LIVING IN A DOLL HOUSE
A long time ago Kathe and I invited an aquaintance and his wife who had gone on a trip to India with me to our house for dinner. Both he and his wife had a good deal more money than us and a large house on a hill with a great view but no children. Without meaning to be unkind, and we liked both of them so they could talk freely, the wife complimented the beauty of our house and said, “It is like living in a doll house.”
That comment has stuck with me for while it is true that I have one of the smaller houses of about fifteen on our street, I have always felt that I live in a mansion on a hill, and now that I live here by myself the house seems much too big for me and I only heat and live in half of it. My children are gone so I have a lot of unused space, but the main reason that I feel as if I have a mansion on the hill is when I compare it to the houses of rickshaw drivers or boatmen in Varanasi where a family of five to eight live in a 12 foot square single room with the mud stove in one corner and clothes kept in neatly in tin trunks piled on top of each other and the family sleeps on one huge bed or several string bed charpoys. My house in comparison is enormous and filled with stuff.
This is the dilemma that I am suddenly faced with and it has two sides that I can’t reconcile. On one hand it is obviously unfair that I live live in a spacious house with every kind of electrical device, electrical servant, which means that I can live with the endless freedom from domestic work that actual servants used to give the middle or upper class even in America and certainly still in India (as a boy in Allahabad we had at least ten servants). Even without actual servants I lead a charmed life.
And I know that I have done nothing to deserve this. I was born in a rich country where everyone can live decently, my parents were educated and made sure I was educated. I live in a country that can afford a great infrastructure with libraries, parks, wide highways, clean water, cheap electricity and more and more, all things I take for granted. So it is clear to me that I am undeservedly privileged and that by doing little to change an unfair world I am complicit in inequality of all kinds.
That is one side of my dilemma. The other side just occurred to me this afternoon. I suddenly realized that when I have sat in the one room hut in India and shared their supper, with the best pieces of fish given to me as the guest, that everyone was very friendly and happy to have me there. They weren’t upset that I had so much and they had so little. They seemed not to know that they had little, in fact as they shared their food with me I had the feeling that they were proud of their house and their meal and their family and completely disregarded my obviously much greater wealth with a car and big house and money to fly around the world and stay in a nice hotel. I had the feeling they wouldn’t want to trade with me, they were happy just as they were and if they could have anything they wanted, what they would like would be to have a new bicycle rickshaw to taxi people around in. These people weren’t jealous at all of me I realize now.
And the way I got to this as I was walking up Jones Mountain was that I suddenly realized that there are people in Asheville who have huge houses, and a vacation house, and money to travel anywhere and who stay in $500 a night hotels. And they, like my friends, would look at my doll house and think it was cute but could never live that way. It might have disturbed them that it was unfair that they have so much and I have so little. But the odd thing is that I was quite happy to have them in my house and felt no jealousy at all. More than having no jealousy, if my house is too big for me I certainly wouldn’t want a house that is two or three times bigger.
And then I wondered if my rich friends envied the super rich with $25 million mansions, homes in several cities, large yachts bobbing in elegant harbors and on and on. Probably not.
I began to wonder if each of us lives in our own community as our whole world and simply don’t consider other communities or ways of life. None of us are going to lead the revolution to change the world. We accept it as it comes to us.
This is my dilemma. Awareness of the fact that each of us accepts our place in the world and what we are born into which means that I can drop my feeling of being undeservedly privileged and being a part of the reason for inequality in the world, not feeling a need to change my lifestyle even as the world begins to roast. There is no reason to feel sorry for Indian villagers with very little and no education and few prospects because they seem quite cheerful as they are. It may be a world with extreme inequality but if we are all happy with what we have then it is the best of all possible worlds. Let billionares use their excess money fly to the moon while Indian villagers with unclean water accept their chances uncomplainingly. And of course this seems nuts even as I say it.
I am not saying this is anyone else’s dilemma and on Thanksgiving when stuffed with turkey the twinge this dilemma gives me will fade away. But right now I feel it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 