Worse Than Coleslaw

So I was in India for a while doing an internship with a human rights advocacy group. A big project I was given at my internship had me researching the history of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 1985. As part of this research, I was required to look at the debates held in Lok Sabha upon the bill’s passage and subsequent renewal every two years until 1995. A quick glance at the Lok Sabha website revealed—well it revealed a few things, not the least of which that the government of India really, really likes scrolling marquee—but also that the website only hosts electronic copies of debates after about 1995.

I was told that I’d need to go to a law library to find the relevant debates in hard copy. My boss suggested the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in the Teen Murti House, saying that the Indian Law Institute was a terrible place that should be avoided at all costs.

Visit the first (Thursday)

The first thing most foreign visitors will notice about the Nehru Memorial Library is that it is small. The Hillsdale Library that I go to in Portland is bigger, and that is just a branch in a mid-sized city in the United States, not a memorial library named for the George Washington of India in the capital of the second-most populous country in the world. Being in Delhi for any length of time without going crazy requires you to give everything the benefit of the doubt, though, so I justified the disparity to myself by saying that the Nehru Library was geared more towards high-level academic research and rare books and things like that. The fact that they didn’t have a giant section devoted to manga shouldn’t be held against them.

Admission for me to the Nehru Memorial Library required a letter written by my employer explaining why I needed access to the library. I also paid a fee of 200 rupees (about $5 US), which got me access for about two weeks from the date of my initial admission. To put that fee in perspective, a three-course meal at a dhaba near my apartment cost about 30 rupees, and a tuk-tuk ride from my apartment in South Delhi to the other side of the city cost about 100 rupees. So for India, this was a non-trivial amount of money, especially since the word “library” in the West is traditionally associated with buildings full of books that anyone can look at for free. Whatever, stuff costs money to maintain, and it would totally have been worth the five bucks to find the information I needed for my project.

After getting all my documents in order, I was given a slip of paper with dates written on it. I was led by a librarian to the back of the library and through an imposing door marked “Employees Only.” We walked through a large, dimly-lit storage area stacked all around with cardboard boxes and arrived at a door that looked as though it should lead to a meat locker. The librarian opened that door, which turned out to lead to a pitch-black room. A short man emerged from the darkness and said something in Hindi. The librarian turned to me. “No power,” he said.1

“Do you have any idea when the power will come back on?” I asked, thinking that maybe this was a regular occurrence.

The librarian thought for a moment. “Come back at three o’clock,” he said. It was about 11 o’clock in the morning. I had enough work to do for my internship, and little enough time to do it in, that I was not thrilled about waiting around for four hours for something that might not ever actually happen, especially since I was fighting a case of the Delhi belly and was not happy about being so long away from a clean toilet. I left, defeated, and resolved to return the following day.

Visit the second (Saturday)

I called my boss and asked him to call the Nehru Library to check if the power was working. He told me that calling the number on the website wouldn’t accomplish anything, and that I would need to just go there and take my chances. I’d checked the hours of operation of the Nehru Memorial Library when I was there, as the library’s website does not contain that information. The sign out front said that the library opened at 9:00 AM and closed at 5:00 PM, Tuesday through Friday. The day after my first visit I had too much work to do to spend the time messing with what I knew would be a trying and time-consuming experience, so I ended up waiting until Saturday to make the trek out there.

I caught a tuk-tuk to Govind Puri Metro Station, then rode the Violet Line up to Central Secretariat, then another tuk-tuk over to the front gate of the Nehru Museum, and walked from there to the library. The trip took about an hour.

The librarian, a middle-aged woman who looked exactly like you’d expect a librarian to look, squinted at the sheet of paper, then looked up at me, then back at the paper. “Go inside there,” she barked, handing me back the paper and motioning at a closed office door. I went through the door and found myself staring face to face with a short, bespectacled man sitting at a desk covered in loose papers. His hair had been dyed with henna. It was orange.

I gave the orange-haired man a rundown of what I was looking for. I said that I needed to go into the Parliamentary debates section.

“That section is closed today,” he said, in a tone of voice like you’d use on a little kid who was asking why dogs sometimes sniff each others butts.

“Closed? Why is it closed?” I asked. The question apparently struck him as being unreasonable.

“You need an escort to take you back to the room where the debates are held, and we do not have enough staff members to take you back there today.” This statement was problematic for at least two reasons. First, as far as I knew, I was not asking to view the original Constitution of India or some other sensitive or valuable materials. The debate volumes were just books. Second, there were at least three employees working at the library that day—none of whom seemed to be doing anything particularly important—and no library patrons that I could see.

The situation escalated. I handled it poorly. I may or may not have offered him a bribe to let me into the room with the debate volumes.

Visit the third (Tuesday)

Visits out in Delhi were best done with others, if for no other reason than it was nice to have someone there to witness crazy stuff happening and confirm that it was, indeed, happening, and also crazy.2 To that end, on my third trip out to the Nehru Library I brought along a coworker of mine who had just been given a short research assignment to complete which also required the perusal of some Lok Sabha debate volumes.

My coworker’s name was Ryan. Ryan and I lived in the same building in Tughlakabad Extension, along with most of the other interns at our office. We took a tuk-tuk over to the Nehru Museum, skipping the metro. Ryan needed to register with the library office. I waited out in front of the office while he got that sorted. When he came out of the office with his own little slip of paper with dates written on it, he said, “That guy in there just told me they didn’t have any Parliamentary debates here.”

“The guy in there is full of shit, then,” I said. Keep in mind, this wasn’t a case of some underpaid teenager dragging his ass while he made my latte at Stabucks. This was a highly skilled librarian working at a respected academic institution who so could not be bothered to get out of his chair to look some crap up on a computer that he would lie straight to my coworker’s face to get rid of him.

We walked up to the circulation desk again and explained what we needed. The librarian working the desk could not think of any new reasons to deny our request, so she called over another library employee who took us back to the room with the meat locker door. The lights were on this time. The room was drab and musty, with shelves that could be moved right up against each other using a crank in order to preseve space. Librarian guy told us to let him know when we were done and left to go attend to his other responsibilities.

The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act was passed in 1985. After five minutes of browsing the debates, I discovered that the index volumes for 1985 were missing. The index volumes were what I needed, as they would allow me to look up the name of the law to figure out where the debates concerning that law were located. I went looking for a librarian who could tell me where the index volumes were.

As I exited the room, a library employee stopped me. He asked me what I was doing. I told him what I was doing.

“Who told you that you could go back there by yourself?” he asked.

“A library employee,” I said. “I asked them where the debates were, and she called up some guy to take me back there.”

“Which employee?” he said.

“I didn’t think to take down his personal information,” I said.3

He looked nonplussed. “Wait here,” he said. He went up to the circulation desk. A few moments later a woman walked up to me and told me she would take me back to the room with the debates to supervise me and help me find what I needed. Once we had passed through the meat locker door, I explained my situation to her.

After scanning the shelves to determine that, indeed, the index volumes were missing, she said, “The index volumes are missing.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said. “Where are they?”

“We don’t have them,” she said.

“So how am I supposed to find anything in these volumes?”

“Just flip through the books until you find what you need,” she said.

The volumes for 1985 occupied an entire library shelf, literally tens of thousands of pages of information organized by date of the debates rather than by topic, making them particularly unsuited for locating specific information without an index volume. “Is there not an easier way to find this information?” I said. She seemed confused at my question.

“All you have to do is look through the books.” She took down a volume and mimed flipping through it. There was a pause as she looked at her watch. “However, it is almost lunchtime, so you will need to leave and come back after lunch when someone can be here to monitor you while you are in this room.”

“What time will lunch be over?” I asked.

“Come back about two o’clock,” she said. It was 11:30 in the morning.

I called up my boss to tell him what had happened. “A librarian mentioned that there was actually a Parliamentary library that should have all the index volumes,” I said. “Maybe I should try there.”

“You don’t want to go there,” he said. “Access to it is very heavily restricted.”

Aftermath

I never did find the information I was looking for. The closest I ever came was a People’s Union for Democratic Rights report entitled “Lawless Roads,” which contained references to the debates I needed but which only cited the source of that information as “Lok Sabha debates, relevant volumes” and was, thus, not helpful. Why any professional organization would think it was acceptable to half-ass their citations like that is beyond me.

It is my sincere wish that this blog post obtain a higher search engine page rank than the actual Nehru Memorial Library website so that all potential visitors to the library have a better sense of what they are getting themselves into. This does not seem like that outlandish of a goal because, as of this writing, only 38,454 people have ever viewed the Nehru Memorial Library’s website according to the oh-so-1995 visitor counter contraption they have at the bottom of the front page. My guess is that almost all of those visitors left without the information they were looking for. Likewise, any person searching for “Nehru Memorial Library” and “hours of operation” will not find what he or she is looking for on the actual Nehru Memorial Library website, which, as I have already mentioned, is terrible and useless.

From what I recall, the hours of operation are 9:00 to 5:00, Tuesday through Saturday.

It was never quite clear what people should call me when I was on the job.

To begin with, my first name, Matthew, carries with it some inherent difficulties when transliterated into Japanese, namely that there is no “TH” sound.  My students pronounced my name “Mah-shew,” which was pretty adorable, but did not really address issues of protocol and respect.  Depending on the school and the class, I was referred to as just “Matthew,” “Matthew-sensei,” “Matt-sensei,” “Mr. Matt,” or by the simple title of “Teacher.”  I didn’t even try to teach them my last name, which contains not only another “TH” sound, but also an “L.”

One day while we were walking to class, the Japanese English teacher I worked with at the School of Suck in Shizukuishi asked me about the origins of my name.

“The name ‘Matthew’ is from the Bible, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.  ”In the Bible, Matthew was one of the disciples of Jesus.”

“Disciples?” he said.

“Followers,” I said.  The teacher nodded and grunted in affirmation.  I said, “Matthew also wrote one of the books of the Bible.”

“In the New Testament,” the teacher said, eager to show off his knowledge of Western religion.

A few days after this conversation I was in a class being bombarded with queries; occasionally we would just give up on the lesson and let the students ask me questions about myself or American culture or whatever, usually translated from Japanese by this same teacher, who supervised me while I was teaching at the School of Suck.  The boys in that class were very interested to hear about guns and the American military, coming as they did from a place where guns are not present anywhere.  One of them asked me if I’d ever fired a gun before, to which I replied, “Yes.”

“What was it like?” they asked, via the Japanese instructor.

I thought about this for a moment.  ”It hurt,” I said.  There were disbelieving exclamations of “Ehhhhhhh?” and “Uso!” that were pretty common occurrences in these sorts of conversations.  To clarify my point, I mimed shooting a rifle and rubbed my shoulder with a pained look on my face, and most of the students seemed to understand that I was talking about the recoil, although it looked as though this was not something they’d ever thought of.

Another student asked, “In America, did you fire a gun often?”

“No,” I said.  ”I do not like guns.”  This was an oversimplification of my general attitude towards firearms, but oversimplification out of necessity was always the way of things in Japan.  My students apparently had a hard time grasping how I could have lived my whole life in the United States and not have spent all my time blowing the crap out of milk bottles and bowling pins.  What a wasted youth.  Then their Japanese teacher pointed at me and said “Christian desu,” by way of explanation.  The conversation that ensued lasted about 15 seconds, during which time I assume he was explaining the Christian idealization of nonviolence—not actually seen all that often in the Western world anymore, but it is technically in the books.  The conversation ended with a lot of nods and knowing smiles.  I did not have the patience or the inclination to clarify that many Christians in my country were actually super hardcore gun enthusiasts, or that calling me a Christian at all was kind of a stretch, thus perpetuating an idealized and largely incorrect  stereotype.

As I’ve said before, I didn’t really have the proper disposition to be a teacher.

A few weeks later I was experiencing a similar barrage of questions, this time from the girl’s side of one of the first year classes at the School of Suck.  It began with them wanting to know if I had a girlfriend in the United States, and also if I had a girlfriend in Japan.

For some reason, many of the girls at both of the schools where I taught were obsessed with getting me laid.  It was endearing, if a tad creepy.

I’d already opened Pandora’s Box by telling them that my regular tutor at the weekly Japanese class I attended was a woman about my age, and they wanted to know why we hadn’t hooked up.  None of my explanations for this lack of action were acceptable to them, and in fact even a year later I actually am still not quite sure about the answer to that question myself, except to say that I am very stupid.

Before the situation became too embarrassing—when my blush reflex is triggered my entire head turns the color of a tomato, which tended to cause a lot of chaotic situations when standing in front of 40 high school age kids who had limited experience with white people—and without any prompting from me, the Japanese instructor mentioned the Christian Hypothesis once more, and all was once again right with the world.  In fact, the Christian Hypothesis became a convenient explanation for all sorts of weird things that I did or failed to do during my tenure as ALT at the School of Suck.

This did not, however, save me from being berated for my failure to take a Japanese lover by that same asshole teacher one night when we split a pizza and a bottle of red wine at this little “Italian” place in Morioka.  I think he thought I was retarded—like, literally, retarded:

“Your Japanese instructor is a woman?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And she is how old?”

“24,” I said.

“And you are how old?”

“24,” I said.

To him it was as simple as that, and he shook his head while his face wore an exasperated frown.  I could have hated him for that, if I hadn’t already hated him for all of the bullshit he put me through during school hours.  Really, the only good thing to come of that evening would be later on when this guy commented how surprised he was at my alcohol tolerance.  “I did not expect you to be able to drink this much,” he said.

Only in Japan would that ever happen.

For a long time after returning back to the United States, months and months, I found myself uttering some permutation of the phrase, “Hey, I just got back from Japan,” to justify all sorts of lapses and indulgences on my part.  If I felt tired and didn’t feel like doing any job hunting on a particular day, I’d tell myself that that was okay, that I had a window of ennui in which it was acceptable for me to act like a college student on summer vacation.  If I didn’t feel like working out or eating healthy food, I’d tell myself that I had a grace period in which to allow myself to lapse.  My feeling was that I had just accomplished something truly extraordinary, and that doors should to life should be thrown open as I walked up to them like in the opening of “Get Smart.”  It felt as if I had just gotten back from Japan up until some vague point several months ago when I found myself thinking of Japan in a wistful and very-much-nostalgic sort of way as if that whole affair had gone down decades before. This shift has been reflected in many small ways throughout my daily life, as in a conversation with one of my coworkers during a slow period at work in which I was trying to justify why it was that I had not yet moved on to bigger and better things.

“Hey, give me a break, I said. “I just got back from Japan.” This must be what it feels like to return from a war, minus the post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Wasn’t that, like, five months ago?” she said.

I paused, my momentum reduced to zero, cocked my head to one side in consideration, and said, “I suppose.”

This conversation took place about six months ago.  I guess that means it’s time to move on.

Lately I’ve been occupied with applying to law school after taking the LSAT and receiving a pretty decent score.  At this point I’ve heard back from and been accepted to nine schools out of a total of 12 applications that I’ve submitted to various places.  Four or five of those schools to which I’ve been accepted are even ones that I actually want to go to, so well done there as well.  The next step is figuring out where I’ll best fit and how I’m going to pay for it.

My decision to pursue a JD flies in the face of several years of liberal arts posturing on the part of my high school and college self.  For a long time I always assumed I would be a writer and that that would become my regular day job through some nebulous process that I did not ever grasp, although I rarely let the label of “writer” define my actions by, you know, actually ever writing anything.  Years later I discovered that being a freelancer basically means that your job is to constantly be applying for jobs, and this career path seemed much less attractive to me.

“Worse Than Coleslaw” should begin being updated more regularly now that I have some distance and perspective on things and am no longer under the pressure to get it all down right now while it’s fresh in my mind holy crap there’s so much happening in every single second and how am I going to write about it all? I foresee future posts taking the form of short, disembodied anecdotes about my life in Japan that I never had the time or the patience to incorporate into a larger discussion of underlying themes or neuroses.  These will be interspersed with details on the law school admissions process, thoughts on the life of a twenty-something semi-recluse, and any other stupid thing that I feel like writing about.

I’ve come to the slow realization that I have already done the scariest thing I am ever likely to do, barring anything crazy like a combat situation or battling cancer.  Whatever else happens, I can rest easy in the knowledge that I spent seven months staring down a roomful after roomful of 30 or 40 catatonic Japanese high school kids and was somehow able to get through it.  I feel pretty good about whatever the future holds, confident as I am that I’ll find a way to handle anything that comes my way.

I have pictures up on Picasa from my trip to Kyoto in April, 2009.  Kyoto is a fun place that every human would benefit from seeing at least once in her or his life.  Here are some choice moments in all of their embedded Flash-y goodness: