By LILIANA GIL, 6/13/2016. Uxa is fifteen years younger than me, but we get along immediately. We ended up meeting her family after her father approached us at a grocery shop. He had heard us speaking in Portuguese, one of his five languages, and was eager to practice it – “we don’t get many tourists from Portugal in Goa.” Now we were sitting in the house’s only bedroom, having tea and chatting about Uxa’s school curricula.
Together we go through her 9th grade history textbook. The content is incredibly worldly – French Revolution, democracy in Eastern Europe, beauty standards across cultures, … I lose myself in Gandhi’s experiments with clothing, as I had just learned about the Khadi and Village Industries Commissions and how they apply principles of self-reliance to rural economy by collecting khadi cotton and other handcrafted products from small producers and organizing their distribution and sale all over India. When Uxa asks me about my 9th grade history curriculum, I get a little embarrassed. “It’s mostly about Portugal,” I say, avoiding the topic. The last thing I want at this point is to tell her how I learned to celebrate the “Discoveries” and Goa’s four-hundred years of occupation as great national achievements.
With impeccable British accent, slightly imperfect grammar, and unshakable confidence, Uxa laments being in a public school. She wants to go to college and feels she’s not getting the best preparation possible. Her marks are great, though, and her father assures that she will be successful. But I wonder where she works and keeps her things. The room is so small and modest and poorly lit. Uxa searches for something – “I’ve built a robot, do you want to see it?” The little bug has two toothbrush heads glued side-by-side and is thrusted by a rotating device connected to a small battery. It cleans the floor. “I could scale it up, but it would be expensive.” I smile. You go, girl.
