No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis

Valli is a coal picker in Jharia, that is someone who picks up the coal that falls from the baskets carried by the women out of the coal pit. As she walks along the railway tracks picking up bits of coal, Valli spies the "monsters" on the other side of the track and throws a stone at them. They are unclean, some missing a nose, or fingers. As her cousin Sanjay and the other boys continue throwing stones at the group on the other side of the tracks, Valli bends down and steals one of the boys' bag of coal and runs. But Valli doesn't get far and the boys grab her and throw her over the tracks and into the group of monsters on the other side. 

Valli lives with her aunt and uncle and her cousin Elamma. After escaping the monsters, Valli tries to sit and listen to the teacher who comes to the village to give free lessons to the students. Valli is smart and learns quickly but today her cousin Elamma spies her and drives her away from where the teacher is and forces her to go back to the monsters to retrieve her coal bag which was left there.

It is during this altercation that Elamma reveals that Valli is not family, that Valli's mother was sickly and that her grandparents were neighbours who paid Elamma's parents to take Valli. Valli's grandparents moved away because her mother had no husband and therefore had shamed the family. 

Valli goes back to picking coal but is certain Elamma is lying because she was always told that her parents had died. However, Valli decides to go find her aunt who is working in the coal pit and when she comes out to dump her coal, Valli questions her about her mother. While she is doing this, Valli burns her leg on a hot coal but doesn't feel anything. Auntie confirms what Elamma told her. This new knowledge makes Valli realize that she has no family and no friends and therefore, no reason to stay. Her future will be that of her "auntie", working in the coal pit. So she jumps into the back of the coal truck as it's leaving. She can do this because Valli has "magic feet" that do not feel "the rough points and edges of hard chunks of coal." 

The next morning Valli is discovered by Raj and Kam, the two men who were driving the truck. After the men argue about what to do with her, Kam tells her that after they unload the coal they are going to take her to Mrs. Mukerjee in Kolkata. Mrs. Mukerjee agrees to take in Valli who doesn't yet understand where she has been taken. After a meal while locked in the shed, Mrs. Mukerjee takes Valli downstairs and has her bathed and cleaned. However when they try to wash her feet, they see that they are scarred and badly blistered. Valli tells them not to worry because she cannot feel anything on her feet. But when Mrs. Mukerjee examines Valli more closely she sees white patches on her back and legs and realized that Valli is "unclean". After giving Valli and kurta and trousers she is made to leave.

Valli lives on the street for months: she borrows blankets from the unlocked cupboard of the Metropole Hotel, she begs money from tourists, reads the discarded books she finds on the streets of Kolkata, even learning bits of German and Spanish. Valli even tried three times to attend school. Then one day Valli goes to the Ganges to search for coins thrown into the river. After stealing some coins, Valli encounters a woman who is saying prayers for a man who died outside the hospital where she works. When Valli steps into the cremation pit and doesn't seem to notice the woman inspects her feet more closely as well as the white patches on her skin. She tells Valli her name is Indra and that she is a doctor and offers for Valli to come to the hospital for a check-up and a meal. Valli agrees to go but refuses to get into the taxi and so they walk to the hospital.  

At the hospital Valli is fed a delicious meal, has a blood sample taken and her feet treated and bandaged. Dr. Indra tells Valli that she has Hansen's Disease or leprosy. This is the reason Valli's "magic feet" do not feel anything. Dr. Indra explains that what she has is not a punishment but is from being infected by a bacteria. She tells Valli that she can stay at the hospital and be cured. Dr. Indra recognizes that Valli is very intelligent,  and that she is naturally inquisitive about the human body. However, Valli doesn't trust anyone and she is terribly frightened when she wakes in the hospital surrounded by people who also have leprosy and whom she calls "monsters". So she runs away.

Her life doesn't get better though. In the weeks following her visit to the hospital, Valli lives at the Sealdah Railway Station where she helps a young girl named Bharati. However, Valli notices that all the niceness has left her: she doesn't want to keep caring for Bharati, and she laughs after painting Mr. Vishwas toenails.  After seeing herself in the window of a book store, and looking more closely at her feet which now smell bad and look terrible, Valli realizes that her future is like the woman beggar she sees with a starving baby.. She knows she has to make a choice; either stay on the streets and become sicker or go to the hospital and hope that she can make a new and better life for herself.

Discussion

No Ordinary Day tackles the difficult subject of the desperately poor street children of Kolkata. Accomplished author, Deborah Ellis uses the character of Valli, a poor, unwanted orphan who leaves her home of Jharia, a neighbourhood in the city of Dhanbad, to live in Kolkata. The novel focuses not only the desperate poverty of India's poor but also on the prevalence of leprosy in this population.

Valli is an engaging and delightful character, whose intelligence, kindness and innocence is evident throughout the story.  Valli manages to survive on the streets by taking the advice of an old man who is also a beggar. He tells her that she is on an adventure and that without it, it would simply be another ordinary day. He also explains that Valli has more than she realizes and that this makes her rich. "You have a lovely green kurta...You have a beautiful long braid down the middle of your back. To someone without clothes and without hair, you are a millionaire." The man also encourages Valli to share whatever she has with others. This helps Valli in the first few weeks she is on the street. 

In putting into practice what the elderly man has advised, Valli gives a family the soap that she took from Mrs. Mukerjee and in turn they give her some of their food. Valli correctly states that  "Nobody really owns anything. We give back our bodies at the end of our lives. We own our thoughts, but everything else is just borrowed. We use it for a while, then pass it on."  With this mindset, Valli is able to survive for months on the street, "borrowing" and then passing on what she borrows. 

Ellis captures the life of a street child in a way that feels realistic.  When she begs money from Dr. Indra, Valli won't get into a taxi with Dr. Indra because she knows about children who have gone into taxis with strangers and are never seen again. She has learned not to trust people, even doctors. "He smiled at me. He seemed friendly, but I had learned that you couldn't always trust smiles. Some smiles were lies. Some smiles were followed by hands grabbing at you and pulling you into an alley."  When she is given food at the hospital, more than she could ever pay for, Valli decides to eat it all very fast before they take it away from her.

Dr. Indra quickly understands that Valli is very intelligent and so when she takes Valli to the hospital, she spends time explaining what she is doing. She lets Valli listen to her heart with the stethoscope, explains why she is sick. These small actions captivate Valli but not enough to make her stay. She also doesn't understand that she can be cured. 

After running away from the hospital Valli feels that she has thrown away the one chance she had in life. She realizes that she wants more than what she has, which is nothing. 

"I wanted clean bandages again. 

But I wanted more than that.
I wanted to be like Dr. Indra.

I wanted to know things and to speak about things so that people would listen to me. I wanted to have a purse with rupees in it -- enough rupees that I could pay for extra things, if I wanted to, just to be nice... And I wanted to have so many dupattas that I could cut one in half and give it away without even thinking about it." 

Eventually Valli is able to make the decision to help herself. It is only when she has gone hungry for a few days, when she finds herself getting mean, and when she realizes that her feet are very infected that she is able to return to the hospital. 

Ellis uses Valli's illness to explain that leprosy, now known as Hansen's Disease, is due to a bacteria and is not a punishment, a belief that dates back to Biblical times, if not earlier. It is likely that leprosy originated in India based on archeological evidence. Ellis captures the stigma that those with leprosy face as well as the lack of Dr. Indra explains this to Valli and tells her that she can be cured of the disease but she needs to stay in the hospital and take the medicine. At this point, Valli is not ready yet to do this. She only makes this choice when her life continues to get worse, days without food and her feet become increasingly infected and she begins to wonder if she could lose her feet or even die.

No Ordinary Day also portrays the effect the stigma unwed mothers in India experience: the grinding poverty for women and children and to the abuse of girls. Valli learns that her mother was not married and pregnant with her. She is told she has no father and she doesn't know if her father is alive or dead. Her mother's unplanned pregnancy created so much shame for her grandparents that they sold her to "auntie" and then moved away. This led to Valli's abuse: she was given the scraps of food that her "cousin" Sanjay left on his plate and was abused by her "uncle".

Overall this short novel should capture the interest of middle graders who are interested in social issues in the developing world.

Book Details:

No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis
Toronto: Groundwood Books    2011
159 pp.