I should be doing laundry

January 5th, 2012. Didi, they call. Didi, badjo. Sister, sit down here, where I lightly pat with my crooked hand, covered in withered skin. I learn new Hindi phrases, slowly, learn names slowly too. I feel there is progress, at least for me. I do not dread the morning so much. Occasionally, I seek the clock, will it faster, talk to the two green parakeets in their tiny cage and sing them sweet lullabies. I sit cross legged and paint nails to women with Parkinson's, the stone cold, and the fields whisking chill air into the courtyard. Often I talk to them, words about my life, asking them about theirs. They respond in a different tongue, in babble, in Hindi, in silence, and I cannot tell the difference. I have conversations, neither of us knowing the other person's words, but I feel it doesn't matter. 
There are moments of joy. Anita, a reclusive woman in her fifties shakes when she talks to me, her voice quivers in English, beautiful English. We watch the others exercise, race from one end of a dirty, hard field to another, and I laugh, because most are walking, some barely move from the starting line, and some trot, cheating by not touching the bench at the other end, and I am reminded of Africa, of my children there, and because I hold these two memories together, I laugh. 
I smile constantly, many times a forced expression of happiness and hopefulness, eyes crinkled, remember to smile with your eyes, but every morning, as a patient tries to hand her broom to my full hands, I smile, and say, for you. She laughs too, we both know she is joking, and I continue to scrub the floor, the marble speckled but shining, the stone damp with streaks of soap and towels and disinfectant. 
Many try to give me their cake, their sweets, their jewelry, precious items to those who have little of their own. I gently push their hands back. For you, I say.
I see love everywhere. The fourteen-year old, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, carried between bed to washroom to floor, unmoving, unspeaking, is fed every meal by an older patient, the matriarch of the center, powerful and tall and broad. A mother feeds her child who shakes her head across the metal beams of the bench, crying out in garble. The blind woman holds my hands and rubs my skin in circles and trapeziods turning them over and back again. Her hands are smooth too. 
My dad read me a passage, part of an essay published in a collection of the best essays of 2011. The writer talked of chapels, of finding silence and peace in a world of screen and images and lights and stimulation. 
I look for my chapel, here, too. For silence, for peace, for those words seemingly unattainable in a country of honking and dirt and cows and dogs and crying and sales. Maybe I find my serenity in the spooing of grains of rice into a tired mouth, wrinkled and toothless, in the rubbing of backs, in the cutting of dirty toenails, in the combing of lice infested hair.