A Mother’s Sense

On an unusually warm and sunny day in February 2019, a colleague and I chatted in a coffee shop in New Delhi. We sipped kanji, a fermented carrot juice that is a winter specialty, and talked about early intervention and education for small children with cochlear implants. My colleague, who runs an early intervention and education program for deaf children in Delhi, commented, “The problem with so many approaches now to early intervention is that mothers are no longer mothers, they are forced to become therapists!” We then looked at our glasses and thought about how the juice—its color, flavor, texture, and consistency, as well as the glass tumbler that held it—would turn into a teachable object in an interaction between an imagined mother and her implanted child. The idealized mother-as-therapist in this moment would talk to her child at length about this glass of kanji.

The small act of drinking and savoring this special winter delicacy would be stretched out as an opportunity to teach vocabulary and new concepts. We speculated that the mother would tell the child that the tumbler is made from glass and that glass is fragile, that carrots are an orange vegetable grown in the soil in Punjab, what it means that the carrots are fermented, and that the drink is both spicy and sweet, among other things. We could have gone on and on. Our café conversation resonated with a discussion I had with a mother in Delhi who narrated the process and aftermath of having her small daughter implanted. This mother told me about how she had to completely transform her mothering practices: “Now I am a speech therapist, a teacher, and a special educator as well.” In her statement, meant to be humorous, like the discussion between my colleague and me, there was a realization that mothers are required to play multiple roles in interacting with, teaching, and caring for their deaf children. Drinking juice is never just drinking juice.

In this chapter, I move out of the clinic to think through what a seasoned deaf education teacher in Mumbai told me: “Mothers need to be like cricket commentators, they need to speak about everything they do and see. When at the market, they must constantly talk about the fruits and vegetables they are looking at, and if a potato is dirty, for example, they must point this out. It is not like with hearing children who can overhear things. You must tell a deaf child everything.” Scholars of childhood in India have argued that Indian children often learn from each other during play rather than learning from adults. Scholars also point to the role of distributed parenting and caring, and stress that it is rare for Indian mothers and children to form exclusive communicative dyads.1 Children often learn through overhearing; as Veena Das (1989, 270) observes, in Punjabi, there are two distinct verbs: kehna, to tell someone something, and sunana, to cause someone to overhear. She notes: “It is not a single imperative voice that the child hears in Indian society but a multitude of voices” (279). What happens when mothers and children are supposed to be together constantly and the children do not hear a multitude of voices, but instead orient solely to the voices of their mothers?

Cochlear implantation—and working with deaf children in general—introduces new ways of relating to children through language, specifically through the need to narrate and stretch out everyday words and worlds, using the ordinary and the domestic as spaces of language development. Mothers focus on the senses, and on sensory attachments and attunements, as cultivated through ongoing talk and choreographies of attention (Tulbert and Goodwin 2011); they do this while making tea, taking walks, and washing floors, for example. They scaffold everyday life in a manner that dyadically binds them and their children to each other in intersensing ways.2 Brendan Hart (2014, 288) studied parents of autistic children in the United States and Morocco, and found that they establish practices through which they make their children’s actions and words intelligible. He terms this “joint embodiment,” which he defines as “an improvised social choreography whereby parents and child prompt each another verbally, gesturally and physically as they together move through the social world.” What is at stake is how mothers and children sense together.3

I attend to joint embodiment, specifically the ways in which mothers intersense with their children and engage in anticipatory sensing in order to facilitate their children’s sensory engagement with the world. The methods and principles of engagement that I observed in the mothers I interviewed were not based on auditory verbal therapy (as discussed in chapter 2), at least not all of the time. Instead of adhering to a unisensory approach focused solely on listening and spoken language, the mothers engaged in therapeutic and everyday talk that was frequently multisensory and multimodal, often to the dismay of authoritative figures. I focus on the everyday stretching of the social through linguistic, sensory, and multimodal communicative processes in educational spaces in which deaf children and their mothers spend time.

By “stretching the social,” I mean that mothers actively work to find and create opportunities to be social with their children, in ways that transcend a focus on a single sense and that at times go against the grain of what therapists and early intervention teachers and experts advise. Stretching the social also means that mothers actively work to produce a social world in which their children are valid and valued sensing participants. Mothers attempt to scaffold their children’s senses and attend to a variety of signals, beyond the auditory, to include these in daily life. While in some cases mothers focus on listening and spoken language outcomes, or have been taught to attend to them, multisensory and multimodal communicative practices and nonlinguistic forms of care also loom large.

The surgeons, therapists, audiologists, and mothers I spoke with stressed repeatedly that there are two “senses” at stake: the child’s auditory sense and also the ostensibly intuitive and “natural” sense of the mother. These two senses are expansive: outside of AVT spaces, the auditory sense often includes lipreading, reading, and memorization. The maternal sense includes learning how to be an outspoken and articulate mother, in addition to a speech therapist, teacher, and special educator, as we saw above. There is tension here, as the founder of a well-known early intervention program told me: “It’s really the common sense and the wisdom of a mother. More than any scientific qualification.” The boundaries between what is “natural” common sense and what is considered to be “scientific practice” are often blurred, and there are times when mothers are asked to resist doing “what comes naturally,” like snuggling with their children, sitting face-to-face with them, or communicating with them nonverbally. Mothers are required to learn what is natural from experts, and in the process, they have to second-guess themselves. The auditory and maternal senses, while seemingly innate, must develop together relationally through “hard work.” This work involves creating and participating in sensory infrastructures that are social, pedagogical, therapeutic, and technological. Mothers and their deaf children thus engage in processes of becoming both who they already are and something new. They do so in relation to each other, in a jointly embodied and intersensing way.

In the discussion that follows, I move between two early intervention and educational programs, one in Chennai and the other in Bangalore, both started by mothers of deaf children. Focusing on mothers’ and children’s experiences, I draw from interviews and time spent with mothers who attended these programs with their children and/or visited them for instruction and guidance. I am not interested in adjudicating or evaluating these programs; both produce important and valued relational infrastructure for mothers and children. These are just two of many programs in India, and mothers and children often cycle through multiple centers and draw on different therapeutic approaches, practicing what Siri Mehus (2011) calls “semiotic bricolage.” “Sensory bricolage” might be another term to describe these practices.4 Each program has its own approach, often guided by a particular sensory ideology, although the ultimate goal of all programs is for children to develop “language,” whatever that means. Reaching this goal typically involves a focus on listening and spoken language, sometimes incorporating lipreading, gesturing, tactile stimulation, reading, writing, and sign language. As discussed in chapter 2, there is a complex classification system and set of values attached to different modalities. My point is that these spaces are messy in terms of the modalities and pedagogical approaches employed, despite what administrators might say.

Hard Work

Many of the therapists, clinicians, teachers, and administrators with whom I spoke had steadfast ideas about how mothers should communicate with their deaf children. They critiqued mothers’ inability to speak nonstop with their children and the fact that the mothers were often shy, quiet, and uneducated. (Sometimes they criticized both parents, but typically mothers bore the brunt because fathers were seen as responsible for earning money.) Mothers, according to the professionals, needed to be taught how to relate to their children differently and appropriately. Forget about warm cuddles, making nurturing meals, or simply being in proximity—what is important is to talk. An audiologist and speech and language pathologist in Delhi told me about a conversation she had just had with young parents as they left her office carrying their deaf child: “When the mother was about to leave and she got up, that’s when I told her that from now on you have to start speaking with the child. Whatever you are thinking, whatever you are doing, whatever you plan to do, all that has to become verbal.” Mothers are supposed to talk about ordinary everyday activities, such as chopping vegetables, packing a suitcase, and drinking milk, so they do not need any specialized knowledge. They must, however, learn how to talk, and to talk constantly.

In addition to honing their abilities to become “natural” mothers, mothers must negotiate the fact that a deaf child does not have only one age, but instead occupies multiple ages simultaneously. One of these is the child’s chronological age. Then, after receiving hearing aids, the child has a “hearing birthday” and a hearing age. After implantation, the child also has an implanted age. The child’s hearing and implanted ages inevitably lag behind the chronological age because the child’s listening and spoken language ability has not (yet) developed. More than this, a cochlear implant surgeon told me that, in fact, the “child is hearing mother’s voice in the last three months of the pregnancy. So a deaf child is already twelve weeks deaf by the time [the] child is born.” Based on this surgeon’s assessment, a child also has a “deaf age” that starts before the actual birth. Deaf children are therefore behind before they are born.5

Mothers, and families in general, are thus oriented to both normative developmental time and an alternate chronology in which they hope that their child’s hearing age will eventually “catch up” with the child’s chronological age—an achievement that depends on the mothers’ “hard work” (in Hindi, mehanat). Because of these multiple ages and birthdays, mothers are required to care for children who are simultaneously different ages. I met a mother with a three-year-old child who was also a newborn in hearing age. Similarly, another mother had a five-year-old child who was simultaneously a two-year-old in hearing age and a six-month-old in implanted age. For mothers, negotiating these different ages takes great skill and flexibility.

Mehanat is a concept that came up often in Delhi and other Hindi-speaking locations when parents, again particularly mothers, spoke about all the time and talk they put into their deaf children. When I asked a therapist in Delhi what mehanat means, she shared with me an expression, “Mehanat ka phal mitha hota hai,” which translates to “Hard work bears sweet fruit.” The hard work, she said, is figuring out how to give your children complex instructions that they will understand; finding ways to teach them to identify different fruits, vegetables, and other objects; reading stories with them; and looking at pictures or experience books and discussing them. Hard work literally results in sweet fruit, or at least naming the fruit. While mehanat is a concept used widely by parents to talk about the work they do in raising their children (those with and without disabilities), it has specific stakes in regard to deaf children in terms of these children being both “behind” their appropriate hearing age and malleably open to intervention. As professionals constantly stress the urgent need for early intervention and the existence of a critical period, parents feel a great deal of pressure to work hard now.

In July 2018, I attended a parents’ function at an early intervention NGO in Delhi that was run by a passionate older man with an adult deaf daughter. The director, known to everyone as Sir, began his lecture by talking about how “HI [hearing impaired] children” are not the same as normal children in terms of how they acquire language. Their hearing birthday is when they get their hearing aids or implants. He said that parents and families must do mehanat. Parents must talk to their child about everything—clothes, food, seasons, holidays—and they should make a book with pictures and words to teach their child. About books in general, he said, “You must read the same book again and again and go through the story again and again.” The director stressed that mehanat should not be done only by mothers: “Fathers have the same responsibility too, it does not only fall upon the mother. Parents must sit and teach their child for two and a half hours in the morning and one hour in the evening.” A father timidly interrupted Sir’s lecture to interject that he left for work at 5:30 a.m. Sir replied, even more animatedly, that the man should wake up at 3:00 a.m. to teach his child. “The full family needs to be involved in the hard work.”

In the midst of his speech, Sir glared at parents who arrived late and asked them, “Why are you late for your child?” Noticing parents who were not taking notes, he asked, “Why aren’t you writing things down? You should bring a notebook and write all of this down.” The main point of his talk was that “HI children can be like normal, it is just that they cannot hear.” He spoke about his daughter, who “is 100 percent deaf but can talk like a normal person.” This director’s focus on sitting, reading, and teaching was an outlier in the therapeutic and pedagogical worlds in which I spent time; most therapists, schoolteachers, and administrators with whom I met stressed that such a pedagogical focus would be boring for the child and would not be natural. Additionally, the three and a half hours of talk that Sir recommended would not be considered enough, and his comment that “HI children can be like normal, it is just that they cannot hear” would not be acceptable to AVT practitioners, who would argue that these children can become normal and can hear. I focus on Sir’s admonitions because of the temporal, logistical, and pedagogical pressure he placed on families.

Mehanat does not mean hard work just in the sense of laboring and toiling; it also connotes work that is virtuous, upstanding, and morally good. Someone who is mehanati (hardworking) is industrious and teachable, capable of improvement. The goal of performing mehanat is to produce a valuable outcome, although parents and re/habilitation practitioners emphasized that the process is also important. Returning to the idea that someone who is mehanati is a teachable person, I stress that it is primarily mothers who are malleably learning to modulate their talk and ways of relating to their children. They are cultivating their maternal sense as well as their children’s auditory sense. I recall the words of a mother in Mumbai who told me that she was “blabbering her heart out” with her son. While this is a colloquial and loving phrase, her words obscured the work that she put into communicating with her child and the ways that “blabbering” demonstrates love and care. Among other things, she labeled all of her household objects, created an experience book containing pictures of important people and activities in their family, and talked with her son constantly about daily life. She had been trained to do this by various re/habilitation professionals, and then she worked with her son. She is now a therapist herself, working with other mothers and children. A number of mothers told me about learning an entirely new language, typically English, with which to communicate with their children. In one case (as described in my Introduction), an extended family spoke Marathi with a deaf child, allowing her to lipread. After the child was implanted, the family was instructed to use only English and not to let the child see their mouths; the elderly grandparents also learned English so that they could communicate with the child. This work of the grandparents was considered true mehanat.

Consider Imran’s family, with whom I spent time in Delhi and whose case I discuss at length in chapter 5. When I met him, Imran was twelve years old, although his birth certificate indicated he was ten. He and his family lived in a village that was a five-hour journey from Delhi. He was implanted in Delhi when he was five years of age, after his family struggled to cobble together the needed money. Before his implantation, Imran had not learned how to listen and speak with hearing aids. After a few weeks of therapy following the implantation surgery, Imran’s family moved back to the village, where Imran attended the village school. There, he was told to sit in a corner and did not develop listening and spoken language. The family moved to Delhi when he was ten, after relatives told them of an NGO in the city that would provide therapy. Imran started receiving therapy from the NGO, and his parents enrolled him in a government school, using his altered birth certificate to claim he was two years younger than he was. This cheerful, intuitive, and snuggly twelve-year-old shared a classroom with much younger children, most of them seven years of age. At that point, however, Imran’s hearing age was at most four years. Like other deaf children, Imran occupies multiple ages at once, and in his case there was the specter of the looming chronological teenage years to come, when he would no longer be as cute and cuddly as his hearing age might imply.

Shortly after the family moved to Delhi, Imran’s implant processor stopped working, and his parents contacted different NGOs for financial support for a replacement. However, NGO administrators and professionals told them that they had missed out on a critical period for teaching Imran language, and that it was now too late (and funders were uninterested in paying for a new processor). In reply, his father plaintively told them, “Hamare sidhe se to kare mehanat, jitna kar paye utne kiye” (From our side, we did a lot of hard work, and whatever we could do, we did). Both he and Imran’s mother stressed that they took the big step of moving from the village to Delhi and that they were doing everything they could do. Their hard work could be seen in their body language, the way that they looked at Imran, and the stories they told about the sacrifices they had made. However, the director of the NGO where they attended therapy told me that they had been doing mehanat only from the time that they brought Imran to the NGO. Prior to then, they did not know about, and were not engaged in, re/habilitation. The director did not recognize their moving to the city, spending large sums of money, and making material sacrifices as mehanat—to her, mehanat is the actual work of re/habilitation.6

Mehanat cannot be disentangled from care, although professionals emphatically consider certain kinds of care to not be mehanat. According to them, there are right and wrong ways of caring for one’s child, specifically involving senses, modalities, and ways of relating. As the director of an institute for speech and hearing in Bangalore told me: “Psychologically, children are connected to their mothers from conception. The baby knows the mother’s body, breast milk, voice, smell. The child only wants their mother and the mother has the most patience for the child.” (A male administrator uttered this statement.) I also heard mothers at the training program based at the director’s institute repeat the same words, emphasizing the patience that mothers have for their children and highlighting mothers’ unique abilities to work hard to teach their children so that “magic would happen” and their children would start listening and talking. However, bodily knowledge and intimate familiarity can become obstacles if they prevent verbal communication.

Indeed, according to certain professionals, caring for one’s child in a nonlinguistic way can be a problem, and this is where ideas about mother–child attachment such as those expressed by the above-mentioned director become fraught. In Mumbai, a passionate audiologist and speech and language pathologist who started audiology and speech and language clinics across India told me that Indian children in general have “a high EQ,” or emotional quotient. According to her, mothers hug and kiss their children and offer them physical contact instead of talking to them. Such mothers “hold their babies in their arms instead of placing them in a pram.” As we talked, she pointed to a family sitting in the waiting room as an example. The family, from northeast India, had traveled to Mumbai for their small child to get bilateral implants. The audiologist described the mother as someone who carefully attends to her child, but who does not talk and is very shy. “How will this child learn?” she asked, not making a distinction between what mothers do in public and what they do at home. Mothers need to focus on verbal intelligence and not emotional intelligence, she stressed, creating a binary between the two and emphasizing that Indian women and Indian society in general are good at the latter. Similarly, another professional, a bit more moderate in her approach, told me that the best place for young deaf children is sitting on their mothers’ laps, facing outward; this allows for touch while maximizing the child’s listening.

Professionals constantly adjudicate good and bad mothers. At a Mumbai-based NGO that was providing free cochlear implants to children through a flagship program, I sat in on the deliberations of the evaluation team, which comprised a surgeon, an audiologist, and a program administrator. As the team members were deciding which families were deserving of cochlear implants, they discussed the mothers’ educational backgrounds and qualifications. In one case, a mother did not have formal education, and the team members were unsure if they could trust her to talk with the child appropriately and to commit to taking the child to therapy for the long term. In another situation, the team decided against providing a child with an implant because both parents were deaf and did not speak themselves. The NGO administrators did not see the point of implanting this child, given that the parents could not talk to the child. In cases of deaf parents with deaf children, school administrators, surgeons, and auditory verbal therapists told me that such children should be handed over to grandparents or other extended family members who are not deaf, at least until the children can talk. As one school administrator told me: “The mother should remove herself for a while and let the grandparents become the primary caregivers.” Here “care” means letting go and permitting someone else to care for one’s child, or, more specifically, for the child’s auditory sense.

This targeted and restrictive understanding of care for and of a single sense may be contrasted with theories of care proposed by feminist scholars such as Eva Feder Kittay (1999), who argue that care involves sustaining another person and that an ethics of care is about interpersonal relationships that extend beyond capabilities and specific senses (also see Tronto 1993). I think here about Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s (2017) argument that presence, proximity, and touch foster relationships; relationships are often formed and maintained through nonlinguistic practices and routines that emplace people. Emplacement is key to thinking about children displaced from their parents and what such an action does. David Howes (2019, 20) writes that the sensorium is produced through the “‘emplacement’ of the sensing subject in a particular environmental and cultural context.” What is the connection between emplacement, displacement, and removal? A child is taken away from her mother and re-placed with hearing grandparents in order to focus on audition. Can this be a replacement for a mother? How can replacement result in emplacement? I argue, in contrast to the administrators and experts described above, that attending to multisensory engagement and multimodality, and to the whole sensorium, is a form of care.7

Quiet Signals

Balavidyalaya is perhaps India’s most well-known early intervention program and school for deaf children. Educators and families come from across India for its training and early intervention programs. The institute has also developed parent kits, handbooks, and video materials that are widely used by families. The center is located on a quiet residential street in an upper-middle-class area of Chennai, where there is little traffic or other outside noise, beyond birds, to be heard. Children and their parents walk down a narrow leafy lane to a large and spacious house, which is the school building. The children clutch identical plastic lunch boxes and have hankies attached to their shirts with safety pins. Mothers escort their children inside if they are under three years old or are new to the program, or drop them off if they are three or older. Mothers dropping their children off might spend some time outside chatting with one another in the small playground attached to the school. Everyone who enters the school building removes their shoes outside and then is greeted at the front desk by a friendly staff person, and often by the principal as well. All of the school’s rooms feature soundproofing, to minimize noise and maximize speech signals, and in each classroom, a teacher works with a small number of students, usually one to four children.

Mrs. Saraswathi, a mother of a deaf child, started the school in 1969. Up until her death in early 2020, Mrs. Saraswathi could often be found at the school, where her daughter, Dr. Meera, is the principal. Mrs. Saraswathi learned that her son was deaf in 1963, before his first birthday. At that time, there were no resources in Chennai for testing hearing or fitting hearing aids, so she traveled to Christian Medical College in Vellore, about three hours away by train, where she learned that her son was deaf. She subsequently found a dentist in Chennai who was willing to make ear molds out of denture materials, and she then purchased imported hearing aids. When her son was one year old, she visited schools in Chennai to inquire about admissions, and they told her to come back when he was five.

Mrs. Saraswathi did not want to wait another four years, so she frequented libraries in the city to find books about deafness. She chose only those books that offered clear successful trajectories, “where there was narration of how somebody was able to make a child talk and how they did it.” One day, she found a book by Alexander Graham Bell, which changed everything. She told me: “It was a huge book, it had a hand-drawn picture of a girl sitting on the swing and a boy pushing. The boy was Alexander Graham Bell and the girl was Mabel. And then there was one small story written under that: ‘Mabel sat on the swing, I pushed the swing, the swing went to and fro.’ Some four or five sentences. That became a gospel for me. I knew how to proceed.” From that point on, Mrs. Saraswathi said, she knew what to do with her child: “Everything that happened at home, I made it into a narration. I would draw a picture and I would talk about it and I would write about it and make him read.” Mrs. Saraswathi created multimodal narrations featuring spoken words, images, and text. The focus on reading through sight words is a significant pedagogical component at Balavidyalaya, as is the use of images, drawings, and art projects of all kinds.

Mrs. Saraswathi told me that the school uses the auditory oral method, which differs from auditory verbal therapy in that children are allowed to read lips, although there are times when they are required to put their heads down and listen to teachers. Mrs. Saraswathi stressed that everyone else reads lips in everyday life and that lips—and faces—provide valuable information about how people are feeling. What is important in the school’s methodology, however, is that no gestures or signs are used. Looking at lips is allowed, but gestures are not; there are appropriate and inappropriate visual cues and behaviors. As the current principal, Dr. Meera, firmly told me: “Nobody gestures. No finger cues. Our policy is if even a dog can understand commands, why would you not allow a deaf child, a child, to understand commands? Why do you need to help the child by giving additional cues?” Mrs. Saraswathi said that she believes that every child has a “birthright to speak,” and that what is important is starting very young and as early as possible. The administration stresses that the school is unabashedly oralist. Here, being oralist means allowing lipreading, reading, and repetition, but no signs or gestures.8 The school also does not focus heavily on speech clarity, to avoid making children self-conscious about their speech. The first priority is language; children can seek speech therapy later if they need it.

As Balavidyalaya is well known across India, I wondered about waiting lists. Dr. Meera told me that for a deaf child every day is critical, and the child’s life is on the line: “If you are late, you’ve missed the bus.” Here, missing the bus means that the child is no longer trainable in listening, reading, and speaking, and would therefore be sent to a sign language–based program (the school does occasionally make exceptions for older children, but children with additional disabilities are never admitted, regardless of age). Whenever a deaf child under the age of three arrives, the school immediately accommodates the child by moving other children around or shifting schedules as needed. Children attend from Monday through Friday. The smallest children come each day for an hour, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. At 10:00 a.m., older children, two and a half years old and up, arrive for their school day, which goes until 3:00 p.m. However, the children are not finished for the day at 3:00 p.m. As Dr. Meera explained: “The parents are talking to them, we tell them what to do at home, they are doing everything at home with the child. So all the waking hours, there is someone talking to the child. There is language input.” (While Dr. Meera said “parents” and not “mothers,” it is the mothers who are overwhelmingly present at the school and who are featured in its instructional books and videos.) Children graduate from the school when they are five years old and are then mainstreamed.

The school has developed a method called DHVANI, an acronym for Development of Hearing, Voice and Natural Integration; in Sanskrit, the word dhvani means sound.9 Over a ten-year period, the school created two massive books for parents devoted to this method. Divided by age range, each weighs about five pounds and contains instructions for three hundred (mostly domestic) activities parents can do with their children. For children up to age three, these include everyday activities like copy games (in which a mother and child copy each other’s movements), eating, scribbling, riding a tricycle, watching a butterfly, blowing soap bubbles, sorting clothes, and killing cockroaches. For ages three to six, the activities include cleaning the table, climbing a hill and going to a temple, packing lunch for a father going to work, and showing the child an article in the newspaper about a baby elephant being born. The description of each activity is accompanied by an illustration of people engaged in the activity, suggestions of what to talk about, sample sentences to use, and recommendations for how long the activity should last. As Dr. Meera told me: “See, one activity as simple as drinking a glass of milk, you can present twenty different sentences to explain that. So today you taught twenty sentences. Tomorrow you teach another twenty sentences.” The goal is to turn every activity into an opportunity to teach language and interact, so that interacting through language is naturally integrated into all aspects of the child’s life. Who knew that one could spend so much time talking about a glass of milk, a cockroach crawling up a wall, or the simple act of dusting a bicycle?

In the beginning of the first training book for parents of children up to three years old, much attention and emphasis are devoted to relationship building and getting to know the child through multisensory engagement. The book instructs mothers to watch their children carefully to get to know their moods and thoughts. Mothers are told to maintain eye contact, which helps “the child to get visual information.” Similarly, they are instructed to take notice of the child’s smile, to reassure the child “that you love him,” and to demonstrate affection frequently with “a hug, a kiss, or a pat,” through tickling and cuddling, and speaking in motherese, or in “love talk.” The book advises that if “you find that you are not hugging and kissing your child often, find out what is going wrong with your life.” It also emphasizes that the child should always be in the presence of an adult or older child “who keeps talking to him.” Additionally, the book instructs mothers to “provide a multisensory stimulation by allowing the child to see, touch, smell, taste and hear throughout the day” and to engage in interesting conversation and activities to captivate the child and avoid boredom (Balavidyalaya 2011a, 5–16). Mothers are assured that their children are communicating with them, even if they are nonverbal (Balavidyalaya 2011a, 5). All of these instructions for mothers suggest that communication—and relationality—can come in different forms, in contrast to what professionals often tell mothers about the primacy of listening and spoken language.

The importance of multisensory engagement and affection can also be seen in the Balavidyalaya teaching videos that focus on activities such as a mother feeding her infant a bottle while the child lies snugly on her lap making eye contact, a mother spooning carrots into her child’s mouth while looking closely at her, a mother walking in a garden while carrying her child and showing her flowers, and a mother and child gazing at a car together. In all of these instances, the mother holds the child closely, makes eye contact and establishes joint attention, and talks to the child constantly and with warmth. Like the mothers in these videos, teachers at the school tenderly pinch the children’s cheeks and snuggle and kiss the children. This focus on affection, proximity, and multisensory stimulation is striking. Dr. Meera commented that such affection and “body language” are both “part of Indian culture” and a means of getting the children to want to communicate with their mothers and to do the difficult training work required of them. There is thus tension between proximity, affection, and multisensory engagement as ends in themselves and their use as a means to get children to do something else, specifically, to use conventionalized spoken and written language.

Attempts to cultivate connection—between people and between people and objects—permeate everything at the school, including the notes that teachers send to mothers each day in notebooks with sections titled “Tell Amma” and “Tell Teacher.” In “Tell Amma,” the teacher uses a pen to write a single line outlining the lesson of the day. The mother is expected to ask her child questions based on that information. In “Tell Teacher,” the mother uses a pencil to write a single line about a home incident she has discussed with her child. The teacher reads this note and follows up the next day. In this way, a connection is made between school and home through talk. This connection is not to be broken or mediated by communication technologies. The school is adamantly against the use of cell phones, tablets, computers, and televisions, either in the school or at home. As Dr. Meera told me, there is no replacement for a human being; parents who want to watch television can do so after their child goes to bed. From the school’s point of view, there is no place for gadgets or technology in pedagogy, mediating relations, or creating appropriately sensing children. The school is a technology-free social space that is produced and maintained through active embodied communicative work. (I recall an audiologist in Bangalore telling me about Balavidyalaya, “At that program, parents go through hell.”)

To highlight the multisensory forms of care and communication that take place at Balavidyalaya, I describe two lessons that I observed there. The discussion that follows may seem repetitive and full of unnecessary details, but it is through repetition and details that engagement is created and relationships are formed.

In the first lesson, which took place in a small quiet room, a one-year-old girl named Radha sat with a teacher named Varuna and a small box of toys and other objects. Radha’s mother, three education students, and I sat in a circle around Radha and Varuna. The first activity involved Radha putting plastic rings of various colors onto a post. As Radha grabbed each ring, Varuna matched its color to another object in the room. One ring was blue and so was Radha’s dress. Varuna touched both the ring and Radha’s dress and said with excitement, “Take the blue and put it on! Look, this is blue and it matches your dress. It is matching!” The little girl clapped after every action, and Varuna affectionately asked why she was clapping at everything. We were all moved by Radha’s excitement and Varuna’s scaffolding of it.

After she put the ring activity away, Varuna used her dupatta to hide her head and then she pulled Radha under the dupatta as well. She asked, “Where is Varuna? Under the dupatta! Where is Radha? Under the dupatta!” She then gave Radha a kiss. The next activity involved making a tower with plastic cups. Varuna asked Radha, “Who made a tower? It was Radha. Radha made a tower!” After cleaning up the cups, Varuna showed Radha a small plastic bus and told her to look at it while Varuna described it, saying that it was made of plastic and that it was purple in color. She also suggested that Radha should count the wheels on the bus. After finishing this activity, Varuna brought out a small plastic shoe and commented that it was black in color and made of plastic. She said that the shoe goes on a foot but it was too small for Radha’s feet. Then she took a pink plastic flower from the box and asked, “Is this a real flower? No! Does it smell? No! It is made of plastic. But you can put flowers on your hair!” Radha then put the plastic shoe on her head and everyone laughed. The final activity involved a matching exercise in which two shoes, two flowers, and two buses were to be placed next to each other. This was a dynamic multisensory lesson that included student and teacher touching objects and each other, making eye contact, and narrating actions. In this setting, Radha was introduced to language through joint embodiment and intersensing with Varuna, who was also creating scaffolding for Radha’s mother to do similar exercises and engage in the same kind of talk with Radha at home.

The second lesson took place in a preschool class. In a brightly decorated room, three children sat around a small low table with their teacher, who enthusiastically asked them what they had eaten for breakfast. A girl answered that she had eaten an idli (a fermented rice and lentil dumpling). The teacher asked her, “Why did you not eat two idlis? And what did you eat it with?” She instructed the child to say, “I ate one idli with chutney.” The teacher then asked her, “What kind of chutney? You should say coconut, tomato, or mint.” After hearing about the kind of chutney, the teacher expanded the conversation and asked her, “What did Appa [Father] eat? How many idlis did Appa eat?” The next child said that she had eaten idli with sambar for breakfast. The teacher asked her how many idlis she ate and instructed her to say, “I ate one idli with sambar.” The teacher inquired if it was tasty, and the girl said, “Yes!” The teacher then followed up by asking the girl to create a full sentence: “The idli and sambar were tasty.”

After the discussion of breakfast, the class examined a drawing of a man climbing a coconut tree. The teacher instructed: “Say in full sentences! The coconuts were in bunches. Uncle plucked the coconuts. The coconut tree is tall. The coconut tree has leaves. The coconut tree has a long trunk.” The children took turns repeating these sentences and then wrote them out. They drew pictures of coconut trees and discussed how many coconuts were on their trees. After class, a mother came to show the teacher an experience book she had created, with immaculately drawn pictures of the family’s house and of a playground that her daughter visits, as well as carefully worded text about all of the images. The teacher praised her work; it looked like the mother had spent a significant amount of time on this painstakingly drawn book, which would be a source of many discussions about daily life for the mother and her child and would help to structure narratives about their experiences.

While the classroom activities at Balavidyalaya include drawing, acting, and arts and crafts, listening is an overarching activity. Children are asked to put their heads down at various points during lessons to listen to words and sentences. These auditory training times are focused and serious. At other times, lighthearted conversations can quickly become opportunities for listening practice. During lunch, for example, everyone sits together in a circle on the floor in a classroom to eat their rice, dosa, or roti and vegetables. The lunch-duty teachers go around the room and ask what the children have for lunch or point out that a child should eat only two of her dosas and not the three she has, because three would be too much. During this banter, the teachers point at their ears and command the children, “Listen!” When I ate lunch with a group of children and teachers one day, I made small talk with a child sitting adjacent to me by asking her if she was eating beetroot (she had a container of shredded beetroot with coconut and curry leaves). The teacher closest to us firmly pointed to her own ear and told this little girl, “Listen! You have to listen! She has asked you a question.” This exhorting or summoning to listen, to be interpellated as a listening subject who responds appropriately to a question about beetroot in a noisy room, is striking. I love beetroot and think of eating it as a multisensory experience. I wanted to talk to this child about how tasty her lunch was (I was projecting, perhaps), but she was ordered to listen to me, and in that moment, I was not sure we could have a playful conversation about delicious food. And then, a few minutes later: “Listen! The bell has rung!”

Noisy Signals

The Mothers Teaching Center is located on a busy main road in Bangalore; it occupies two large classrooms in a compound that also houses an institute that offers audiology and speech and language pathology clinics, higher education courses in these fields, and an elementary school for deaf children where signed language and spoken language are used together. The MTC’s training program, however, does not interact with this school, and the children in the program are kept separate from those in the school, even though the two groups are in physical proximity and often visible to each other.

Sasikala (she preferred to be called by her first name), the founder and director of the MTC, received training from both Balavidyalaya and another flagship program in Mysore that was modeled on Balavidyalaya. Like Mrs. Saraswathi, Sasikala has a deaf son, and her pursuit of educational resources for him led her to the programs where she was trained. After her training, she started her program in Bangalore, where she carefully selected “hardworking” mothers with young deaf children who she thought would be successful. Sasikala’s deaf son earned a master’s degree from a university in the United States and is now an engineer working for a multiational corporation in India, as she proudly tells people who inquire about the program. Her son is held up as an example of what mothers and their deaf children can achieve if they are hardworking.

The MTC is open five days a week from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and the program is three years in length. Mothers commit to attending for the full duration, a significant investment of time. The two classrooms, decorated with Hindu imagery and pictures of civic leaders, are spare but feel crowded when they are filled with children and their mothers. They become noisy when many people talk at once, which happens often during the day. The rooms are structurally loud, with open windows, fans, concrete and tiled floors, and oil paint on the walls. Mothers and children sit on floor mats in these rooms and also out in the narrow corridor connecting the two rooms during dyadic and small group sessions. Mothers enroll from across south India, and I met mothers and children originally from Bangalore, elsewhere in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh as well. Mothers and their children sometimes move to Bangalore from other locations to attend the MTC, renting rooms nearby while they complete the program.

Sasikala insisted that only mothers can enroll in the MTC. She does not permit fathers because, she said, they would make the women uncomfortable. Grandmothers are not allowed either, because she cannot order them around and they are in turn unable to order their grandchildren around. Sasikala pointed out: “I can’t scold the grandmother, can I? Grandmothers mollycoddle the child and the child will never learn if the grandmother is in charge.” She claimed that a child attending the program with his grandmother would not learn how to do the last rites for her when it came time for her funeral. By this, she meant that the child would not be able to speak the last rites for his grandmother and that demonstrating relationality and showing respect through speech is of utmost importance. In foregrounding the importance of speech here—of speaking the last rites—Sasikala stressed an understanding of care, affection, and competence as attached to and manifested through the teaching and utilization of spoken language. In her comments about mollycoddling, she emphasized the need for sternness and not nurturing through touch, although tactility was a mode of engagement in this program.

Mothers and their children were loosely grouped into cohorts that spent three years together, although the MTC’s open-enrollment policy meant that new mothers were constantly being admitted. Some children had cochlear implants, while others had hearing aids. There was also variation in implant processors: some children had basic models provided through government programs and others had more advanced models purchased privately. The mothers came to know each other and each other’s children well, since they spent full days together. More experienced mothers provided newer mothers with lesson plans and lesson modeling, device troubleshooting, help with negotiating government programs, and emotional support and encouragement. The mothers also ate lunch together and passed the time chatting with one another during the few moments a day that they were not responsible for talking to their children.

Days started with yoga for mothers in one of the classrooms, an activity offered so that they could relax and decompress, presumably after spending all of the previous evening talking and doing therapy at home. Yoga was the only time when any of the rooms were quiet. In the other classroom, the mothers who opted not to do yoga sat with all of the children along with Sasikala and another teacher, also a mother of a deaf child. About twenty-five children sat on the floor on mats, watching and listening for their names to be called during the daily attendance ritual. After attendance, there was a discussion of the day of the week and the date. After being temporally oriented, the children recited the Ling Six sounds (see chapter 2). Sasikala wandered around the room, stepping between children, loudly voicing the sounds—“ahh,” “eee,” “ooo,” “mmm,” “shh,” and “sss”—and the students copied her, collectively uttering the sounds. I recited along, too, and watched students fidget. They grabbed on to each other’s arms and legs, sometimes surreptitiously gestured to each other, and tried to escape the gazes of the ever-watchful Sasikala and the diligent mothers who surrounded them.

After this period of cacophonous togetherness, mothers and children paired off and discussed a topic or a theme, such as favorite colors, recent holidays, or the weather; their conversations constituted lessons made up of small talk. Children who were newer to the program had more structured lessons involving balls, feathers, and plastic objects to be handled, identified, put into relation to each other and discussed. Sasikala taught these structured lessons to mothers, who then taught them to newer mothers. Each mother then spent two hours of the day with another mother’s child, and each child spent that time with somebody else’s mother. This structure exists so that the children are exposed to a range of speech patterns and voices (although it seemed to me that many of the mothers imitated Sasikala’s prosody) and also to give the mothers experience relating to children who are not their own. Sasikala said that this practice makes mothers patient and confident, and it also helps them to realize that “they are not the only ones with problems.” In addition, it prevents them from excessively doting on their own children. There is, however, a paradox, because mothers are supposed to have special and close bonds with their own children. Do such bonds then extend to other people’s children? Mothers told me that it was rewarding to work with other children but at the same time they kept an eye on their own children and asked them after school, “What did Aunty teach you today?” A graduate of the program, now in her late teens, fondly remembers working with other mothers. She said that these periods provided a nice break from her own mother and that they prepared her well for talking with different people.

I particularly enjoyed observing one child at the MTC. He was six years old and had been implanted at the age of four. He did not speak unless he was prodded to do so. He engaged with the other children by being mischievous or “naughty,” in Sasikala’s words. He pulled off their implants, tapped their shoulders, stuck his tongue out at them, and stroked their faces. He oriented to them through touch and delighted in getting a reaction. When Sasikala caught him engaged in his antics, she marched over to him and hit him sharply on the shoulder with a ruler or a stick, calling him a naughty boy. The assault never seemed to faze him—in fact, he often smiled, perhaps a reaction to the touch, although I was disturbed. I wondered if somehow this communication that came on the skin and not through the ear broke up the daily monotony. Sasikala told me that this boy’s auditory nerves were not up to the task of having an implant and that he had attention deficit disorder. I wondered if he was just bored. He looked at his notebook and recited words and phrases halfheartedly, and only when he was ordered to do so. Because of his poor progress, the mothers in his cohort took turns working with him after the program was over for the day. They had different private lessons with him, depending on the day: counting windows, arranging shoes, and discussing days of the week. These were repetitive call-and-response activities that could be seen as punishment, especially at the end of a long day, although the mothers’ animated attunement may have offset the roteness of what they were doing. While mothers were occasionally angry about how this boy treated their children, especially when he played with their (expensive) cochlear implants, they were careful not to speak negatively about him to his mother—as they were all mothers.

I wondered about other impairments or diagnoses and how they (dis)appeared (Titchkosky 2011) in this space. There was a four-year-old boy who came to the MTC daily. The boy and his mother sat on the floor face-to-face, with their legs crossed and sometimes touching. His mother had stacks of books containing pictures of fruits, vegetables, animals, and numbers, among other things. The boy looked around constantly, and he often rocked back and forth and flapped his hands; he also vocalized at times. One day, his mother showed him pictures of fruits and loudly uttered their names with exaggerated mouth movements: orange, guava, apple, pear, papaya, watermelon. He did not respond verbally and his eyes darted around widely. She tapped his hands and legs with a ruler to get his attention and then pointed to the fruits with the same ruler. She firmly pushed his face back to the page whenever he looked away. Determined to keep going, she switched from fruits to animals. She used her fingers to imitate horns on her head, moved her head back and forth, and said, “Moo moo moo,” to resemble a cow. The cow, or her rocking motions, elicited a response: the boy started and smiled. His mother also smiled. Unlike other children and mothers at the MTC, rather than working separately for part of the day, this dyad was always together. Occasionally this mother led activities after lunch during more unstructured times when mothers take over, do informal lessons, and read stories to all of the children. I wondered if she compared her son to other children as mothers often told me they did. Sasikala encouraged such comparison, because she believed it made mothers work harder. This mother and her son were included in the MTC in that they shared space and time, albeit not developmental trajectories, with the other children and their mothers.

The boy had an expensive implant processor that the family had purchased privately. Sasikala told me that he was autistic but that his mother did not accept the diagnosis. She hoped that her child would progress and become more like the other children at the MTC, and to this end she also sought out therapy at different centers around the city: at the private clinic where he was implanted, at a school for children with intellectual disabilities, and at the adjacent institute for speech and hearing, among other places. Sasikala said that she told this mother that the MTC was not equipped to work with children with autism, but she could not stop them from coming. She asked, rhetorically, and also expressing care for this mother: “How can I disappoint her as she is a mother, no? She has hopes and dreams for her son . . . How can I deny her the fact that he smiles and is happy when they come?” (The boy did look at the other children in the program with interest.) Sasikala told me that this woman’s husband was cruel and did not help her. When he was home from work, he was busy with his mobile phone and his laptop. She called him a “technology addict,” engaging with his devices and not his family. This mother was with her son all day long, ferrying him to the MTC and to other appointments.

Another mother told me that while she and her son walked to and from the MTC each day, she constantly pointed out people and objects to him. She said, “Whatever we see, I will explain to him.” Sasikala followed up on this mother’s comment: “We want mothers to notice everything, they need to see everything.” The implication of Sasikala’s statement is that mothers will then talk to their children about whatever they notice and see. The focus on “seeing everything” can be jarring. One afternoon, Sasikala talked with the children about recent floods in Karnataka’s Coorg district and in the neighboring state of Kerala, and she chided the mothers for not taking their children to see the flooded areas. I wondered if she was joking, but she always seemed to be serious.

Sasikala often asked the children what they had for lunch. One day, when a child said that she had eaten sambar, Sasikala followed up by asking, “Which sambar did Amma make? Which vegetable was in the sambar?” The child replied, “Radish.” After checking with the child’s mother to confirm that this was indeed what the child had eaten, Sasikala asked, “What color radish?” A few days prior, Sasikala had shown a radish plant to the children, and she reminded them of this. The conversation was oriented to making abstract things tangible and to showing material examples. The children had to see things and learn their names to know them; everything was a “language game” (Wittgenstein 2009). There were trips to vegetable and clothing markets during which Sasikala, mothers, and children talked about what they observed. On Teachers’ Day, there was a celebration at the training center with a brightly colored cake. The students discussed the shape of the cake and the knife used to cut it—specifically, the material the knife was made of (plastic) and how sharp it was (very sharp, not dull).

A popular yearly trip for mothers and children attending the MTC is to Bangalore’s Pottery Town, where they watch potters making clay Ganesha idols for the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi in September. Before each trip, Sasikala and the mothers ask their children, “Where are you going and what will you see?” and “How will you get to Pottery Town?” As they travel to Pottery Town in the institute’s van, the mothers spend the time pointing out things like trees, other vehicles, and landmarks and asking their children questions about what they are seeing along the way. When they reach Pottery Town, some mothers use their phones to record the potter in action so that they can later use the video for conversation practice. On a 2018 trip, one mother narrated the potter’s activities for the children:

[The potter] is making the idol with clay. He is taking clay and wetting it. This is the mold of the Ganesha. If you put clay in the mold, the clay will take the shape of the mold. He is breaking the clay and putting it in the mold. He is adding more clay. He is smoothening the clay now. He is putting clay in the other mold. He is putting some water in it. He is smoothening the clay. He is now closing the two molds together. He is putting more clay at the hollow bottom. He is making a hole in the bottom. He is smoothening the bottom part. He is now opening the mold. [The children oohed and aahed when they saw the idol come out of the mold.] Doesn’t it look nice? He is now taking some clay and making the trunk of Ganesha. He is now shaping the trunk. He is now making the tusk of Ganesha. The idol is now ready. It will have to dry.

The mothers purchase a Ganesha to bring back to the classroom so that the children will have an object to look at during their follow-up discussions. Mothers spend the ride back to the program asking questions about what the children saw in Pottery Town, how they got there, and with whom they traveled.10 Back in the classrooms, mothers sit with their children and ask them the same questions again. So many details, so much repetition, so much work to turn the trip into a language game.

At the MTC, mothers learn various skills in addition to learning how to talk to and conduct training sessions with their children. Some mothers learn to write in English because Sasikala gives them dictation in English daily, and after writing down what she narrates, they recite these passages to their children. Mothers are also given nightly writing assignments in which they are expected to write three paragraphs about things they have seen and done; they are supposed to deliver these paragraphs through dictation and discuss them with their children.11 Some mothers begin reading newspapers and watching the news so that they can talk to their children about current events, such as the flooding in Coorg. Mothers also learn about holidays across religions: I talked to one mother who had never celebrated Ganesh Chaturthi before.

The mothers I met occasionally seemed ambivalent about their time at the center. A single mother from Chennai told me about relocating to Bangalore and struggling to perform her work as a software engineer in the evening. She had asked Sasikala if it would be possible for a family member or a hired person to bring her child to the center, and Sasikala adamantly refused the request. As such, the mother appealed to her employer, who agreed to let her work at night. When I talked to the mother during her first week at the center, she seemed overwhelmed but optimistic that she could make it all work out. Another mother from Bangalore who was enrolled at the center for the second time with her second child told me that it was difficult for her to be away from home all day and she had to do all of her housework when she got home; such compounding of responsibility is experienced by most of the mothers at the center. Another mother had a different perspective on this—she told me that her time at the MTC was the only dedicated time she had to spend with her child because at home she had to focus on her housework, although ideally she would do the housework while simultaneously talking to her child about what she was doing. Because there was always a familial and/or economic cost to being away from the home or work, mothers were often especially anxious about their children’s progress. And for mothers who traveled to Bangalore alone with their deaf children and rented rooms or apartments near the MTC, their children’s failures on any given day often took on outsize proportions, and they experienced mother blame, even though the mothers in the program supported each other.

In one incident, a six-year-old girl could not repeat back to Sasikala during a dictation exercise. Sasikala harshly scolded the girl’s mother for not working hard enough with her, setting off a chain of events. That night, the child refused to study or do her writing. In response, her mother cried and did not eat. That evening, she talked on the phone with another mother from her cohort, who also shed tears, and the next day this other mother asked the little girl: “You don’t like Mummy? Why don’t you study? Why don’t you obey her? See how sad she is? Your mother is always smiling and friendly but she is so sad today.” She lectured the girl about how her mother was living away from her other daughter and her husband, and she asked the girl to study. The next day, this other mother sat with the girl for a two-hour lesson that was intended to prevent another scolding by Sasikala (what a weight to place on a child). Here we see the shared efforts of mothers, who often maintain their relationships even after they graduate from the program.

Relational Signals

When I left the MTC in the afternoons and walked outside, I felt a sense of relief even though the sounds of Bangalore’s ever-present traffic were immediately beyond the gates. It was too noisy for me in the two classrooms with all of the children and their mothers talking. I was exhausted from the signal labor (Sterne and Rodgers 2011) associated with trying to separate speech from noise. I wondered about the children, about their listening effort, and about what it would be like for them to have classes and conversations in quieter spaces. Would it make a difference? Would it have been easier for the girl discussed above to hear Sasikala’s dictation? Other program administrators, therapists, and educators with whom I spoke routinely criticized Sasikala for not being “natural” because she speaks very loudly and makes use of significant intonation and acoustic highlighting (exaggerated mouth movements and stressing of syllables and sounds). They also commented on the MTC’s lack of appropriate “listening infrastructure,” a problem of which Sasikala was well aware; she pleaded with the institute’s director for soundproofing for her classrooms, to no avail. Indeed, she spoke the way she did to compensate for the echoes and reverberations in the rooms. Despite the noisy spaces, Sasikala provided relational infrastructure, and mothers supported each other and each other’s children through sharing space and time, conversations, and aspirations day in and day out. Children became close to other mothers and learned different ways of speaking, although mothers often taught the same lessons and sounded similar to each other in that they imitated Sasikala.

In the moments when mothers peeled a mosambi (sweet lime) and gave slices to all of the children, touched and cared for bruises and cuts, pulled children onto their laps, shared lunches and compared cooking notes, and smoothed down children’s unruly hair, there was care that transcended a focus on listening. This was evident too in lessons in which mothers blew on children’s little hands, brought these same hands to their faces and necks to feel sounds, and animatedly discussed everyday life using gestures, images, and touch. How might we think about the kinds of signals that are transmitted in this space? They are communicative in nonlinguistic and often nonauditory ways, in contrast to dominant professional discourses. These signals establish relationships and enable the scaffolding of time, sociality, and trajectories.

I end with the story of a mother who found it difficult to talk all the time with her child. Ashwini grew up in a rural village in Karnataka. Her parents died when she was young, and during her late teens, she was married to a distant relative who was almost twice her age. She became pregnant soon after marriage and gave birth to one child, a boy, and then another. Ashwini said she was sure that her second child, a girl, was deaf when she was ten months of age. However, her conjugal family first ignored her and then told her that she was “psychic.” They sent Ashwini to an institution where she was forcibly drugged. Still worried after returning home, she pointed out that her child did not hear any of the firecrackers during the celebration of Diwali. When Ashwini’s daughter was one and a half years old, the entire family finally took her to the All India Institute of Speech and Hearing in Mysore for tests and received an official diagnosis of deafness. The family did not act because they said that the girl would be married off to another family, so what was the use of investing in her? After two years, Ashwini quickly packed a suitcase, bundled up her daughter, and left the family home, leaving her son behind. She took her daughter to Bangalore, to a speech and hearing institute that a friend had told her about. The institute director raised funds for an implant for the child, who attended three to four hours of therapy per day both before and after implantation. The director also gave Ashwini a job at the institute’s library and provided her with an apartment. Ashwini had no contact with her in-laws or her husband, who refused to take her calls, and she feared that her in-laws were out to steal the parcel of land that she owned.

I asked Ashwini about talking to her child, and she said that she could not do it all the time, she was tired and had “too much tension.” At night, after the cooking and housework were done, she could not and did not talk with the girl, as her mind was constantly racing. The question raised by therapists is whether “hard work” means anything if mothers are not constantly talking to their deaf children and actively engaged in re/habilitation. However, there are mothers like Ashwini who do not have the social, emotional, and economic infrastructure they need to scaffold their children’s lives through talk or who experience barriers to intersensing and joint embodiment (let us not forget that Ashwini had been declared senseless by her family). By leaving her native place with her daughter in order to maximize the child’s potential, Ashwini chose to invest in her daughter’s future over the desires of her husband and conjugal family. Rather than looking at such mothers as failures, as many therapists do, I am interested in the forms of care, support, facilitation, and engagement that they provide and the signals that they apprehend and transduce. Becoming a cricket commentator is not the only way to be a mother and give and receive signals.

In this chapter I have argued that mothers and their deaf children make sense and relate to each other in multisensory and multimodal ways. Mothers do active work to produce and transduce a multitude of signals, even if these signals are not valued or occur under the radar. The question is not whether deaf children are appropriately social but how the social is produced, recognized, and stretched during carefully taught classes, therapeutic practices, and everyday engagements in quiet and noisy rooms. Intersensing and joint embodiment can be unruly and involve affectionate acts such as patting and hugging, touching plastic objects, and gazing at imperfectly drawn pictures of grapes, body parts, and Ganeshas. Just as children ostensibly learn language in addition to developing their various senses, mothers learn new ways of relating to their children and communicating in general. Care extends beyond caring for one sense. At times it also involves embracing and succumbing to noisy signals. As I discuss in the next chapter, care also extends to maintaining devices, relationships, and senses more broadly.