It’s a sunny 81 degrees in lovely Bangalore this early afternoon. In fact, it’s pretty much 81 degrees every day with an occasional evening rain storm lest we forget its Monsoon season. The girls are downstairs watching the making of Katy Perry’s ‘Roar,’ which isn’t as annoying this far into the summer as it could be since they are doing it for a purpose: they need to memorize all of the words, along with ‘Ebony & Ivory’ and ‘We Are the World’ for their choir class.

In yesterday’s Bollywood/Zumba class at the Adarsh Palm Retreat (APR) clubhouse a fellow student and French expat invited me to bring my kids to a choir class she teaches in her villa on Wednesday afternoons. In the vein of trying to say yes to as many new things as possible in my new city, and dragging the kids along in this endeavor, I told her we would be there.

The whole choir scenario ended up playing out like a slightly disturbing dream sequence after a night of spicy food and tequila. The villa which the class was held in looks exactly the same as ours does, just in another lane of the neighborhood. (Apparently there are 5 of these identical, non-Indianesque homes in the neighborhood). It was like walking into our own home and finding that someone had stolen all the simple grey furniture and pink toys and replaced them with musical instruments, superhero paraphernalia, video games, plants, and toy guns.

When the 3 girls, our 8 year old neighbor, and I entered the villa we were greeted by the teacher, 5 girls in the choir between the ages of 4 and 11 sitting quietly and politely on the leather sofas in the living room, my Korean friend sitting on the floor with her 2 year old on her lap, and the French expat’s 8 year old son running around the living room aiming his replica bazooka at us. Maybe it wasn’t actually as large as a bazooka, but it was definitely machine gun size, and equally as daunting when while singing ‘We Are the World’ a boy you have never met before is looking through his gun’s scope to take aim at your kids from various vantage points throughout the villa. What was most unsettling to me was that the teacher, his mom, didn’t address the gun aiming and occasional shooting AT ALL. Being our first class I had no idea what the boy’s role was. Was he also a member of the choir? Clearly he didn’t seem to want all of these kids in his home and was showing his mom and the rest of us instead of saying something. And like him, instead of voicing my concern, I took my cues for how to handle this situation from the others in the room who had been taking the choir class for several weeks. Most of the kids were cringing away from the gun while attempting to focus on the music and ignore the shooting, so I did too. I reasoned that the boy was probably friends with the kids in the choir and so wasn’t actually scaring them, and that he would eventually put his gun down and join in the singing, or that his mom would ask him to stop when it was time.

When it was clear that none of my assumptions were accurate, my Korean friend whispered, “don’t shoot, don’t shoot” to the boy while his mother’s attention was diverted, so as not to offend. Instead of putting the gun down, he walked upstairs, and slowly took aim directly at her from the balcony. The rest of us were singing, “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony” and “We all are a part of God’s great big family, And the truth, you know, Love is all we need” while the boy was shooting foam balls and colorful bullets at us.

The situation finally came to a head with Masan, God bless her. She grabbed the bullet that the boy shot at one of the kids, and refused to give it back to him. She said, “Why are you shooting at us?” It was the question that had been on everyone’s minds, yet no one said anything. Once Masan spoke up, I was able to say that I thought the shooting was scaring some of the younger kids. The mom finally said something to the boy in French, who reluctantly put his gun away. He traded it in for a plastic sword. Masan and our 8 year old neighbor taunted the boy by saying that the toy sword wouldn’t hurt them. Well, he tried it out on Masan’s wrist, and of course it did hurt. She started screaming and crying, and wanted to leave. Of course she did, poor gal. She reluctantly agreed to stay when I begged her to not disrupt the class by leaving early. Heaven forbid we offend anyone with our desire to leave or not be shot at, toy gun or not.

(For whatever reason, even though Masan says she is done with choir, Evie wants to go back, however, instead of singing any of the songs, she ran around the room with Mia the entire class).