My kids are off to school tomorrow, starting another year. But along with all of the adjustments entailed comes a new one: their Central Ohio suburban, public school is worlds away from the international school they attended last year in India, the American Embassy School.
AES pretty much gave shape to our entire stay in India. Of course, having kids in school at all grounds you in a specific place for a given length of time, for better and for worse. And this school’s particular schedule for younger children, forcing us to make three trips to school per day, completely transformed our plans about what we could accomplish on the day-to-day level. In short, we were doing as much balancing of childcare and work as we do in the US, but now with less support and independence.
I’m going to try to put into words some of the sharply contradictory feelings I had about this AES experience, as a way to try to grapple with it. I realize, however, that there are potential readers of this post, dear friends of mine, who might take some of this the wrong way. So I ask them to keep at the front of their minds what I always do: ultimately, AES provided the teachers, and exactly the kinds of friends and communities, that our hybrid kids needed in a place where they didn’t know the language and had no family.
Whatever the limitations of going to school at a place that basically feels like an armed camp for the wealthy, sitting in the middle of Chanakyapuri, the embassy district of New Delhi, the fact of the matter is that we and our kids met some amazing people there. It’s not a coincidence that my younger daughter keeps a photo of one of her AES friends close by; and that my older one is only now getting over leaving her gang of friends and the memories that shared together over the course of a year.
If you’re looking for a really excellent school and curriculum, AES has got to be right up there. A beautiful campus, complete with an amazing banyan tree in the playground, classrooms with state-of-the art equipment, dedicated and creative teachers, and an overall sense—one that is often trampled out in our test-crazy schools in the US—that education is about encouraging the full development of an individual.
The close-knit nature of the community, mostly American ex-pats in India, provided the right context for the intensive teaching and learning environment. And yet there were also many other nationalities represented in the school: British (including British desis), Ethiopian, Korean, Israeli, South African, etc., as well as Indians. Their presence depended on a mix of things: a desire for American-style education, the lack of space in other international schools, the influx of particular groups in India under globalization (Israeli, Korean), etc. And so the students and families represented an interesting diversity in terms of nationality and ethnicity, even while being under the American rubric.
And yet in some key ways AES was not diverse at all. For one, as we found out the hard way, this was not just a school for international students but for elite international students. By “elite” I mean rich and/or well-placed. The cost of attending AES is as much as paying for private school in the US, which means that it shot a hole through our finances. Worse than this, we found that only a tiny minority were paying out of pocket like us; the rest had embassies, corporations, and others to pick up the tab.
To tell you the truth, governments and businesses are way ahead of academic institutions when giving their people international experience. Whereas the academy talks a lot about global thinking, etc., we have to scrounge for money and time off. My one year in India, with grants that are quite insufficient to cover the real costs, is nevertheless seen, among academics, as a coup. But there we met people on 2- or 3-year stints and supported in terms of housing and childcare.
In any case, the material basis of the AES community translated into a social environment that sometimes felt like the old colonial clubs described in literary and scholarly texts. There’s a great scene in George Orwell’s Burmese Days describing how the British would get together in their whites-only club and vent about the Indian weather, the Indian people, the need for a form hand to train the natives, etc. There were conversations I overheard at the Open Hand, the on-campus café with its excellent omelets, that reminded me strongly of these. The high stone walls, the high-level security everywhere, the insular atmosphere gave a tacit license, I often felt, to think about India in the sorts of Orientalist ways that international travel is supposed to contest.
And it makes sense that this should be the case, right? Their purpose in India is largely for making profits and gaining political foot-holds, and places like AES become sites for such people to “take a break” from India. There’s a way in which the folks who go abroad from the West need to be able to adjust to new places, and that’s well and good. We often felt like we could not handle the sense of displacement as long as many of these people did. But they often make these adjustments, as I saw at close hand, by building huge walls–physical and mental–between themselves and the place they happen to be in at the moment. It’s one thing to look for something familiar in order to get a sense of home; it’s another to actively shun the place you’ve come to.
As the narrator of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines says, there is a sort of ex-pat who goes around the world but actually hardly moves, remaining trapped in his/her own mind and preconceptions.
But in the middle of all these complications, we found the right kinds of people—those that bond with you instantly, and make you think, when you’ve left, “If I ever lose touch with them, shame on me.” These down-to-earth folks were from all over, including Africa, Great Britain, El Salvador, India, Pakistan, Spain and, yes, the US of A.—and shared the same goals of thinking and living past the boundaries created, like it or not, by being an ex-pat. These friends enriched our lives, and extended our horizons.
Could there have been another place in Delhi for an American Desi family like ours? Probably. But such a place would also be a quite rarefied and elite environment, I’m told, and just a different kind of elite space. In any case, nothing ultimately could have beat the smooth transitions, in and out, that AES provided. And the relationships we made there: priceless.
