Emigrant Lifts Horizons of village Girls
New York Times - January 23,
2000
Doobher Kishanpur, India Jan 17- The New
York City cabby, a big-bellied, fast-talking philosopher-driver with a
hide as tough as a water buffalo, stood in the doorway of a school here
today, sweetly bidding farewell to 180 little girls in blue-and-white
gingham who poured in to a dusty brick lane at the end of the school day.
Namaste, Om Dutta Sharma said to them,
pressing his hands together in the prayerful Hindi greeting (pronounced
"nah-MAH-stay) as they chorused back their own tinkling goodbyes.
For 20 years, Mr. Sharma has barreled
through the streets of Manhattan in a yellow taxi, saying his crumpled
tips, never taking his wife out to eat, scrimping on new clothes for his
sons, to make this act of goodness possible. He has given his village a
school for girls and named it for his illiterate mother, Ram Kali.
In New York, Mr. Sharma and his wife are
just struggling immigrants. But here in his village - a place without even
a single telephone - their incomes, modest by American standards, make
them philanthropists-"I am worthless in New York", said Mr.
Sharma, whose father grew sugar cane on a 10 acre plot nearby. "Here,
I am everything".
The two-story brick house where Mr.
Sharma, 65, was raised is now filled with first to fifth graders
laboriously scratching out their lessons in chalk. One recent afternoon,
rows of girls in bright red sweaters sat on the roof in the warm winter
sun poring over their sums while a man on the next roof shaped fuel
patties from dung.
The Sharmas can afford to educate and
care for these farmers daughters because money buys more here than in New
York.
Mr. Sharma and his wife, Krishna, nurse
at Bellevue Hospital Center, contribute the $2,500 a year it costs to run
the bare-bones school. The girls sit on the floor and write on small
chalkboards. Each of the five teachers earns just $35 to $55 a month.
To hire a local doctor to give the girls
regular checkups, Mr. Sharma spent $500 more from the earnings of a mango
orchard he planted years ago when he and his brother inherited the family
plot.
Mr. Sharma is now expanding the school
so that 500 girls can attend through high school. To pay for his ambitious
plan, he says he and his brother have submitted affidavits promising to
donate the family's 10 acres of land to a charitable trust they have set
up in India, Mr. Sharma will also give half the money from the sale of his
taxi medallion, which he estimates is worth $ 220,000. He bought it in
1981 for $ 75,000, and said he planned to sell it when he retired in three
or four years.
If he succeeds, more girls in the
village will have a chance of schooling beyond the primary grades, a step
forward in traditional north Indian villages like this one, where a girl's
odds of learning to read and write are much lower than a boy's .
The mother of a 9 year-old explained
that her daughter would not be permitted to go to coeducational public
school after she finishes the fifth grade at Mr. Sharma's school. Many
villagers want their girls to go to girls-only school, even though the
public schools are open to both boys and girls.
"We villagers don't like that,
"said the mother, Sumitra, her hands determinedly planted on her hips
as her daughter, Nancy, stood meekly beside her, eyes downcast. "
After fifth, if will be necessary to hold her back, But if there is a
girls' school, she can go up to 10th."
The Sharmas, who live in Woodside,
Queens, are educating their own sons too these days. They have taken out
$50,000 in loans to pay for Pramanik and Prasheel's college years at St.
John's University in Queens, Mrs. Sharma said.
Even so, after Mr. Sharma's mother died
in 1996,hefelt that the time was right to take on the cost of educating
some little girls he did not know in a village where he no longer lived.
The doors of the Ram Kali School for Girls opened in the summer of 1997.
You are always getting, getting,
getting". Mr. Sharma said.. "You have to give it back.
But getting has not always come easily
to the Sharmas. After they immigrated to New York in 1994, Mrs. Sharma got
a New York City nursing license and readily found work. But Mr. Sharma,
who had earned a law degree in India through a correspondence course,
decided not to practice in the United States after he found out that he
would have to go back to law school and pass the bar exam.
In those early years, he worked as
cashier at Burger King, a machine operator in a wood-cutting factory and
an insurance salesman, but nothing lasted long, his wife said. Then one
day in1979, he hailed a cab and the Greek man behind the wheel told him
how to get a hack license. He became a taxi driver.
In his wife's eyes, her lawyer husband
had fallen from Mount Everest to the depths of the Indian Ocean, he said
Mrs. Sharma, whose father was also a
lawyer said she was shocked by her husband's new line of work. In India,
no professional person would give their daughter to a driver, she said.
But Mr. Sharma loved the job. Most of
all, he loved talking to his passengers about politics and the meaning of
life in conversations snatched during traffic jams. He worked 12 to 15
hours a day, seven days a week. If I sit at a desk in an office, I am dead
meat, he said.
Always, he was charitable, giving free
rides to old people or money to a poor family in his village to help out
with wedding expenses. Mrs. Sharma said her husband's generosity was
painful for her as they struggled to pay their mortgage and heating bills.
And she was angry that she and their two sons saw little of him during
those years when he was working such long hours.
I am here 22 years, said Mrs. Sharma,
who stayed home in Queens this year to save the cost of the air fare, I
never went to one restaurant with him. I never went to one movie with him.
He never bought me even one dress. In my living room, one of my TV's-you
can't see the picture properly. He comes home and watches it at night. I
said whey don't you fix the tube. He said, No I have to go to India. I may
need money for the school.
Despite all the penny-pinching. Mrs.
Sharma supports and admires her husband desire to good. It is she who has
packed her sons lunches to save on cafeteria food. Many people give to
hospital and schools, she said. But those are millionaires. How many poor
and middle-class people have done this.
After sparring about American foreign
policy with a passenger recently, Mr. Sharma said he explained his motives
for giving away what he has. The passenger exasperated that Mr. Sharma had
called the United States hypocritical for batting to stop ethnic massacres
in Kosovo but failing to stop them in Rwanda, asked him. If you hate
America so much, why do you live here?
Oh my God, this is a beautiful question
you have asked, and I am going to give you the answer.
Mr. Sharma replied. He reminded the
passenger about the First Amendment, which gives a talker like Mr. Sharma
the liberty to say whatever he thinks. He also told the man he is here to
help the motherland he left 25 years ago.
American technology overpowering the
poor countries like India by hook or by crook. He said. It is my moral
duty to take back some wealth, by drop, drop, drop.