Get thee to a Nunnery

Technically, I do not live in a nunnery. There's a wealthy family who lives on the first floor and owns several farms in the area. Some members are abroad, but the grandmother, who is about four feet and has enormous gold jewelry in her nose, is the matriarch of the place. Her son, who is a dwarf, also lives there, with his beautiful wife who washes clothes, and their two small children. A teenage boy also lives there and appears to be part of the family. The woman who cleans for them also cooks and cleans for us, and we all eat well. (Having a cook might seem to contradict the vow of poverty but it is a huge help given the fact that everyone is working all the time.)

We smile and say hello, but the dwarf didn't speak to me until yesterday. When I got home from work, there were tarps laid out with meat on them Someone was sawing.

"I killed buffalo," he explained, smiling. I had heard that the buffalo, who had been tied in the backyard the past few days, was going to meet its end soon, and apparently yesterday was the day. There was not much of the buffalo left there that night.

Anyway, we are on the second and third floors, and mostly I only feel like I'm in a nunnery in the morning. They have their morning prayer, attended by brother Peter, Paul, and father Amal, from 6:30 to 7, so I tiptoe by the prayer room, which is covered by a cloth curtain, on my way to the shower and back. The shower is at the end of the hall. They promised me that they don't hear me but I still feel a little awkward about it.

It is interesting to live with people who spend a lot of time praying, because it's novel to me. When I'm coming back from my run (think flat roads surrounded by rice paddies, with an ocassional boy on a bicycle from the refugee camps telling me he's moving to Washington) in the morning, I can hear their singing from the road outside. I don't yet know what kind of influence they've had on me, but I do know that I've gotten two of them completely hooked on banannagrams.

Usually the sisters play cards after dinner, but one night this week they were short a sister and I decided it was a good time to introduce the game. They like Scrabble, and bannagrams is basically a cousin as far as games lineage goes. (I apologize in advance to those readers who are not familiar with the game banannagrams, but this will be a good opportunity to learn.)

The Sisters agreed to play, and we put down the tiles. Sister Anacleta spread them out, making sure they were well-mixed, and then when we chose our eleven tiles, she improbably picked almost entirely vowels. This did not phase Sister Anacleta. I'm not sure exactly how this goes, but I believe Father Amal had requested Sister Anacleta to come work here. He had met her back in 1970, when a cyclone hit Andrapradesh. It had been Father's job to help collect the bodies, which he described the first night I met him in horrifying detail. Then they'd had a major de-salinization effort as part of the clean up, so that the land would be farmable again. Sister Anacleta came to audit the process, checking records to see if the diesel had been used for the de-salinization or sold on the side. She's impressive and exactly the person you'd want for such a job: compassionate and unfailingly logical.

Anyway, the game began and I had gotten good letters, so I finished quickly. The sisters took some time getting used to strategy, and I took some time getting used to their term "zed" for "z" when they said things like, "Buzz has two zeds?" Sister Lioba often didn't take an extra tile when someone called peel. I took a tile for her, and she smiled at me. Sister Lioba has a warm smile and she and I have sat for hours at the kitchen table, having tea while the monsoon rains dumped water outside, and she told me stories about teaching Chemistry, and her large family back in Kerala.

I noticed that Sister Lourdes liked to take more time and create words that pleased her. When she managed "love" and "you" together with a common "o", she showed them to me. I admired them, and then reminded her that there were no extra points for these sorts of things. She was also in the habit of turning over tiles to choose a letter she liked when someone said peel. I called her out on cheating, and she smiled at me and insisted she needed certain letters.

Sister Lourdes and I ususally watch the sunsets on the terrace together when it's not raining. She does a walking meditation up there, and then she will come and sit with me. One of my favorite parts of the day is when we watch the sky fall into darkness around us while we talk about anything from the long boat trip she had to take all the way around Africa in the 1960s when the Suez Canal was closed and she had to get back to India from England, or the time she worked in Orissa, or my school, or Victor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning which she and I both love, or about the years when she was the head of a school of social work.

Sister Anacleta joins us sometimes. One day Sister Anacleta brought peanuts, and told me how her family used to grow them on her farm. They grew the kind that had two nuts, since there was more oil in them. They'd grown different things at different times: cotton, red gram, chiles, sorghum. Sister Anacleta lived in the Netherlands for a time, and she talks about that too.

Anyway, I digress. For our first game, Sister Lourdes was the last to finish, her "q" tile set apart from the others.

"Looks like you're having avoidance issues with that "q"" I told her.

"But I have no "u"!" she protested.

"Excuses, excuses," I told her, and Sister Anacleta laughed.

"Excuses, excuses," she repeated, smiling. Sister Anacleta has a small cross tattoo in the middle of her forehead where the tikka, the third eye, goes. I asked her about it, and she told me how, when she was 8, she stole some betel nut from her parents, and snuck off to where the villagers will tattoo you with herbs in exchange for the betel nut. Her mother had forbidden her to go, but then she went anyway. Her family was not so sympathetic when she came back, in pain from the needles from the tatoo.

We decided to play again. "This is also interesting," Sister Anacleta declared, as both she and Sister Lourdes spread the tiles. Sister Lourdes commented on the smooth feel of the tiles. The next games of banannagrams went quickly, as just Sister Lourdes, Sister Anacleta, and I played, and we went with 21 tiles instead of starting with 11. Sister Lourdes then got out their Scrabble set to count how many tiles were there compared to the banannagrams set. Their set is ancient and would probably sell as a collectors item on Ebay. They never asked, but of course I assured her that I had no plans of taking the set of banannagrams with me, and that it would be theirs from now on. She said she still wanted to see how many letters they had in their set, but I think she was happy to know the set would be staying in Damak after I left.

We've played a couple nights since. Last night they mentioned how it would be quite nice if perhaps I could send another set through the mail after I got back. It seems both Sister Anacleta and Sister Lourdes want to make sure they each have a set whenever they are called to move on. I told them I would be more than happy to oblige.