didn’t matter to him how he appeared in my cognitive map. This is what an Other is. In Giving an Account of Oneself (2003), Judith Butler, building on Levinas, writes: “I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others” (p.84). In the encounter with the Other, the Other’s “face is turned toward me, individuating me through its address” (pp 90-91). The child’s address to me implicated me into a relationality with him, however fragile. The only victory I can claim is that I allowed him to act upon me. My journey back to our hotel in the cab was spent in looking out the window wistfully and managing my emotions. The child probably would have proceeded to retrace the numbers that were present below the alphabet.