UNCOMFORTABLE IN COMFORT - Being 'rich' in Dehra Doon.

Nearly two years ago, my husband and I bought a small piece of land here in Dehra Doon, the town in India where we have lived for more than a decade. "By next Christmas," we told the children, "we will be in our own house." That Christmas came and went and another has just passed. We haven't even had a blueprint drawn, let alone dug a foundation, although we have moved to larger quarters. It is more than just our ability to procrastinate. There is something more fundamental at work which has to do with the nature of life in the place we stumbled into some ten years ago.

I was the one who chose Dehra Doon. It is a pretty area, once you get out of the congested inner city, and the climate is a milder version of what I grew up with in Massachusetts (it never snows). We can see the Himalayas from our terrace, our garden is large and full of flowers, the children can climb trees and ride their bikes, and we like all our neighbors. Both my husband and I run well-known and respected institutions and there is a genuine pleasure in being big fish in a very small pond. But when I consider the rest of my life rolling out here, for that is what building a house implies, I get nervous.

Uttar Pradesh (the state Dehra Doon is in) is one of the poorest, most backward states of India. Illiteracy is high, corruption is a way of life, and even the most basic of civic amenities are in working order only some of the time. Electricity supply is erratic, with power cuts of up to four hours a day the norm. Water comes only at specific times in the morning and evening, always at low pressure and not safe to drink. Roads are an obstacle course of gaping manholes and open drains; sidewalks do not exist. Traffic, if it weren't so dangerous, would be ludicrous. No one has the slightest idea that rules of the road exist: The object is simply to get oneself from point A to point B in the least possible time. Shops and offices open when they feel like it and people work when the mood strikes. It is not uncommon to go to the bank and find there is no cash available or to the post office and find there are no stamps.

So why are we here? Oddly enough, there are a lot of reasons. The first is the way our children are turning out. Although they complain about the sad state of affairs (they have been to the United States often enough to know that things can be different), they have flourished. They are resourceful, adaptable, resilient, and very easy to please. My sister came to visit recently and one of the gifts she brought for the children was spiral notebooks, three each. They were beside themselves with delight, thanking her again and again. She, accustomed to American children who have everything and are generally bored with most of it, was charmed. She was also charmed by our children's good manners and respect for elders and by the fact that they seem not to realize that teen-agers are supposed to be surly and uncommunicative. I know that nice adolescents exist in America too, but I also know it takes much more effort to navigate them through the shoals of that consumer culture.

Another reason is my work. I run a school for children with mental handicaps, in spite of being a college dropout with no qualifications at all. I am just the administrator-I hire experts to work with the kids- but in the United States I wouldn't get past the receptionist's desk. Here, anything goes. There is a real sense of life's endless possibilities, and while I complain about the very lack of government regulation that allows quacks and charlatans to thrive, I know that I benefit from the same. I also know that if I weren't doing this work, it wouldn't be happening, at least not right here. The near total lack of services for children with mental handicaps in towns like Dehra Doon gives my small contribution a significance it would not otherwise have- it is impossible to overstate the pleasure I get as a result. I feel like a pioneer sometimes, with no limits to where I can go and what I can accomplish. Sometimes I can hardly sleep for the excitement.

And yet, and yet....Recently, I received my copy of Commonweal Confronts the Century, the wonderful selection of Commonweal essays of the past seventy-five years, and I was particularly disturbed by the very first one: "Terror in Vienna" by George Shuster. The essay is a chilling account of the descent into madness of that "quiet, dignified city" during the Nazi takeover, when Jews were hunted down in the streets and killed in cold blood. I believe it was the immediacy of Shuster's description, albeit sixty years later, that has put me into my present frame of mind.

For although the situation is very different politically, the same thing could happen here. There is an undercurrent of violence and desperation that permeates even the most ordinary situations in India, at least in the volatile North. One moves with instinctive caution in crowds. There is no telling what the spark will be.

Until fairly recently, however, in spite of understanding how wide the gulf was between me and the poor, I somehow believed our family would be safe in the event of trouble. Not that I actually thought about it much. Our lives were so simple and pared down that it didn't occur to me very often to think about the differences that separated us from the poor. While sober analysis could persuade me that in the eyes of an angry revolutionary my life was not much different from a fat cat Republican's, on a day-to-day level I believed the difference was vast and this saved me from many sleepless nights of anxiety.

Now, however, I am forced by circumstances to be much clearer about my position here. In the past year, my husband and I have suddenly become wealthy. Not by American standards-our combined income is less than $9000 a year-but relative to our community here. We have moved to a large house, we have a formidable collection of household helpers, and I, anyway, have simply stopped thinking about money as an obstacle in my life. Where before I would shop as the poor do, buying only enough for the moment (one roll of toilet paper at a time, for example; although no poor person here would ever dream of buying toilet paper! My argument keeps breaking down!), now I behave as if I am in the United States where time itself is money and where wasting it by shopping every day when one trip would suffice for the week would be silly. I buy in bulk now and get annoyed, not stricken, when something runs out unexpectedly. I no longer keep up with the daily fluctuations of vegetable prices and couldn't say anymore how much a kilo of sugar costs.

This blase attitude to the daily necessities has distanced me from the poor more than anything else I can think of, and it has changed everything in its wake. I think of myself differently now, as more worthy, somehow, more deserving of whatever it is I happen to want at the moment. Now that my house is more comfortable, I am less tolerant of being disturbed in it. Now that I have staff taking care of both my home and my office, I am more impatient when they slip up. Now that I have more gadgets and toys, I am more frustrated when there is no electricity to run them.

In America, where it is possible to live surrounded mainly by people who are making choices similar to one's own, where one can confidently expect that systems will function and the goods will be delivered, it is more difficult to see reality as it is for most of the world, and to judge ourselves and our role in the perpetuation of inequity. In India, there is no such luxury. My complicity and culpability stare me in the face every day. India tells the truth and I am not sure I want to hear it.