All You Need is Love

Wednesday morning I awaken from a great dream. I am singing “All You Need Is Love” and dancing and putting on stage makeup with one of my theatre friends. There is a feeling of pure bliss. I think we are dressing up like hobo clowns because my friend is putting dirt on her face with a big powder puff.

No beetle has attacked me during the night. I think I can safely blame my infamous Friday night rickshaw ride for the brush with the offending insect instead.

I shower, talk to Scott, eat my breakfast and catch my ride to work.

When we catch a red light at the market, a man walks up to the driver side window of our car. Sonu rolls down the window a crack and talks to him. The market is where Sonu’s taxi stand is. The man, I think, is from the taxi stand. Another man tries to open the front passenger side door. Sonu says something in Hindi, and this other man goes away. I can’t make out what’s going on.

Sonu tells me, “Ma’am, maybe tomorrow different driver.”

“What? Why?” I ask.

“You call boss,” he says. “Mrs. Sonu. Different driver maybe tomorrow. I like you. Mrs. Sonu. You call boss.”

“Okay,” I tell Sonu. “I’ll call Mrs. Sonu. I don’t want a different driver. I want you to be my driver.”

“Yes,” he says. “You call boss.”

At work, I ring up Mrs. Sonu. I want to know if she received the payment from Finance that she called me to ask about yesterday, and I want to know about the driver situation. Sonu is working out so well for me. I don’t know why they have to change the arrangement.

“Don’t tell him this,” she says, “but there is some question about the gas. He is only driving so many miles but the gas that is gone is double, you see? We don’t know if it is a car problem or if he is selling this gas. So my husband is checking on this and we will do the needful.”

Stealing gas? I can’t imagine Sonu doing such a thing. “Well, I’d really like to keep the same driver,” I tell Mrs. Sonu. “Sonu’s helped me so much, well beyond his job requirements, and he’s always on time and he knows the way to my work. He’s a very good driver.”

“If we send someone else, he also will be good,” Mrs. Sonu assures me. I tell her thank you, but I’d really like to keep the same driver. She says she’ll see what she can do. She has to protect her profits, she says, and she wouldn’t want to have to charge me more. Is this a veiled threat?

I suppose I don’t know the reality of the situation. I try to imagine Sonu siphoning off gas and selling it, but it’s difficult to do. The guy who helps me cross the street? The guy who sits next to me in the Lotus Temple and takes care of my shoes when we check them in and out? The guy who wrangled me an elephant ride? I guess I don’t really know him, but he seems like such a fundamentally good person.

I guess it could be happening, but I feel more like he’s being unfairly accused. And why would Mrs. Sonu tell me not to tell him about her concern? Are they going to fire him without telling him why? Doesn’t he have a right to know? The whole thing sounds shady. Mrs. Sonu seems shady to me. I don’t trust her. I’ve been trying to deal with her to arrange payment for the hotel and the terms have changed countless times. They don’t accept credit cards, then they do. The price is one rate, then another. We can pay upon checkout, then we need to pay right away, and if everything isn’t settled before I check out, I won’t be able to leave. Another threat.

There is no central truth. I hear Susie’s words again. Indians are okay with shifting ground, the lack of a definitive answer, but it’s maddening to me, especially when I’m caught in the middle between Finance and Mrs. Sonu.

“Well I would be really disappointed if I had to get a new driver,” I think maybe an interpersonal appeal might work.

“I will see what we can do and let you know,” Mrs. Sonu says, but I know she doesn’t mean it and I know I’m not getting a straight story either, but I am powerless to do anything more.

At the office, I work on tweaking the layout plan I created yesterday. Because of costs, we are restricted to a black and white layout that is no more than six pages. We need to somehow fit over 5,000 words into these six pages. How small can we make the font and still retain readability? I experiment to see.

At lunch I ask Amar about the history book launch. Can I still go to that? Of course, he says. He wants to know if I’m still coming to the Macroeconomics launch on Saturday. Of course, I reciprocate.

I ask him about a photo he took of the Mumbai skyline that was used on a book cover. On Tuesday the head of the design team, Madhur, had done a brilliant job of showing me scads of book cover designs that he and his team have created: some basic, some beautiful. On several covers, they’ve used photos taken by staff members. Amar pulls up the picture on his computer. “This one?” he asks. Yes, I recognize it from the cover. “I took this at the National Sales Meeting when we had it in Bombay,” he says. It’s a beautiful picture. Impressively done.

I notice that Amar refers to Mumbai by its old name, Bombay. I ask about the name change. When and how did that happen? More recently than I thought. About four years ago, he says. He says the Hindu nationalists in the government want to pretend like the British colonization never happened. They want to rename everything. But Amar sees these British names as part of the history of his country. It’s there. You can’t change it. There were the Mughuls, the Persians, the Portuguese, the British. All of these conquerors served to make India what it is today. There is no use in pretending like some of them were never here.

Back at my desk, the Sonu vs. Mrs. Sonu situation is really bugging me. I compose an email:

I just want to reiterate what a helpful and good man my driver, Sonu, has been
for me the whole time I’ve been here. He has helped me above and beyond the
requirements of his job, showing me shops and talking to the salespeople for me
if they don’t speak much English. He helped my friend at the chemists when she
cut her toe and was even offering to bandage it up for her. He has been a
treasure for me during my first weeks getting adjusted in this country.

I know you need to settle your business, but I just thought it
might help to hear a little more about Sonu’s character. As far as I am
concerned, he is a very, very good man. I would be very upset to lose him as my
driver.

Thank you for your consideration,

Vicki

This email will fix the problem, I fool myself, then hit send. I get a message right back: it’s undeliverable. I try again. Undeliverable. Mrs. Sonu’s email account isn’t working. I call her up and tell her email account isn’t working. She doesn’t care. She asks why I was emailing her. I tell her I wanted to reiterate how helpful Sonu has been--and try not to feel like this is an exercise in futility.

“Okay madam,” she says. “I will talk to my husband.” They’re going to fire Sonu.

After work I see Sonu in his orange shirt and khaki pants. I tell him he looks nice. I tell him I called his boss—twice—and that I told her he is a good man. He wants to know what Mrs. Sonu said. I tell him she wouldn’t tell me anything, whether or not she’d let him continue to be my driver. “I don’t know, Sonu. I don’t know.”

“Oh,” he says, deflated.

Should I tell him about the accusation? I consider him a friend, but Mrs. Sonu confided this fact in me and told me not to tell. I don’ t really want to piss off the woman who is in charge of where I’m living. I go back and forth. Tell him. Don’t tell him.

“Sonu, can you take me to a store and help me buy some Punjabi music? Can we do that before we go home today?” In case I don’t see him again, I want this souvenir to remember him by. I don’t count on a new driver being willing to do this for me.

“Yes,” he says.

“Sonu, you speak Punjabi?”

“Yes.”

“And Hindi?”

“Yes.”

“And English?”

“Yes, but not very. English is very nice language.”

I tell him his English is good, especially seeing as it’s his third language. I tell him most people in the United States barely have their first language down.

“Ma’am, you send snaps Mrs. Sonu.” He wants me to email the few pictures I took of us to Mrs. Sonu so she can print them out and give them to him, since all his many snaps are lost in his broken phone.

He asks about Mrs. Sonu again. “Mrs. Sonu. What tell?”

“She wouldn’t tell me anything, Sonu.” I want to ask him if he’s been stealing gas. I want to see his eyes when he says he has no idea what she’s talking about. It’s a lie. “She said there’s a problem with the car. Did she tell you that?”

“Yes, problem,” he says, but I don’t get a feeling like he understands.

“She said there’s some gas missing.” Screw you, Mrs. Sonu and your crazy, circular riddle talk. “But she told me not to tell you this. She thinks you’re taking gas.”

“Yes, problem?” he says. Damn it. He doesn’t understand the big revelation, and what could he do if he did? Argue with Mrs. Sonu and her husband? If my pleading has no effect, his surely will not. I let it go.

“Lodhi Gardens? Go?” Sonu says.

“Sometime, yes,” I say, “But not now.” Lodhi Gardens is where people go on dates according to Julianne and Susie. It’s not good to go there by yourself, they say. I think if I want to see it, it would probably be good to have Sonu with me. I realize he’s asking me to go because this may be the last time we have the chance to go, the last chance we have for snaps, but I realize this after I’ve already said no. It's probably for the best.

We pass the signs for Khan Market, where I figured we’d go to get the music, but then I think maybe Sonu knows somewhere else. When we come up on the Defence Colony Market, I realize he’s just spaced off the music thing altogether. I decide to press the issue, as it’s probably my last chance to have a guide to Punjabi music shopping. “Sonu, can we go get some music?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he says, and pulls into the right lane so we can make a U-turn. The light turns green but the car just sits there. Traffic whizzes past us and honks, but Sonu just stares off into space. I wonder what he’s waiting for. Finally a pedestrian waiting to cross the street bangs on the window and Sonu emerges from his trance. He laughs. He notices his friend from the taxi stand saw the whole incident. He will be teased about this later. I wonder what he was thinking about: probably losing his job.

At Khan Market, Sonu parks the car and makes sure the doors are locked before we leave. My backpack is in the back seat and he wants to be sure it’s safe. We go to a store that has DVDs, CDs and video games. A man checking out has about five James Bond movies. Octopussy. Goldfinger. Etc. Sonu speaks with the shopkeepers in Hindi, and they pull out about four discs. Sonu considers each one. He puts one aside right away. It’s a good one. “Like you play in the car?” I ask. “Yes,” he says. He wants to know if I want one or two. Two, I say. He finds a second one that he recommends. The bill comes to 200 rupees, or about four dollars. I wonder if they have cell phones at this store. I still think it might be a nice idea to buy one for Sonu since he can’t afford one until next month. It might be a nice way to thank him for all he’s done for me. I find no cell phones in the store and decide not to ask.

On the way back to the car, I ask Sonu how much cell phones cost here. 5,000 rupees, he tells me. This is more than I expected. It’s about $125. Maybe I can just give him a big tip today. Or maybe I should give him the whole $125. But that would be inappropriate, wouldn’t it? It’s really a lot of money in India.

We are almost home and I’m trying to close this debate with myself when Sonu ends it for me. It comes to a shattering stop like a crash test dummy flying through a windshield at the moment of impact, car crumpling up underneath him.

“Madam, I hope you don’t mind. I love you,” he says.

He doesn’t mean that. Maybe he means love in a broad, humanitarian way, I think. All You Need Is Love. God is Love. That sort of thing.

“You love your wife,” I tell him.

“My wife. She no. No babies. No boys.”

What is he saying? He doesn’t love his wife because they have two baby girls? Doesn’t he love his baby girls? Doesn’t’ he love his wife? What kind of character is this guy? What is he thinking? I want to jump out of the cab. I hope he is fired and I never have to see him again.

Then our weeks together flash through my mind’s eye and I see myself leading him on. “You look nice today, Sonu. I want you to be my driver. I don’t want a different driver. I like you.” I see myself letting him take all his snaps of us. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have done this to him? How could I have thought he was doing all he did for me just because he was nice? People aren't that nice. He loves me.

“Madam, do you love me?” he asks, about two blocks later.

“I love you like a friend,” I tell him. I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. I wonder if this most crushing, dreaded bullshit line will translate for Sonu, if it will make sense. I hope he doesn’t get angy. I hope he doesn’t try anything.

“Oh,” he says. “Okay, madam. I see.”

We pull up in front of the guest house in silence as he prepares the day’s receipt and I get out my standard daily tip for him: 100 rupees. At least that settled my quandary, I think.

This moment might be goodbye for us. I still want to thank him for all he’s done for me. “If I don’t see you again…” I say, but he interrupts me.

“Okay, happy new friendship,” he says. He is nodding and smiling from embarrassment. He wants me to stop talking. He wants this moment to end quickly.

“Okay,” I tell him. “Goodnight.”

In my room, I stare at the ceiling. I stare at myself in the mirror and exhale. I can’t believe what just happened. Why? Why did it have to go there? This is why all my male friends are gay, I think. Otherwise, it’s just too confusing.

I feel bad for Sonu. Of course he’s confused. I’ve been acting like a complete idiot. I’ve been going on dates with the poor man, riding in a paddle boat and walking around ruins. I just didn’t realize.

“We have the same problem, madam. Your husband too far. My wife too far.” This wasn’t commiserating, maybe. Maybe this was a come on. And he wasn't thinking about losing his job when he spaced out at the green light, was he? He was thinking about telling me he loves me, wasn't he? I spend about an hour replaying scenes of Sonu and Vicki and second-guessing all we’ve done and said. I’m glad I didn’t offer to buy him a cell phone. I’m glad I didn’t go to Lodhi Gardens with him.

I want to call my husband. I want to go downstairs and see Mira and Pachu who don’t give a damn about me one way or the other. I want to go stand next to somebody with whom I have a professional relationship. I want to feel that utter neutrality--the opposite of love or lust or whatever it is that Sonu's feeling. I want to wash away this icky feeling.

I so wish this didn’t happen, but it did. I want Sonu to be the good person I had constructed in my head: the crossing guard, first-aid giving, selfless driver with angel wings on the back of his t-shirt, not a gas-stealing horn dog who’s disappointed with girl babies and willing to cheat on his wife with the first white girl who comes along. Maybe he is both of these things. Maybe he is neither.

All You Need is Love. The love part is simple. It's the relationships that mess it up.

I wonder what will happen tomorrow morning, and tell myself I need to be more careful with Indian men.

Pearson India Blog

I finally got up the courage to write something for the official Pearson India blog. It's posted there live now, under the date July 30 and the title "My First Experiences in India - Vicki Krajewski" (spelled with a w--not a double u). You can read my post (and others) at: http://pearsonindia.blogspot.com/

A Quiet Night In

Nothing much to report on Tuesday, July 29th, except that Monday night I didn’t sleep very well, feeling every little twitch and itch as the possible venomous beetle that ate the back of my knee.

I’ve gotten into a morning routine where I wake up around 6:30 and shower, talk to Scott at 7:30, eat breakfast at 8:00 or 8:30, then leave for work around 9:00. I’m not usually big on routine, but the structure feels good here where so little else happens as expected.

I am so happy to have my Internet service working so I can “schedule” my Skype calls to my family. It feels like an entirely different experience when I can talk to them regularly without worrying about paying over a dollar a minute in long distance fees.

Tuesday morning, I don’t even get into Sonu’s cab before he asks me about my leg. Is it pain? Is it better?

It’s better. It’s less swollen, at least. And the lesion doesn’t seem to be spreading. It’s just a big “c” shape on the back of my knee. I’m just hoping it doesn’t turn into an open wound, because then I need to worry about the water coming into contact with it. If I have an open wound, because of the bacteria in the water, I’m going to need to take showers without getting my leg wet—and that will be a trick and a half. For now, I’m just crossing my fingers that my latest Indian souvenir won’t blister and seep.

At work, I design a prototype layout for a study card that will accompany a graduate level textbook on supply chain management. The CEO also invites me to contribute to the Pearson India blog. I have to think of something good enough to say. I decide to let some ideas brew in my brain until later in the week (read: procrastinate).

Sonu drives me home. As I am getting out of the car he looks at me and says, “Smile, ma’am.” Of course I do. In fact, I laugh. But the moment feels a bit odd. I wonder what made him say that. Was I looking glum? Does he just like seeing my front teeth?

For dinner, I microwave my leftover pasta from Liquid Kitchen. Most evenings I find some excuse to go to the market. I need Scotch tape. I wonder what’s at the bakery. But this evening I stay in and catch up on my blogging.

After my necrosis diagnosis, a quiet night in sounds lovely—and is. Now if I can just convince myself that the poison beetle isn't crawling around in my bed, I should be able to get some good sleep.

Ma ma ma My Necrosis

At work on Monday morning I see Debamitra, with whom I had tentative plans to meet at the Lajput Nagar market. She asks if I called her. I tell her yes, but I missed her. She didn’t remember seeing any missed calls. I wonder if I dialed correctly.

She did go Lajput Nagar. She shows me her very cute sandals. “200 rupees,” she exclaims. “No!” I exclaim back. She was disappointed, though, that she couldn’t find the 100 rupee kurta man. I tell her we’ll have to go back there sometime together—and just to be sure, we’ll have to take my person shopping shirpa, Julianne with us. Julianne knows that market inside and out. Better than my Indian friends at work, apparently.

Impressive.

I talk to Shabnum about her weekend too. She had some men work on a window that wouldn’t close on her house. She didn’t have a very thrilling time, but it’s good to have the work done.

I tell Shabnum about the bite on my leg and ask what she thinks I should do. She says she had a bite once that kept spreading, and she had to go to the doctor for it. It took about a month to go away and left a scar. She says I should have my leg looked at.

I was hoping she’d tell me it’s nothing. Ignore it and it will surely get better. Instead I have visions of tiny flesh-eating worms making themselves at home in my knee pit.

Later I visit Amar in his office. He’s talking with Shabnum. How was his weekend? He ended up not seeing The Dark Knight because there were no tickets available on Sunday. Had I tried to call him? Yes. He didn’t see any missed calls from me, but that could be because of his wireless network. Shabnum had problems with that until she switched networks.

As I’m sitting in the office, Shabnum asks me if I’d like her to arrange a doctor’s visit for me. I’m so thankful for the offer of help. She calls and gets an appointment for 3:15 at “Max’s” near the office. So, shortly, I will be able to tell you about my experience with the Indian health care system.

Amar says Max’s isn’t very good, but it’s the only place near the office. Shabnum agrees. They’re not very good, but they’re close. I wonder what “not very good” means. They say the same thing about lunch all the time, “It’s not very good,” and lunch always tastes fine to me. I hope it’s the same kind of “not very good” at the doctor’s this afternoon. I hope it’s fine.

I still have no rudder here for the Indian concept of quality. People have to tell me I’m in a nice neighborhood. Otherwise, I don’t know it from the other neighborhoods I’ve seen. People have to tell me the food is good, otherwise, it tastes like all the other food I’ve tasted.

I wonder if I’ll get a better feel for this before I leave. I wonder if there are mites burrowing into my leg.

This may sound very bad, but I’m not alarmed; I’m more interested. Everyone seems assured that the doctor will be able to give me something that will fix the problem, if there is one.

I feel about my predicament just like I feel about the Indian traffic. It looks terrifying on the surface of it, it sounds awful when I describe it, but if I have someone I trust to get me through it, I’ll be fine.

Three o’clock rolls around and Shabnum comes to my desk. It’s time to go. We walk outside and try to find Sonu. "Roti," the front desk guard says, motioning to his mouth. Sonu’s off having lunch somewhere. It’s okay. We can take a bicycle rickshaw to the hospital as it’s just outside of the industrial park gate and across the other side of the highway from where we are.

Shabnum calls, excusing herself for having to yell, “Rickshaw! Rickshaw!” The man peddles off without stopping. We find another rickshaw driver. He doesn’t want to take us.

As we walk further toward the industrial park gate, I thank Shabnum again for going with me and helping me. She says she knows what it’s like to be in a new place and not know how to do even simple things. She went to Canada a few years ago to visit her sister.

We walk almost to the gate of the industrial park before we find some more drivers. This one will take us there for ten rupees. We jump in and he pushes his bike up the bridge. I suddenly feel like a Big Fat Westerner crammed into this little carriage. I think most Indians are smaller in stature than I am.

“This place must seem filthy to you,” Shabnum tells me. I laugh nervously. It does seem filthy. I think if I lie about it, I will not sound genuine. “It’s not one of the nicer places,” she says as we pass by a busted up, rubble-filled sidewalk.

The rickshaw driver finally starts pedaling and I don’t feel as bad—until he grunts. Then I feel bad again. As we turn out onto the highway and begin biking into oncoming traffic, my guilt is replaced by trepidation. Busses and autos and motorcycles are headed straight for us.

Shabnum says, “Now we’re on the wrong side of the street.”

I consider some responses: “Yeah, holy shit.” No, that’s not good. “This would be the right side of the street where I come from.” No, that’s lame. How about, “Um, are we going to live?” Once again, I decline to comment. If I didn’t need a doctor when we set out, I think, I’ll surely need one by the time we get to the hospital.

But, once again, the rickshaw driver gets us through the traffic safely. We don’t tip over when I think we’re going to tip over. We don’t get sideswiped when I think we’re going to get sideswiped. And apart from the metal bar that hit me in the back when I leaned against the cushion, I am completely unscathed. Shabnum’s apartment is right across the street from the hospital. She gets to and from work via bicycle rickshaw every day.

Shabnum gives the man ten rupees even though I offer to pay, then we walk into the hospital. There are rows and rows of people patiently waiting in the main lobby (no pun intended). The hospital lobby looks like a hospital lobby: wooden paneling and a religious medallion, only this one is Hindu. I think it might be Vishnu the Sustainer. I'm glad it's not Shiva the Destroyer. I wouldn't want to go to that hospital.

I give my name to the woman at the front desk, spelling my last name: K-R-A-J-E-W-S-K-I. She gets to the “W” and types in “UU.” I try to correct this, but have no way of explaining that “double ewe” doesn’t mean two U’s. I figure it’s no harm done.

She types in my information and sends us to a second desk around the corner where another woman asks for my birth date and marital status. She then leans back and says, “Four hundred rupees.” I wonder how they know how much to charge before the appointment happens, but four hundred rupees is about eight dollars, and who am I to argue with an eight dollar doctor appointment?

The woman behind this second desk tells Shabnum in Hindi that there will be a wait. Shabnum asks how long, and the woman tells her the doctor has a list and will take people in the order their names appear on the list. We sit down in a warm roomfull of people. A giant banner says, “The best thing you can do for Mother Earth is to plant a tree.” There are many such ecological messages scattered about the city.

I ask Shabnum more about the work she’s having done in her apartment. There are termites in the window frames, she says. She’s been waiting forever for these guys to come fix it and hoping the bugs don’t spread to her new furniture. “Couldn’t you get your landlord to pay for that if it happened?” I ask, knowing that the Indian legal system is labyrinthine and not good at ensuring anybody’s actual rights.

“I could,” she says, “but there are all kinds of loopholes.”

“Victoria,” a man steps out of the door and calls my name.

Shabnum stands up with me. “Do you want me to go in with you?”

“Would you? Just in case?” I ask her, then tell her I feel like a baby.

Inside the office Dr. Mukesh Girdhar tells us to have a seat, then he takes a gander at my name. “How do you say your surname?” he asks.

“Krajewski,” I say.

“Krajewski,” he repeats, then takes a big, deep breath, staring at the name. “Double ‘u,’” he says, “very unusual.”

“No,” I tell him. “It’s a W.”

“Yes,” he says, “double u.”

I give up.

“What is the problem?” he asks me. I tell him I think I have an insect bite, then I roll up my pant leg, stand up and show him the back of my left leg.

“Your diagnosis is correct,” he says, smiling. “But that is not why you came to me. I need to add something more.” He tells me the name of the bug that he thinks is the culprit. It’s a beetle with very venomous wings. So it’s not actually a bite. The irritation comes just from contact with the wings. I’m glad this thing only crawled across the back of my knee.

He says I have necrosis (or cell death) in the tissue that came in contact with the beetle.

Whatever you do, don’t Google necrosis or look it up in Wikipedia. You will throw up.

The doctor says it may take a month to heal, and it will likely scar. But he says it won’t scar as bad on fair skin as it would on darker skin. If I have to have a scar, I tell him, I guess the back of my knee is a good place for it. He laughs.

He tells me to take Allegra and an oral steroid. He also prescribes a topical steroid that I can use twice a day. He writes this all up in a legible prescription, and we are on our way. Shabnum says he was a good doctor. He seemed like a good doctor to me, but again, it's India; it’s hard to tell.

We stop at the chemist counter on the way out of the hospital. I hand over the prescription and they begin pulling pill packets from their shelves and counting them out. I rifle through my wallet and count the 500 rupee bills, hoping I have enough cash.

“124,” the man behind the counter says.

I think he may mean one thousand and twenty four rupees. That would be about twenty five dollars. I ask Shabnum. “No,” she says, “one hundred and twenty four rupees. Do you need to borrow some money?”

That’s two dollars and fifty cents for all the medicine.

“No, I’m fine. But thank you,” I say and fork over the two fifty. I tell Shabnum how cheap that is. Sadly, she says, a lot of people living here still can't afford medical care. "People like us can," she says, but not others. Many others. They have to go to government hospitals where the care isn't so good.

Outside we have trouble with the bicycle rickshaw drivers. They want to charge fifty rupees to drive us across the street, which is ridiculous in Indian terms. We go from driver to driver and they all refuse to take us or ask too much. I tell Shabnum it doesn’t help to have a whitey with her. They’re probably hiking their prices because of me. She says they do it to her too, though, because she is from Assam (another Indian state). Her native language is Assamese and she speaks Hindi with an accent. “They can tell I’m not from around here,” she says, and they charge accordingly. It’s not just because she’s got a white friend today.

We finally find a driver who will take us back for 20 rupees. Shabnum climbs into the little carriage. I follow close behind and bang my head on the way in—but not too hard. Just enough to feel awkward and dippy.

Back at the office, I email my friend who works in an ER about my adventure in Indian health care. He spreads the story around the ER and emails me back. I should take an antibiotic, too, to prevent infection. No problem, I tell him. You can get antibiotics at any chemists here without a prescription for a little over a dollar.

After work, I tell Sonu my story as well. “Madam, what time?” He wants to know when I went to the doctor. “About three o’clock,” I tell him, and he starts touching his forehead with his fingers over and over. He wrinkles his eyebrows. He’s upset. “Only five minutes I gone. I eat. Only five minutes all day.”

“It’s fine,” I tell him. “The hospital was close. We just took a bicycle rickshaw. It’s fine.” He looks a bit relieved.

“Is pain?” he asks about my bite--or whatever it is.

“It hurts. Yes,” I say. “But I have a lot of medicine for it. It will be okay.”

“Okay, good,” he says, and smiles.

Back at the Defence Colony I decide to walk to the market to get my antibiotic. I walk into the chemist’s and am greeted by the doorman. “Ma’am?” he wants to know what I want.

“Cipro?” I say. He points me toward the back counter. “Cipro,” I tell the two men there. They take out a packet of about ten pills. It’s marked 68 rupees. About a dollar fifty. I look at the packet for dosage information, but there is none. I remember the last time I took antibiotics. I had to take them twice a day, twelve hours apart, a breakfast/dinner kind of thing. I decide to do the same with my Cipro.

Because I have to eat a good dinner in order to prepare my stomach for the drug bomb it’s about to get, I decide to check out a restaurant I’ve had my eye on. It’s called Liquid Kitchen. I’ve been staying away as the place is intimidatingly nice. The guard outside looks like he got picked up at Buckingham Palace and dropped off here. The host outside stands behind a dark wooden podium. I ask him if I can see a menu. He shows me two. One is Asian fusion, the other is Italian. I wonder if the Italian will be any better than the stuff I tried with Susie on Saturday night. We ate above this bakery called “Angels in My Kitchen.” I ordered “Pasta al Fungi” and got rotini noodles in a thick, tasteless floury paste. It was a sad tease for someone who is addicted to Italian food.

The prices here are exorbitant compared to the prices at Sagar. Dinner will likely cost me ten dollars. I decide to splurge. Inside I ask for the bathroom so I can wash my hands. They send me upstairs where there is a staff of about ten people standing in a circle. They part like the red sea and make a path to the washroom for me.

Downstairs I find my booth which is set for six people with regular silverware and chopsticks. I order my pasta with my fingers crossed. Please be good. A chic Buddha looks over me and the walls are done up in bamboo. Chic music plays: slightly techno, slightly emo. Two men stand nearby at the ready with fresh, filtered water. I am the only patron in the joint. But it’s early by Indian standards. Only about 6:45.

Before the pasta arrives, they bring me kim chee: a Chinese cabbage salad. It has a light sesame sauce on it. It’s delicious. They also bring me a small dish of Chinese pickles: pickled carrots and cucumber. I almost don’t try them because of the terrible, acid Indian pickle I had with my lunch the other day, but I decide to hold my nose and give it a go. These Chinese pickles are nothing like Indian pickles, to my delight. They are delicate and fresh and crunchy, also with a hint of savory sesame. I finish and the waiter wants to know if I want some more. I forego second helpings. The food is so good so far that my hopes are really up for my pasta.

The pasta arribiata arrives and I am heartened. The presentation is detailed, with a halved grape tomato placed just there, a parsley spring here and one ring each of green and black olive.

This is posh—and I don’t need anybody to tell me so, probably because it is posh in western terms, terms I understand.

The dish tastes like something I might get in the United States. Better than the Olive Garden. There’s even garlic in it. It’s heavenly.

I finish half of the large helping and ask to get the rest to go. They want to know if madam wants dessert. Madam saw the dessert menu and it looked marvelous. Madam says yes. She’d like to try the tekko. It was one of the desserts on the Asian menu. Something having to do with pineapple and banana in coconut sauce.

The tekko takes some time to prepare and two people come in to do some business while I wait: a young woman and an older man. She’s trying to talk him into buying whatever it is she’s selling. He doesn’t like her price.

The tekko comes on a platter and the waiter serves me my first helping: one breaded pineapple wedge and one breaded banana slice. The pineapple has rice noodles around the outside and is in a sweet, white coconut sauce. The banana has an orange caramel-tasting sauce on it. It’s dastardly delicious. The waiter asks me how it is and I can’t even think of words. “It’s definite… it’s definitely good,” I tell him as though English were my third language.

He waits while I finish this first helping, then dishes up a second, then a third, until the dessert is gone.

When I am done, they give me a comment card. It asks for a lot of personal information. I just fill out the rankings. “Extremely good, extremely good, extremely good.”

Eight people thank me for coming on the way out, and the host smiles at the podium as I leave through the door being held open by the palace guard.

I may have necrosis, but I also just had one of the best meals of my life. It all balances out, I figure.

Before I go home, I decide I’m going to visit a chemist in hopes of finding the one necessity I have yet to run across here: feminine products. If I can’t buy these, I’ll have to ask someone to send them to me, and that could take a while. This is something I need to figure out in advance. I walk into the nearest chemist and gaze up at the shelves full to the high ceiling. There’s hair dye, diapers, cigarettes, in no particular order. The men behind the counter ask me what I’m looking for. I know Indian men are pretty shy about matters like this, and I was hoping I didn’t have to ask. I laugh a little as I think about how to ask for this in basic English. Will any of our euphemisms work? Feminine hygiene products? Napkins? What do I ask for? Finally I just say, “For ladies…” and look embarrassed. Thankfully, this does the trick. They point at a shelf right in front of where I’m standing. If I’d only looked down instead of up I would have found it.

I’m so glad to know I can buy this stuff here and I don’t have to rely on the postal service. “Thank you,” I say, grabbing a package and heading toward the front counter.

“No, madam,” they say, reaching their hands out for my “product.” They take it and furtively place it in an opaque black bag to hide the contents from sight, as though I were purchasing a snuff movie or a dead puppy. I thank them again, unable to keep from laughing. They laugh too and nod. The man at the counter takes my money none the wiser for the illicit goods I am buying.

I walk home with my leftover food in a monogrammed plastic container, my bag of “supplies,” and my Cipro feeling pretty accomplished. It’s been a long day and I’m ready for some drugs.

On the way, I run into one of my dogs and offer her a piece of bread from Liquid Kitchen. As per usual, she looks at it like it’s garbage and lets it drop to the ground.

National Museum (un)Authorized Photos!

Dilli Haat

The Basics

Sunday I sleep late—right through church, not because of any nightmares or fear hangover, but just because I’m darn tired. I’ve been going to bed around midnight and getting up at 6:30 in the morning. I think I’ve racked up a little sleep deprivation.

Since I don’t have Sonu on Sundays, I resolve to just poke around at home and be lazy. I haven’t really taken a day “off” since I landed here. I’ve been running about and seeing everything and getting myself filled to bursting with new experiences.

Also, there have now been two spates of bombings in two days in two Indian cities. I wonder, on this third day, if Delhi is next. It is the capital. There are plenty of easy targets. I decide it’s best to steer clear of the crowded markets and auto-rickshaws, where it’s rumored that some of the bombs that went off in the other cities were planted.

After breakfast, I laze around in bed, watching the BBC World News until noon. Then I get up and read one of the plays Scott sent me, The Laramie Project. It’s good, but depressing: the story of the town where Matthew Shephard was killed.

I decide to check out what’s on the Hallmark channel, not because I would ever do this at home, but because it’s one of the only English language tv channels I get here. Hallmark and BBC World News. I get the Disney Channel, but it’s dubbed into Hindi, which is always amusing for about three seconds, then gets old.

We Were the Mulvaneys is on. I know it as a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, one that I’ve never read, so I figure I’ll watch. It might be good. And it’s okay, but depressing. It’s about this picture perfect family that totally falls apart. “Mom always said it’s nature’s way to scatter,” the narrator remarks.

Between the play and the movie and feeling a bit stuck inside my guest house and alone, I am utterly depressed. The first three weeks went so fast, but this day alone is an eternity. I tell myself to buck up, but on top of everything else, my leg hurts. That scratch is really bad.

As though he had ESP and could tell I was about to fall into a pit of despair, Scott rings up my computer via Skype. We talk for a while. I tell him I read the play. Thanks for sending it. I whine to him about my leg. He wonders if it’s not a scratch at all but a bite. I try to take a closer gander at it, which is difficult. Darn if he’s not right. There’s a circular lump on part of it. If it’s a bite, that would also explain why I didn’t remember scratching myself. But it’s no mosquito bite. It’s nasty. Scott wants me to ask the people at the guest house about it, but they speak so little English I doubt they’ll be of much help. Plus it’s getting a little late here. I tell him I’ll ask Sonu or someone at work tomorrow. He guesses that’s okay.

He’s going to go mow the lawn.

Okay, I say, but start to cry. I’m not so good with being alone, despite all my discoveries at the Lotus Temple. I miss him terribly. His smile. His warmth. His caring.

If he were here, he’d be nursing my wound and I could be the baby I want to be about the whole thing. But it’s no big deal. It’s good that I can’t be a baby. It’s good that I have to figure this one out by myself. Just like the tv and the door lock and the microwave and my alarm clock. This is another exercise in patience with myself, in confidence in my ability to handle things. It will be okay. I will be okay.

And all this despair is about my needs anyway, not a wish for the well-being of anyone else. All this despair is selfish. If I can just stop thinking about my needs so much and focus on others, I’ll be closer to feeling love anyway. How is my poor husband who I abandoned on the other side of the planet. Did I even ask? Or was I too wrapped up in the fact that I spent the day alone? It was probably closer to the latter than the former. I need to practice this wishing for the well-being of others in times when I am feeling sorry for myself. My voice was right. I wasn’t ready for a more complex answer. I need to get the basics down first.

All You Need Is... a deep wish for the well-being of others

Saturday morning I feel beat. It’s 9:30—later than I’ve slept the whole time I’ve been here.

I roll out of bed and notice a pain in the back of my left knee. It looks like a scratch, as far as I can see. Try looking at the back of your knee. It’s not easy—even if you do practice yoga. I don’t remember scratching my leg on anything, but it was quite an evening. I can imagine having scratched myself and not realizing it at the time.

Sonu arrives promptly at ten o’clock. The problem is that the technician from the hotel who has come to check out my wireless issues also arrives promptly at ten o’clock. And I’ve just gotten up anyway, and I’m shuffling around in a bit of a stress hangover.

I tell Sonu, “One hour, okay?” He hangs out downstairs with the guard at the gate while the tech works on my computer and I get ready for the day.

The tech runs a few diagnostics, then says there is a problem with the router. He tells me he’ll go downstairs and fix it, and I should have no further problems with the Internet. He turns out to be right—at least for the time being.

Downstairs I ask Sonu if he knows where Dilli Haat is. It’s a “somewhat contrived open air market” according to my guidebook, but all the locals (and the expats I’m hanging out with) tell me I should go there. They have crafts from all over India. Can Sonu find it?

“Yes madam,” he tells me. “Dilli Haat.” We pull away and Punjabi music fills the car. One of Sonu’s favorite songs these days is “Rambo Rambo.” The song is half in Hindi, half in English and some of the words I can make out include, “Like Sly Stallone I’m bringing the pain. The only difference is I got a Singh in my name.” I like Sonu’s music not just because of culturally mashed up oddities like this, but also because it’s just good music. I tell him he has to show me where I can buy some before I leave.

Then for some reason I tell him there’s a lizard in my room. I wonder how he will react to this news since he tends to be protective of me. I hope he doesn’t think the lizard upsets me.

“You like?” he says. “I like.”

Sonu and me. Compatriots. “Yes, I like them a lot,” I say. “They’re cute.”

“Cute,” he says, then laughs—either at me or at the thought of a cute lizard. I’m not sure which.

Shortly thereafter, we pull up to Dilli Haat. Sonu gets out of the car and points the way. “I stay?” he asks. I think he doesn’t want to go shopping with me. Especially without his phone to take snaps.

“It’s fine,” I say. I walk through a metal detector and a man behind a table says “Tikka,” which means okay, but he’s also motioning for me to stop. “Tikka,” he says, “Tikka,” and points. I’m confused.

“English?” I say. The man points me to another man who is sitting beside him.

“Tickets,” this second man says.

“Oh, tickets! Not tikka,” I feel like a dufus.

I walk to the front of the adjacent brick building and purchase a ticket for fifteen rupees. I return to the guards, laughing. “Tickets!” I say. And they laugh back. “Acha,” I say. Good.

Inside I realize what the guidebook meant by contrived. There is no garbage or rubble here. There are no men peeing. There are no scurvy lemonade stands. This market is maintained for tourists, but because it’s so nice, locals like to come here too.

I also find that the prices seem a little more fair and a little less prone to wild fluctuation. Shoes will cost you about 250 rupees unless you get the really fancy ones with lots of stitching. Jewelry is about 150 rupees. The blouses are around 300 rupees. There’s not such an exorbitant white tax here, which is a relief, as is the lack of the pushing, surging crowd you have to constantly battle in the regular markets. If it wasn’t 100 plus degrees, this would be downright nice.

You can still bargain a bit, and the shopkeepers still kiss the money you give them and bow their heads if you are their first customer. It’s not like this market is some kind of frosted flake commercial franchise. It just isn’t a daily market that is part of a neighborhood. It’s strictly souvenir-type goods.

I buy my sister-in-law some great bracelets. I buy my niece a cute little change purse (even though she can’t have change yet because she’ll eat it. It can wait.) I buy myself a pair of shoes and am convinced by the vendor to buy one more pair for good measure. His wife made them, you know. I get some kurtas and a suit I can wear to the Macroeconomics book launch next Saturday. The woman who designed the suit (and all the beautiful clothes in her booth) sells it to me. Here you can see the designers and craftspeople sitting in the booths making the amazing things they are selling. Dilli Haat is a real kick. I’ll have to stay away lest I fill my suitcase to bursting and have to leave behind my treasures or ship them home at ungodly prices.

I walk back to the car with my many bags. “I bought too much, Sonu,” I say, and he smiles.

“Where next, ma’am?” he asks.

“There’s an art museum by India Gate,” I tell him. “Can we go there?”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, and we pull out of the market, Punjabi music playing as it always is in Sonu’s car.

We near India Gate and Sonu starts speaking a bit excitedly. “Madam? India Gate?” He says a lot more that I can’t quite make out. Sometimes Sonu’s English confuses me, but he always seems to be able to understand me pretty well. I finally make out that he’s asking if I want to walk around India Gate. “Sure,” I tell him. I hadn’t really walked around it the first time I saw it. I just kind of popped out of the car, took a snap, and popped back in.

Sonu parks across the street and is careful to make sure I cross when he does. In addition to my driver, he is my trusty crossing guard. The heat is searing, so our pace is leisurely. Vendors approach, “Madam! Madam!” They have little airplanes that slingshot into the air, and bobble-headed dogs, and balloons. There is a Mother Dairy ice cream stand. Mother Dairy sounded gross to me when I first got here. I don’t really want to associate my dairy products with mothering (i.e. breastfeeding), but now I’m used to this ubiquitous brand.

“Sonu,” I ask, “did you get a new cell phone?”

“No madam. There is a money problem. Wait until next month. Next month cell phone,” he says.

I wonder how much a new cell phone costs here. I consider offering to take him to a cell phone store and buying one for him, but I think that might be crossing a line. Without a cell phone, I wonder how he talks to his wife and kids who are seven or eight hours away in Punjab. I know from my first day or two in India when I couldn’t even figure out the hotel’s phone how much being incommunicado with your family hurts.

I feel like an idiot for parading around and laughing about all my crap from the market when Sonu has to wait until next month to talk to his family. I don’t know why he isn’t completely annoyed by me. I think I would be if I were in his position. I think I will slip him a little extra money in his tips, and maybe that will help.

After we walk around India Gate, I ask Sonu about the museum again. There is a museum of modern art somewhere off the circular drive around the India Gate structure. Sonu doesn’t know where this is. He knows where the National Museum is, though.

We’ll go there, then.

I’m afraid I’ll be a bit bored at the National Museum, but it turns out to be fascinating: full of beautiful, ancient carvings of Hindu gods and Buddhas, and impressively refined Mughul miniature paintings in which the faces seem to have been painted with one hair of a brush.

They charge Indians ten rupees to get in and foreigners have to pay 300. If you want to take pictures, you have to pay an additional 300 rupees. I don’t pay admission for my camera and kind of regret it. The sculptures are beautiful, and I’d like to take some record of them home with me.

I get an audio tour for my three hundred rupees, and it’s actually pretty good. It tells me about a sculpture of Ganesh, the elephant god. Ganesh is the oldest son of Vishnu, the sustainer, part of the trilogy of gods I learned about before I came. Hindu gods have families, wives and children, and that’s where part of my confusion has been coming from, I discover. The gods aren’t necessarily willy nilly, at least Ganesh isn’t. He fits within the trilogy as a family relation.

Ganesh is good luck, the man selling baubles at the market outside the Red Fort said. Ganesh is the most intelligent god, my audio guide adds. He is celebrated as the remover of obstacles.

The audio tour then tells a story. Ganesh’s parents, Vishnu and Lakshmi, posed a challenge to their sons. Whoever would be the first to circle the universe would win. His brothers took off, but Ganesh simply walked a circle around his divine parents and, in doing so, won the contest.

I later try to check the particulars of this story online, but find when I visit Wikipedia that Ganesh is the son of Shiva and Parvati—at least according to Wikipedia, he is. Did I remember the story wrong from the museum, or is there a conflict here? An error?

India is famous for getting tourist information wrong, or making it up. At the Old Fort, for instance, there’s a plaque touting it as the ancient site of the Indraprasthan civilization—even though there’s absolutely no evidence of this.

Is my audio guide another case of bad information? Or is this a case of conflicting “truths” in Hinduism? Do some people think Ganesh is Shiva’s son, while others think he is Vishnu’s?

Just when I think I’m making some sense out of Hinduism, it all gets muddy again.

I walk past a Mughul miniature painting entitled, “Drunkard and faithful wife,” dated 1740. In it, a man lays passed out on a cot and a woman fawns over him. It looks to me like an early Saturday Evening Post cover, everything bathed in a soft light. Like the scene is supposed to be quaint. It still strikes me as strange subject matter. The rest of these miniatures are scenes of royal weddings and king’s courts. But not this one: a drunk guy and his faithful wife. Hank Williams could write a song about this one.

Another interesting stop on the audio tour is a series of illustrations of the Gita Govinda, a hot love poem that tells the story of the romance between the lord Krishna and the goddess Radha wherein they incarnate as a cowherd and a milkmaid. Hot.

Krishna, I learn here, is said to be the ninth incarnation of Vishnu, who is also called Narayana. So gods have different names and multiple incarnations in addition to whole families. So this explains a little more of the multiplicity I’ve seen here in the temples.

The audio guide tells me that this love story between Krishna and Radha is an allegory about the love between god and man. Coming from a tradition in which the model of love between God and man is paternal (God the Father), I find this interesting and somewhat disorienting. The notion of romantic love and the notion of divinity couldn’t be farther apart in my head. How could these two things possibly go together? Romantic love is dirty and sinful, isn’t it? Sex is bad, but we must endure it under special circumstances (i.e. marriage) because it’s our duty to maintain the human race. We can’t get romantic with God.

I finish looking at the sculptures and decide to forego the other open exhibits (many are closed for repairs). There’s an Indian navy exhibition and one of Indian coins that I’m sure my dad would like, but he’s not with me, and they wouldn’t photograph well as they’re all under glass.

On my way out, I decide to sneak a few snaps. What could they do? Kick me out? Make me pay the stinking 300 rupees? I decide to play stupid like I didn’t see the sign if anyone catches me. But no one says anything, and I come away with a few stolen photos.

After the museum I tell Sonu we need to go back to Defence Colony. I have to make a few phone calls. I’m supposed to meet Susie for dinner and I was going to see a movie with Amar. I get hold of Susie. She’ll meet me in the Defence Colony market at 7 p.m. I’m glad because I can’t stand the thought of another rickshaw ride home alone from Malviya Nagar where she lives.

I walk back out to the car thinking it would be nice to walk around Lodhi Gardens, but it’s threatening rain. I need another plan.

“Sonu, let’s go to the Lotus Temple,” I say, and he points the car in that direction and pops in another CD as the rain washes down around us.

Because the sewer system is so inadequate here, when it rains, the streets quickly fill up with water. Parking at the temple is difficult. I tell Sonu maybe we should turn around, but he guns it through a big mess of muddy water.

We get out our umbrellas and walk down the manicured path to the shoe check and the entrance. As always, Sonu takes my shoes for me and takes care of the little token that will get us our shoes back when we are done.

Inside we sit in silence. I close my eyes and think about the paintings of the Gita Govinda. I think about love, how the concept of romantic love is so very different from the concept of paternal love. Is it even the same thing? What do we mean when we say love? What do I mean when I say it? And, finally, what is love? We say it all the time. We sing about it. But what is it? What is love?

The question floats through the air of the temple and hangs there for a while. What is love? How can I not know? But I don’t. I can’t nail it down, put my finger on it, say it in ten words or less. It’s too big to define, too nebulous. But that’s a cop out. That’s an easy way out.

What is love?

More silence. A bird cries. The sound of clothes rustling. Then, I get an answer.

“It’s a deep wish for the well-being of another.”

Who said that? Was that me? This question/answer thing is getting weird. I think this answer came from me, but I want to argue with it. It’s too simple. Love has to be more complicated than that. I want a better answer. So I put the question out there again.

What is love?

This time I get something more like, “I already told you. It’s a deep wish for the well-being of another. Before you decide you don’t like the answer, think about it for a while, would you?”

I oblige this voice-from-wherever. I think about it for a while. Then I make a deep wish for the well-being of my husband. Then my mother. Then my niece. Then I tear up.

As comes naturally to me in the Lotus Temple, I then ask why. Why am I crying? Because I can wish all I want for the well-being of these people, but I can’t do a thing to ensure it. My niece could fall and skin her knee. My mom could get sick. I am powerless, especially all the way in India.

I get a little mad. I tell my voice it must be wrong. This can’t be love; it’s making me sad and frustrated. But my voice straightens me out. It’s not about achieving the well-being of others, it’s about thinking of them before or instead of or more than thinking about yourself: a deep wish for the well-being of others—as opposed to the self.

Do you get it yet?

Yes, I think so.

Good. Maybe we’ll do more next time, then.

Okay, I say, then just sit there in peace with a still mind, wishing for the well-being of those who I love. “Wait a minute,” I say. “What about all the different kinds of love?”

You have different kinds of relationships, my voice says, not different kinds of love. Love is love.

I open my eyes and nod to Sonu who is sitting patiently beside me. We can leave, though I could probably sit here all night.

Outside the rain has all but stopped and it feels cool for the first time since I’ve been in India.

“Ooo. Nice,” Sonu says.

I agree.

We pause, and I look at the aqua pools of water that surround the ground level of the temple. I feel like the water: serene, unperturbed, a world away from the anxiety hangover with which I began the day. I tear up again but this time it’s from happiness or beauty or peace.

I follow Sonu down to the shoe check, and we are on our way home with our soundtrack of Punjabi music.

We pull up to Defence Colony and before I get out of the car Sonu says, “Ma’am, you and I have the same problem.”

“What’s that, Sonu?” I ask.

“Your husband too far. My wife too far. Seven month,” he says.

“We do,” I tell him. “It sucks.” (I’ve asked him if he knows what this means before, and he’s assured me he does). I so want to buy him a cell phone. I so have a deep wish for his well-being, and I know he has the same wish for mine by the way he has helped me through my first weeks in India.

“Have a good night, Sonu.”

“Yes, ma’am. Good night.”

Amoebas and Dysentery and Worms, Oh My!

Before dinner at Susie’s place on Friday night, I asked her what got her friend Maggie so sick. Poor Maggie had to take a train trip through the countryside of India with only a hole in the train floor to use as a restroom while she was dealing with a severe case of the Delhi belly.

Susie says most of the time it’s impossible to tell what specifically gets you sick because it can take over a week for the symptoms to appear. So it’s not necessarily the last thing that you ate that is giving you grief. So, in my case, it wasn’t necessarily the idli I ate at Sagar that made me sick. This is good news, as the idli at Sagar was very delicious. I'm going to continue blaming the McDonald's in light of this discovery.

In Maggie’s case, however, it is abundantly clear what made her sick. She drank street lemonade. This is lemonade sold by men with little carts. It comes in dingy green bottles full of tiny lemons. They don’t necessarily use filtered water to make the lemonade, they don't necessarily clean the lemons, and they clean the bottles right there on the (very unsanitary) street.

“It was sealed,” Maggie said. But they also seal the bottles on the street. It’s clear Maggie exercised some bad judgment. But who am I to point fingers?

Even in this scenario, Maggie didn’t get sick until three days after consuming the nefarious bacterial brew.

I’m confused as to why I’m not just constantly sick. Don’t they wash the dishes in the bad water? Why don’t the dishes themselves get me sick?

Susie explains that once the dishes are dry, the water-bourn bacteria can’t live on them any longer. But if you get a wet dish in a restaurant, she says, send it back.

Still, there’s only so much you can do to be careful. One of Susie’s friends back home asked her how she takes showers. “Do you, like, shut your eyes and your mouth real tight the whole time?” he wanted to know.

We laugh. Susie says she obviously doesn’t drink the water in the shower, but you can’t be ridiculous about it. If you’re going to get sick, you’re going to get sick. You can be sensible and not drink scurvy lemonade, but being careful past a certain point probably won’t help you anyway. It will just make you miserable.

After Nepal, Susie shares, she had amoebas, parasites, and some stomach condition beginning with a “g” that made her whole midsection swell up.

“Oh my god!” I am horrified, but she is taciturn. No big deal. She had to take so many antibiotics that the medicine wound up making her even more sick on top of everything else. I try not to imagine what that must have been like. I try to imagine myself signing up for another extended trip overseas after such an incident. Maybe it’s like child birth, I reason. The pain winds up being worth it?

I resolve not to get amoebas or parasites—not that I know how to avoid getting amoebas or parasites, let alone the “g” disease. I’ll just keep eating at my posh guest house and the posh restaurants in the Defence Colony market and hope for the best. Susie was living out in rural Nepal with Shirpa families. It was a totally different situation, I tell myself.

Then she mentions de-worming. “Like we do to my cats?” I wonder. Yes. Like that. She’s got her de-worming medicine, but she’ll wait to take it until she gets home. There’s no sense in taking it here because she’ll just have to do it again when she returns to the States.

"You have to de-worm?" I ask.

"Yes."

Her sister-in-law (who she’ll be living with when she returns) is freaking out. She wants Susie to de-worm before she gets back to the United States. She doesn’t want her family catching Susie’s worms. Susie says they’re not contagious.

How do you get them, then?

“Oh, from anything,” she says. “From food or from walking down the street.”

I ponder how I can avoid food and walking down the street between now and October.

The University Travel Clinic didn’t mention de-worming, I tell her. Maybe this is just a Susie thing. Maybe I won’t get worms because I’m Vicki Krajewski, and I’m working at Pearson in the New Directions program. The worms will recognize that I’m special and steer clear, right?

“Should I de-worm too?” I ask Susie.

"Yes," she says unequivocally. I should. She’ll show me the stuff at a chemist’s some time. It’s just three days of pills. It’s no big deal. Or I can just visit the vet’s office with my cats when I get back, I think. In which case I’ll make Scott sneak the medicine to me in pats of butter while I squirm and meow. And he’ll have to rub my throat to get me to swallow it.

I pretend I’m not horrified by all this. I pretend I’m cool. I’m down with amoebas and parasites and the “g” disease and dysentery and worms. No big deal. No problem-o. Nothing a stiff course of antibiotics can’t take care of. Sometimes pretending helps make it so. They say if you’re sad and you smile, you become less sad. If you’re scared and you pretend you’re not, I hope you become more bold.

Then I think to myself, “You might as well not worry about it. Be smart about what you eat and don’t eat, but don’t worry. If you’re going to get sick, you’re going to get sick, and then you cross that bridge when you get to it.”

Whatever tendencies toward hypochondria I might have harbored are somehow banished. It just doesn’t make sense to worry about possibly being sick. When you’re sick here, I have a feeling, you know it. Amoebas and dysentery and worms, oh my!

Roti and Religion

Friday night after work, I tell Sonu to take me to Susie’s place. She’s invited me over to hang out.

We get to the Malviya Nagar market by Susie’s apartment with relatively no trouble (save a hairy traffic jamb that takes about 20 minutes to get through), but Sonu can’t find number 79A to save himself. We circle past her street about five times. I think I recognize it, but I’m not confident enough to tell Sonu for sure.

He stops innumerable times to ask passersby where is M Block? Where is 79A? We find 78A and 80A, but 79A is nowhere in sight.

After another half hour of circling, we find the place. I thank Sonu and tell him I’ll see him tomorrow. He can pick me up and ten and we’ll do some shopping or something. I get Sonu’s services for eight hours a day, Monday through Saturday, so he’s officially off the clock once he drops me off at Susie’s.

I open a big metal gate and climb the stairs to the first floor (which is really the second floor) where Susie’s apartment is.

She welcomes me inside and we wander into her kitchen where she has some hot chai on her camp stove. Camp stoves are standard issue here, even if musical refrigerators are not. It’s rare to have an oven, as Julianne does.

We talk about Susie’s experiences living overseas. She tells me about the 100 page paper she wrote about the Shirpa people when she lived in Nepal her junior year of undergraduate school. The Shirpas are a people and a culture separate from the mountain climbing guides as we in the west know them. In fact, until it became a popular thing to hire trekking guides, the Shirpas never climbed the mountain because they considered it sacred.

Shirpas have a kind of communal family system, Susie says. Each family optimally has three brothers. The first brother runs the mountain climbing business, the second brother becomes a Buddhist monk, and the third brother stays home and tends to the family. These three brothers share one wife.

I’m fascinated by the stuff Susie knows. I ask her if she’s ever thought about publishing her paper. I’d read it, I tell her.

“No,” she laughs self-consciously. “I don’t express myself very well in writing.” She pours our tea and puts the mugs on a little plastic tray like I’ve seen in the markets here. We walk into the living room where we chat some more about where and how to shop and who sells what. If I want to get a larger container of water, I need to find a neighborhood stand. They’ll deliver it for me. It might be better than using the hotel’s one liter bottles. Cheaper. I’ll see if I can check it out.

We sip our tea, then Susie asks if I’m hungry for dinner. “Of course,” I tell her. In a country where dinnertime is 8:30 or later, I spend a lot of time hungry for dinner.

We go back into Susie’s kitchen where she has a wall full of spices. She takes two large Tupperware containers from her fridge. Her “guy” made enough food on Wednesday to last for Thursday and Friday. She shops for him, buys all the ingredients he’ll need, then he cooks for her. What he’s made this week is a sabzi and a dal. The sabzi is a bunch of mixed vegetables cooked with spices. The dal is lentils in a gravy mostly made from tomatoes.

Susie has dough sitting in a bowlful of four. It’s for the roti, puffed bread that you use to scoop up the sabzi and dal. We’re going to roll out the roti and cook it fresh. You can’t really warm up roti and have it be good. You need to make it fresh for each meal.

She starts rolling and frying the roti, then taking it out of the frying pan and throwing it directly into the gas flame, where it magically puffs up like a balloon. It looks like no effort is involved until she asks me if I’d like to try. First you have to make a ball, then flatten it, then roll it once across in opposing directions, length-wise and width-wise. Then you have to do this kind of angle rolling to get the dough flat, thin and round. Then you have to slap it back and forth between your hands. Susie doesn’t know why. She just knows this is how the Indian family with whom she lived for two months did it. Even if you do all of this perfectly, if the roti is not perfectly even, it won’t puff.

I have to start my first roti over about three times because first I tear it, then I get it stuck to the rolling pin, then it gets stuck to my hand and creases. When I finally throw it into the fire, it ripples a little bit then deflates. Try again. This second time goes better, and my roti actually puffs. My third attempt, which I have to redo again because of problems with my technique, also puffs. To quote Meatloaf, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

When we sit down to eat I make sure to pick the roti that I made. It tastes good, but I tell Susie she did the hard part. Making the dough is just as touchy of a process as frying it up—if not more so.

Over dinner the subject of religion comes up. I am having trouble trying to make heads or tails out of what I see over here, even though I did a little reading about the religions before I arrived. I thought I understood that in Hinduism there is basically a trinity with Brahman the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer and Shiva the Destroyer. But I see so many gods and temples here that I don’t understand. “Who is Ganesh, the elephant god?” I want to know, “And how does he relate to the trilogy?”

Susie says I’m confused for a good reason. Even Hindus are confused about all of this, she says. She says if you ask them to explain why they’re doing something, their answer will be, “because that’s how we’ve always done it.”

I tell her we’re the same way, really. Every year I wonder why I’m putting up a Christmas tree, then I Google it to find out, then I forget again because it mustn’t make a lot of sense.

Susie says Hinduism and Buddhism are religions with no central truth, that the practices are contradictory, that there is no one text that everyone shares, that people have family gods and personal gods on top of the mess of other gods. Everybody makes it up as they go. She says the greeting “namaste” refers to the belief that there is a god in every person.

I know this phrase from my yoga classes at home. We end every class with the salutation. The way it was explained to me, I understand it to mean, “The sacred in me recognizes the sacred in you.”

Susie says that’s a watered down Americanization. That Hindus believe there is an actual god living inside every person—not a figurative “element” of the sacred, of the one true god. Buddhists think this, too, she says.

I tell her that’s not what the Buddhists in Iowa think. I feel absurd and somewhat defensive.

Susie wants to know about these “Buddhists in Iowa.”

“Are they culturally Buddhist, or did they choose the religion?” (Read: “Are they white kids who thought Buddhism sounded cool and exotic?”)

They are white kids. The Buddhist monk that I’ve been known to hang out with is my age, and he is from the suburbs of Chicago just like me. I know him as Wangden, obviously not the name he was born with.

Susie says that American practices of Hinduism and Buddhism have little resemblance to what actually happens here. I can see she has a point.

She has a friend, for instance, who tells her she’s going to a Hindu church. Susie says, “You can’t be going to a Hindu church because there is no such thing. You can go to a Hindu temple, but it’s not the same as a church. They don’t have ‘services’ for starters.”

Susie’s friend’s reply was, “I don’t care. I feel good when I go there.”

Is that what a church service is for? Being raised Catholic, I would tend to think otherwise. I would sometimes argue the opposite, in fact. “I feel bad when I go there,” could aptly describe more than a few services I’ve attended. So why was I going? From duty. From the ever-infamous Catholic guilt. To avoid damnation. Is that why you’re supposed to go to church? Or is feeling good okay?

I’m resistant to just dismissing these cultures, these practices, these traditions on the basis that they have no central truth. I think there is truth in these practices; I think I’ve glimpsed it, felt it—or am I projecting my American, Christian understandings of the universe where they don’t belong and make little sense? Because what I see here makes little sense to me.

Susie’s friend is searching, she says. She’s been trying out a bunch of different religions, sampling from them and seeing what works. She has another friend, though, whose been a little more serious about her search. She spent several months in an ashram, but now she’s Christian again. I think Susie may be telling me a cautionary tale.

She says Buddhism came out of Hinduism—a fact I realized without realizing the reality of what that means in practice. In practice, it means that lots of Hindu culture and practice seeps into Buddhism. And then there’s the issue of territory. There are different “Buddhisms” depending on the locale. Nepalese Buddhists, for instance, eat meat.

I am shocked. I thought all Buddhists were vegetarian. “The Buddhists in Iowa are all vegetarian,” I think, but this time I’m cool enough not to exclaim this out loud and sound like a total provincial wannabe dork.

The difference in diet is largely due to climate, Susie says. Buddhists in Nepal live in a cold climate where they need a lot of protein to keep them warm, plus the growing season isn’t long enough to grow good vegetables. They eat yak butter in their tea and eat yak meat. So do Tibetan Buddhists.

The Dalai Lama is a carnivore!@*?#! Okay, he’s an omnivore, but still. The Dalai Lama eats yak. It sounds like the end of a game of telephone—some message that started out making sense and got twisted into something random and in error.

I can’t believe it. I want to argue, but there’s no arguing with someone who’s been there and seen it. Susie’s not making any of this up.

Nepalese Buddhist kids, she says, wear a charm on their neck, in which they believe their personal god resides. But then, in Buddhism itself, there is no belief in a central creator god. Some people don’t even regard Buddhism as a religion because of this.

“Buddha was just a guy,” Susie says, “and he wanted to seek enlightenment, and he even told people that he didn’t know the way for them to find inner peace, he was just seeking it himself. And then he died and people venerated him; and now people worship him.” I never understood it in those terms. I understood that practitioners demonstrate respect for Buddha as an esteemed teacher of wisdom—not that they worship him as a god. Here it seems like both things happen, or neither, or something else altogether. As I started the conversation with Susie, it’s confusing. As she started the conversation with me, there is no central truth.

But there has to be. I feel like there are several truths at the core of all religions, regardless of all the trappings that go with them. All religions set out to answer our biggest questions: where did we come from, why are we here, and what happens to us when we die? We can start with at least those common questions, and then the fact that we, as human beings, deeply need answers to these same questions. There’s something universal about that search, about that longing to know.

Susie and I talk more about the wild diversity of beliefs in this country. There are the Sikhs who believe that everything is god, that god is the universe and everything in it. Then there are the Jains, who, Susie tells me, are like really strict Hindus. I think of our Amish population in Iowa.

There are some Jains who sweep the sidewalk as they walk so they don’t smash any bugs and accidentally kill them. They wear masks outside so they don’t inhale gnats and destroy life that way. They don’t eat the roots of plants because that would be like killing the plant.

Susie talks about another paper she wrote in college. She wrote way deeper papers than I ever did as an undergraduate. This other paper was about belief systems. In Hinduism, she says, they believe if you please the gods enough, you’re good. So most Hindus focus heavily on making offerings and worship, and don’t worry so much about their everyday deeds, i.e. how they treat each other.

This explains the Delhi traffic, I comment. But then I remember the concept of moksha from my visit to Akshardam Temple. “Don’t Hindus have the same concept of reaching enlightenment (i.e. salvation, loosely) as the Buddhists do? And to reach enlightenment, don’t you have to worry about how you treat others? Don’t you have to show compassion and exemplify good acts in the world?”

“Yes, but everyday Hindus don’t even hope to achieve anything like that. They don’t see themselves as anywhere close to it, so they don’t even try. It’s not possible. Just look at how they live their lives.”

I think of trying to “achieve enlightenment” while living in a hovel on the side of the road, possibly dying from the sometimes 120 degree heat. Again, it comes down to practicality. You can’t respect all life when there’s nothing to eat but yak, and you can’t ponder rising above this world when your basic needs for food, clothing and shelter are a constant struggle. Even religion is a privilege.

Before I know it, it’s quarter of eleven. Susie asks if I want to stay overnight, but I haven’t brought any of my things with me and I figure I’ll get home okay. She and her roommate walk me out to the main market and help find an auto-rickshaw that will drive me home for an agreed upon 50 rupees.

I tell myself this is a good plan. I tell myself everything will be fine. Susie tells me to call her when I get home. I say ok, and we’re off.

Everything seems to be going along fine when the driver suddenly slows and pulls to the side of the highway in a place I don’t recognize. “Defence Colony,” he says, and points at a locked gate past a median with three men in blankets sleeping on it.

I am having a harder time convincing myself this was a good decision. In fact, I admit this was a very horrible decision. One of the worse I’ve made to date, and possibly my last.

“NihaN! NihaN! Defence Colony! C-83 Defence Colony!” I tell the driver, praying that he’ll get me where I need to go and not leave me lost with these sleeping men in the middle of Delhi in the middle of the night. I look around, wondering if I should hail a different driver, but there don’t seem to be other rickshaws in the place he’s stopped. I could call Susie on my cell phone, but her number’s tucked away in bag and what good is that going to do anyway? I could call 100—that’s like the Indian 9-1-1, but I wonder if this number will work on my international cell phone. I wonder if 9-1-1 will work. But what good would that do? As I’m trying to come up with an alternate plan, he hits the throttle and the rickshaw slowly begins to move.

Troublingly, though, the driver takes me down what I think is a dead end that Sonu once drove down trying to find a shortcut. The rickshaw, though, rambles through a narrow gate where Sonu’s car couldn’t go. It appears we are actually en route to Defence Colony.

I am rattled but surprisingly assured, save the tremor in my left leg that has started to shake and won’t stop. I think, “Poor Michael J. Fox. He has tremors like this all the time.” Then I think, “Why the hell am I thinking about Michael J. Fox? I need to be thinking about how to get home.” Then I think, “If I survive this, my mom and my husband are going to kill me.” Then I think, “How could I do this to them? Stupid move, Vicki. Very stupid move.”

I notice we pass a police stand with police in it. I make a mental note in case I need to run out and find it again.

The driver is lost. He doesn’t know where C-83 Defence Colony is, and he’s trying to ask me which way to go. I can’t tell him exactly, but I know we’re getting close. Thankfully, there are guards sitting outside some of the buildings that I vaguely recognize. When the driver stops to ask them which way to go, I suddenly know I’m safe and he’s not out to kill me, but to get me home.

I realize now that I don’t have any change, but I consider paying this guy 100 rupees instead of the agreed upon 50 just as a tip for not killing me or leaving me to die somewhere.

When we finally pull up to my guest house I feel like I could melt into a puddle. I give him my 100 rupee note and wait for change. He says he has no change. I figured as much anyway. He asks the guard at the Ahuja Residency if he has change. The guard says no.

The rickshaw driver gets his 50 rupees and 50 more, and I have never been so glad to see C-83 Defence Colony.

The guard at the gate follows me into the building where he opens the door and turns the hall light on for me. Back in my room I feel like I'll throw up. I come close to crying, but I don't. A letter from Scott is waiting for me on my coffee table. More than reading it, I kiss it and hold it in my hands against my face.

Given the grace to have survived this incident in one piece, with no bumps or bruises, considering all that could have gone wrong, I promise myself on behalf of everyone I love to never, ever do anything stupid like that again.

I call Susie and let her know that I'm okay, then I crawl into bed and have a nightmare about losing my purse and my passport. All that anxiety had to come out somewhere.

Friday's Invitations

I was just bemoaning the fact that I hadn’t received any invitations from my Indian friends to do things with them; that, while I was very glad to have my Gringo Girls to hang out with, I wanted to get to know the people at work better as well. Am I doing something wrong at work? Is there something wrong with me that makes no one want to spend time with me? Am I offending the Indians in some way (perhaps my using my left hand too much, or perhaps by adopting Indian dress too quickly or not quickly enough)? Maybe I'm just unappealing overall. Boring. Or maybe it's my bangs. I am sure I have some kind of problem.

Then, over lunch today, Amar asks if I would like to go see The Dark Knight with him. He lives by the Lotus Temple and there’s a theatre nearby. I tell him certainly.

Amar also tells me a little about Indian etiquette. Do I know it’s impolite to do anything with the left hand? Yes, I tell him. I’m trying to eat with only my right hand, but it’s kind of hard. He chuckles. There’s also some confusing bit about the first floor being called “z” and the second floor being called the first floor.

“There are also some things about here that I don’t like,” he says. “When I first came here, this man, he was inviting me to his house for dinner and all these things and I thought, ‘Why are you inviting me when I just met you?’” This is a nicety only—and you’re supposed to refuse such invitations.

He also says in south India, when people shake their heads from side to side, it means “yes” although even to North Indians, it looks like “No.” This drove him crazy when he went down there for vacation a few weeks ago.

After lunch, I take a walk with Jonaki, the woman with the T.S. Eliot quote on her cube wall. The horn on her car is broken, and she’s taking it down the road to get it repaired. It’s dangerous to be on the road without a horn here. It’s more like both headlights going out would be for us. The horn is a navigational device.

Jonaki tells me she’s just returned from a trip to Dharamsala with a friend. This is the seat of the exiled Tibetan government where the Dalai Lama lives. She says she got to meet the Dalai Lama. I ask if they planned this in advance and she says no; it was just chance. They had just returned back from a four hour hike in the mountains; she was tired and hot; she hit the elevator call button and this pushy guy came out, telling her to step back. She was busy scowling at the man when the Dalai Lama walked right out of the elevator, right past her. She shows me the face she was making when she saw him. Her eyes narrow. Her head bows. She says once she realized what was going on, she smiled, but it was too late. She’d already scowled at the Dalai Lama.

They also went to a prayer service where the Dalai Lama said a prayer. She was halfway sitting, halfway standing, trying to decide what she should be doing when the Dalai Lama walked past her a second time, figuring, she says, “Hm, isn’t that squatting woman the same person who gave me the dirty look the other day?”

“Great story,” I tell her. I think of meeting the Prime Minister with my bad hair. It will be a similar affair, I’m sure. The mundane always rises to the absurd in moments like these.

Jonaki says she remembers seeing this old Japanese man in Dharamsala, all bent over, walking past the prayer wheels and turning and turning them. “Too see faith like that is amazing,” she says. I know what she’s talking about. Faith like this is on display all over India.

She says she’s taking a holiday next month and wonders if I’d like to join her. “No way!” I think. She’s going to a hill station and has reserved a double room. Would I like to come along? I tell her I’d love to (though I wonder if I should refuse this invitation out of etiquette), and I’ll ask Amar to see if it’s okay. I hope it is. I’d love to see the Himalayas.

Here’s the link to the place that Jonaki made her reservations at and the place I’ll be staying if I get permission to take a short leave from Amar:
http://www.abc-of-hiking.com/asia/india/himachal-pradesh/rajubhartishomestaygoshaini.asp

Back at my desk, Angshuman’s phone rings off the hook. He is not at his desk. Debamitra answers it for him, but she is a bit too late. The caller has hung up. Here people regularly pick up each other’s phones. There is no voice mail. Or there is voice mail but no one checks it. I think I remember Amar telling me that on my first day in the office.

Debamitra sits down. “Why am I drinking coffee?” she asks. “This is supposed to be tea.” I agree. Why am I drinking this gas station syrup again?

The funny thing is when I finally got the food service guys to bring me plain, black tea for a day, I found myself missing the disgusting gas station syrup coffee. You become accustomed pretty quickly to different foods—like Julianne and the watery brown ketchup. I notice in the mornings that the jam I put on my toast now tastes normal and I’m not wishing for something else. I am becoming “totally Indianized,” as Soma told me the other afternoon.

I ask Debamitra what she’s doing over the weekend, and she says she might do a little shopping. She’s been inspired by my hundred-rupee kurtas (Indian-style blouses) and wants to find the shop that sells them in the Lajput Nagar marketplace. She gives me her phone number in case I go back there. I should call her and we can go together.

By the end of the day, I have three social engagements lined up with my Indian friends, and I didn’t even try to make any of this happen. It just did.

As a slightly socially awkward person who makes most of her friends by acting in theatrical productions with them, this has been a positive development.

I’m thankful for the kindness and caring I’ve been shown here by so many people from my driver to Julianne and Susie to my coworkers. And I’m slightly amazed at how easy it’s been to make friends.

I always feel slightly unworthy of being someone’s friend, so I come with bribes like McVittie’s biscuits. But here I’m learning I don’t need bribes and inducements. Not even for the dogs. Just showing up and scratching their necks is good enough. Just being myself is all I need to do.

On Security

In case you missed the news, there have been over a dozen bombs set off over the past two days in two separate citites in India. A group calling itself "Indian Mujahadeen" has claimed responsibility. They're a relatively new and unknown group of terrorists here in India.

To anyone wondering, I am fine. The targeted cities are far from Delhi. That doesn't mean, though, that Delhi is "out of the woods" so-to-speak, so I have been laying low a bit, steering clear of the crowded markets and public transportation. I needed a day to just rest anyway.

Because of the bombings, Delhi is on high alert. I'm not quite sure what that means, but I saw a lot of security here even before the recent attacks. At almost every tourist site and temple, you are asked to open your bag and walk through a metal detector. The Lotus Temple is the lone exception to this rule. There is no security check there, though there are guards at the entrances.

At many sites there is an entrance line for ladies and one for "gents." I wondered why they'd sort people like that until I had to go through one of these lines. These are full-contact security checks where metal-detecting wands go where no metal-detecting wand should ever go, where a woman will ask you, "What in there?" referring to your bra, just before frisking you in that general area.

Delhi's landmarks have an obvious security presence, but it would be hard to secure, for instance, the auto-rickshaws that course about the hundreds of miles of city roads. It would be hard to secure the busses onto which masses of people crowd. It would be hard to secure the messy markets. These are the security risks, and the places I'm avoiding for the immediate future.

Friday and Saturday saw attacks on opposite sides of India. The terrorists either took Sunday off or are done for the time-being. I'm hoping it's the latter but being extra cautious just in case.

By Popular Request

Here is Acha. Baloo was sleeping under a car and wasn't available for photographing on this day. I never leave home without my camera, though, so keep your eyes peeled for him!

Reality and Surreality Revisited

So I mentioned that I'm starting to believe the giant snail beast I saw on the night when I landed in India was a hallucination.

On the other hand, I'm finding some things I thought I hallucinated are real. Take, for instance, the shadow I saw out of the corner of my eye in my kitchen. A closer glance revealed that, yes, there was something in my kitchen: a lizard clambering behind my fridge.

And speaking of my fridge...

The other night I was working on my computer at the little bar in the kitchen and I opened up the fridge just to stare at its contents and see if anything looked appealing. After an interval, I heard a little electronic song, "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home..." I closed the fridge and the song stopped. Isn't it crazy, I thought, how someone's cell phone from outside seemed to coincide with the moment I closed the fridge?

I hadn't given the moment another thought until the other night when I was, once again, gazing into my fridge considering, at some length, its contents. Out came the song, "Be it ever so humble there's no place like home..."

I wasn't crazy. My fridge was playing music. I tried it again just now, just to make sure. You have to wait a minute, but then, there's the little song, "Be it ever so humble..." It sounds like there's a tiny cartoon bagpiper in there, running out of air. It makes me want to leave my fridge open all the time (though I believe it's supposed to have the opposite effect).

I asked Susie if her fridge plays music to her, figuring this was some kind of Indian thing, but she said she's never heard a fridge play music to her anywhere in the world, and she's lived in Nepal, Hong Kong and India. It must just be the really posh fridges that play music.

Monopoly Hats, Lessons from Dogs and Dessert

Thursday’s paper has two articles of interest. The first one says “Pray this doesn’t happen in your city!” and discusses how the incidence of miscarriages has increased in Mumbai due to the bad roads. Yes, the roads are so bad in Mumbai that women are losing their babies.

The second article is a graphic box with text that reads, “Expect long power cuts today in east, west and south Delhi, basically all of Delhi. 6-8 hours. Workers will be repairing parts of the wiring. Make sure your inverters are charged.” Power cuts are quaint and all; I just hope the hotel has an inverter, which, I think, is like a generator—because without air conditioning or even a fan, the heat quickly becomes choking. This may be another meaning of the word posh in Delhi: “has an inverter.”

After breakfast I get in the cab. Sonu says, “Very old snap, this one,” and hands back a tattered and folded picture. “My wife,” he says.

It’s a picture of the two of them. He is smiling and has a crimson scarf draped over his head and shoulders. He looks straight at the camera. His wife is wearing muted pastels, has her hands folded and is looking down so much that her face is barely visible.

“Beautiful,” I tell him. “Thank you for showing me.” I hand the photo back.

At work, I get word that the CEO liked four of the phrases that I supplied for the Pearson India website. It will say: Live and learn, Learning for life, Chart your course, and Learning matters. There will be a piece of me on their new website. I’m flattered.

I meet with Vikesh from Marketing who wonders why we don’t try to sell some of the training we create in our department. “You should market the things with wide relevance and application, like email training.” He asks if we’ve talked to the folks at eCollege. They might be able to help. His marketing mind is at work. It’s more of the “make it happen” spirit I’ve seen so much of here in India. Whatever you’re interested in, you can do it, said Angshuman. And he wasn’t kidding.

At lunch, Amar gives me more of the history and geography of Delhi. We are in east Delhi right now (I make a mental note of this in light of the power outage article in the paper). Then there’s Lutyen’s Delhi: Connaught Place, India Gate, Janpath. Lutyen is the British architect who planned and built the colonial areas of town. These places have wider, tree-lined avenues. They are less crowded—or they were less crowded when they were planned. Some of them have been crammed up with just as many vendors as you’d see in an east Delhi neighborhood market. Some of them you can’t tell from the rest of the city.

After lunch I go for a walk through the streets of the industrial park that surrounds the office. I pass by food vendors. Some of them are fanning hot coals and roasting ears of corn in them on the ground. Others, many others, sell little packages of a chewing tobacco—I think it’s betel. Turns your teeth brown and spits out red on the ground. One cart has plastic containers of cookies. “Not even a morsel,” said the University’s Book of Dread when it cautioned against eating from street vendors.

I try to discern what the businesses around Pearson are—what they do—but it’s a challenge because of a conspicuous lack of signs. Pearson Education is the only large business sign I’ve seen in our development.

I pass by a mechanic’s shop and a truck full of oscillating fans, but that’s all I can make out on this, my first walk around the place.

I think I’m the only woman walking out there, and certainly the only white person. And I notice that whenever I look at someone, they are staring back at me. I smile, but they don’t always return the greeting. It’s rare that they do. I try to remember what the guidebooks say on this point. Should I make eye contact? Avoid eye contact? Did one book say that eye contact and smiling is provocative? I’ll have to check when I get home.

Either way, this minority feeling is a bit unnerving, especially coupled with the language barrier. I hadn’t counted on feeling uncomfortable in this way—and I have to say it’s really not that bad. It’s hard to describe if you haven’t found yourself in this situation. There’s no good parallel. It’s a vague feeling of being without a tribe, a family, a shared identity. They showed Barack Obama on the news speaking in Germany last night, and I looked at all the Germans and got a bit homesick for Iowa. It’s like everyone here is a piece in a puzzle and I’m the top hat from the Monopoly game. It’s a missed fit. A disjunction. And there is some discrimination that happens too, mostly by way of surly looks and exorbitant “white taxes.”

What is not at all parallel with the minority experience in America is the sense of disempowerment. I am not disempowered. I am not “stuck” here with no way out. I am not trapped in a lower social stratum because of the way I look, the color of my skin. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be feeling a vague and passing discomfort. I’d panic.

When I return from my walk, people are gathered around Angshuman’s computer. He is playing a news piece from IBN Live. They are profiling Upinder Singh and the history textbook Pearson is launching on August 5th. They show Singh in her personal library at home, looking very scholarly. They discuss how this is not a history of kings and nobleman, but a profile of the lives of everyday people including women. Singh discusses how it was important to her to incorporate themes of gender and document matters of the household. The narrator tells us that the book has no political agenda. “I see myself as a liberal historian,” Singh says. The narrator tells us Singh's students call her “U Singh.” She seems like quite an impressive woman. Amar told me that Pearson was going to fly her somewhere and she insisted on going economy instead of business class. The profile concludes by saying that the book took four years to create and is the only history book of its kind in existence, with photographic documentation of many archeological sites that are now destroyed.

I want to clap and cry when it ends. I am moved and proud to be part of a company that invested in something like this. “We took a risk on this book,” I’ve heard more than once. And it’s true. Publishing in India is notoriously a reprinting business: get titles from the U.S. and U.K. and print them on cruddy paper in black and white for cheap prices. Even the Brit at breakfast yesterday said this when he asked what I was doing here in India and I told him "publishing." Pearson Education is trying to buck the reprinting trend and bring solid, relevant Indian content to the students who buy their textbooks. This is an experiment. I hope it works.

In the afternoon, I finish the layout for the preface of International Financial Management and send a picture of an elephant to a friend back home.

In the evening, I walk again to the market, this time taking with me a piece of nan (Indian bread) that was leftover from lunch. The dogs will like Indian cooking, I figure. When I find them today, they seem no happier to see me than the first time we met. This is good, I think. They are wiser than I am. Everything in India is wiser than I am—probably even that enormous slug-snail I saw the night I landed here and haven’t seen since. These dogs know I’m not here for good. They know attachment isn’t useful. If I show up, that’s nice. If I don’t, that’s nice too.

They’re not even attached to food. They are so uninterested in the nan I can’t even get them to take it into their mouths. There is no feeding these dogs. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life! Dogs who don’t like to eat, but somehow aren’t skinny or starving? I think maybe the Indians are worshipping the wrong animals as I see a cow grazing beside a No U-Turn sign. These dogs are some kind of miracle: a model of Buddhist asceticism.

At the market I hope to find some Indian sweets. I go to Nanthu’s Sweet stand, but what is behind the outdoor counter looks suspiciously like street food. All dirty with flies in it. Not even a morsel, I think.

Then I find the Defence Colony Bakery. Promising.

I walk inside and am greeted by a giant shelf of Ferraro Roche chocolates. Not what I was hoping for. A man behind the counter repeats, “Cha bat a. Cha bat a. It’s Italian bread.” He holds out a tray for another man. “It’s crusty bread made with olive oil. Cha bat a. Cha bat a.” This must be a new attempt for the bakery.

Behind the glass I can see some homemade confections (in comparison to the imported, pre-packaged chocolates). There is a fruit cake and a tiny fruit-glazed tart. They’re not Indian, but they look really good. I remember the warning about not eating fruit with the skin on it, but, for some reason, the treats look okay. It’s probably all imported, I reason. Everything in this place is imported, including the box of Sour Jacks candies at the check out counter.

In addition to good restaurants, Defence Colony Market is the place to go for expensive imported items, I discover. English tea and biscuits. American Cheetos and Doritos. The boxes and bags are always a little smashed and dirty by the time they get here, but the stuff inside pretty much tastes the same (if it’s not too stale). I’m slightly disappointed by un-Indian character of my market, but it’s nice to know I can get some comfort food if I want it—I’ll just have to pay through the nose for it. The other night, two boxes of tea and a box of granola bars cost me upwards of ten dollars. That hurt. But I’m getting used to being overcharged in India anyway, being a white chick and all.

I return home with a cute little bakery box containing a fruit tart and a piece of fruity cake, which I devour for “dinner.” Finally something I don’t want to share with the dogs. Finally something better than digestive biscuits. I wait to see if a backlash ensues, but I’m fine. It’s strange here how you can operate on hunches once you get the knack. This food looks okay. That water seems fine.

Julianne tells me she eats at Subway all the time, even the lettuce, which I am told is a big no-no. “I don’t know,” she says, “I figure they have to keep their food clean because of Subway standards.” She’s been right so far. Or maybe she’s been lucky. Hard to say. I think it mostly all boils down to luck and the strength of your stomach/immune system. I think of the lime-scaled glass my Uncle Joe offered me water out of one time at his house and how I shrunk back in fear from it. “That’s okay; I’m not thirsty.” I told him. I should have taken the water. I should have eaten the dirty dishcloth that he wiped it with. I would have been better prepared for my Indian odyssey.

After I eat, I jog in place in front of the BBC World News for about thirty minutes, pretending I’m on my treadmill. It’s not the same, but it will do for the time being to help me “keep my thin.”

Great, Gleaming Buildings

Wednesday morning a Brit joins me at breakfast. “Just toast,” he tells Pachu as he sits down at the dining room table.

“They’ll serve you mangos here,” I tell him. It’s rare that there’s someone at breakfast to whom I can talk, so I figure I’ll take advantage. My other breakfast companions so far are Asian and can only say, “Hello.”

“What?” the Brit asks me. Come on. This guy has to understand me.

“They’ll serve you mangos. I thought you might like some fruit.” I tell him.

“Oh,” he says. “We have mango trees in our backyard, mangos in our fridge, mango jelly, mango cakes, all the mangos you could ever want, then more.”

I get the feeling this guy doesn’t live in the UK.

I ask where he’s from, and he tells me he’s lived in Goa for the last thirteen years. It’s a beautiful place. “You know it was a Portuguese colony until the 60s?” Before Goa, he lived in Delhi, and he tells me he’s surprised to see how Defence Colony has changed since he left. “They built these great, gleaming buildings here.” He’s talking about the three story apartments across the street with the dingy walls and dripping window air conditioning units. Great? Gleaming? I’ll have to take another look.

I see in the morning paper that the Prime Minister has survived the no confidence vote. Good news for Pearson’s history book! Good news for me because I get to meet him at the book launch party—I think. They’ve given me a formal invitation to the Macroeconomics book launch on Saturday, August 2nd. I haven’t received a formal invite to the history book launch, but I keep asking about it. Maybe soon I will be less subtle and just ask if I can go to the darn thing for sure, bad hair and all.

Sonu shows up late again at 9 a.m., but we arrive to work by 9:30 when I’m supposed to be there. I wonder if this is a fluke or if he’s figured out a route that saves us an entire half hour in the morning. This would be a happy development—especially for someone like me who is used to arriving at work five minutes after she’s left her front door.

At work, Shabnum gives me the preface of a book on finance to work on, and Srinivas asks if I have time to talk to the CEO about the Assessment and Information group where I work. Do I have time for the CEO? The question is perplexing. Isn’t that supposed to be the other way around? Certainly, I tell Srini. Good. We’ll talk at 3 p.m.

I work the morning away, then have lunch with Amar. Amar really does a good job of keeping up conversation at our lunches together. Today he asks me about gangster movies and whether I’ve seen the series Firefly. He can’t stand Bollywood movies, he confesses. All that singing. He shakes his head.

The meeting with Vivek, the CEO, goes well. I use the new employee orientation training I created to give him an introduction to the assessment group and what we do. Afterwards, he invites me to take a sneak peak at the new Pearson India website now in development. It looks stunningly like a Pearson Iowa website might look, with just a few more pictures of Indian people. Even though they’re Indian, the people in the pictures wear very westernized clothing. It doesn’t really reflect what I see on the streets or even in the office, but I haven’t been on a university campus yet, which is the market I’m working in. Maybe the look is more western in these institutions.

There’s a question of the slogans on the website. Vivek doesn’t really like them right now. I mention that I have a list of possibilities that we considered when putting together our website. They ask if I’ll share them. Sure.

After my meeting with Vivek, I meet with Anindita, who is a commissioning editor for the professional technology and trade book group. Commissioning editors find new projects, do the initial review and development of manuscripts, then put proposals in front of the board who decides whether a book gets made or not. Anindita is clearly excited by this work. She shows me a list of titles and ideas under consideration for next year. I notice that there are books about entrepreneurship and books about caste and ask if this isn’t somehow contradictory. There is such a sense in Delhi that there are big opportunities available to anyone who wants to take a shot. How does caste figure in to this phenomenon?

Anindita says caste is a curious thing. Its effects are regional. In the south where the general level of education and literacy is higher, caste is less of a factor in people’s lives. In cities, caste is less relevant and opportunities abound. It is in the rural north of the country where caste still has a choke hold on people’s lives, even though it was abandoned as a formal economic and social system years ago.

Apart from caste and entrepreneurship, the group Anindita works with has published books on everything from Indian fashion to low fat cooking (which is apparently a totally new concept here where most foods are prepared with generous helpings of oils).

To hear Anindita talk about the people she’s worked with is humbling: the finance minister, the Vice President. The group’s titles are high profile pieces of work that undergo media scrutiny. Editing in this group is different than working on textbooks, which I’m doing. Textbooks are created to match course syllabi, so the editors have a heavier hand in making sure that happens.

Sonu picks me up promptly at six. I notice he’s wearing a different shirt than he had on in the morning, and the cab smells like men’s cologne. I wonder a little what Sonu does during the day when he’s supposed to be sitting and waiting for me in case I need him—which is a boring job to say the least. Still, what if I’m stricken with a sudden deathly case of Delhi belly? And now he doesn’t have a working cell phone so I can’t call him if he’s not there.

We’ll just hope my belly holds out okay.

Today when I get home, Pachu wants to know if my Internet is still not working. “Yes,” I tell him. “It’s still not working.”

“No?”

“Yes.”

It all gets a little confusing, but I think I get the point across. He will send a man, he says. When will I be home? In just a little bit, I tell him as I head out the door to visit my dogs and share with them the last of the McVittie’s biscuits.

I’ve taken to calling them Baloo (bear) and Acha (good), mostly because these are some of the only Hindi words I’ve learned so far.

Today when Acha sees me, I think she wags her tail a little harder than before. I think she knows me a little. I know I shouldn’t get attached to these animals, or get them attached to me, but it might already be too late for that. I scratch her head and offer her a biscuit which she accepts politely, much like I took the biscuit from the watch vendor in Khan market even though I didn’t want it.

Baloo is lying under a car today and doesn’t want to come out, but there is another dog who is eager for both pets and biscuits, so I share with her as well. This dog decides she loves me and grows affectionate very quickly. She jumps up and gets my shirt dirty. I have to tell her to get down. This would be a bad habit for a stray dog in Delhi to develop: jumping up on people. It could get her in trouble. She lies down in the dirt and lets me scratch her belly until I decide it’s time to go home and leave my canine friends behind.

I don’t see anyone else giving these dogs attention, but I also don’t see any weird looks while I do it, so it mustn’t be that bad. And they seem tame. They seem used to human contact. I can’t be the first person to have approached them. They would have been terrified like the dog we saw at Humayun’s Tomb was. Or maybe it’s just these dogs nature to be okay with a random human coming over and scratching them on the head. Hard to say.

If I could, I’d take them to the guest house with me and give them baths and proper meals. If I could, I’d fly them back to the United States to live in my great, gleaming Coralville duplex. But I can’t. So I’ll slip them a biscuit here and there and spend a little time scratching their tummies and heads.

I know I shouldn’t. But I do.

Yes. Very. I like Delhi.

Tuesday Sonu lets me into the car and tells me with some urgency, “My mobile. Gone. All snaps. Gone. I hate mobile but I like snaps.”

“Oh no, Sonu,” I say. “Your cell phone is broken?”

“Yes.” he says. I think this is the only way he has of talking to his wife in Punjab, seven or eight hours away. “My wife. She call me everyday,” he says. I wish I could fix his phone for him. “I no like mobile but I like snaps,” he repeats.

Tuesday I eat lunch with Amar and Shabnum. Amar wonders what the first thing I noticed about India was.

The first thing I noticed is that my luggage was taken off the carousel by someone, and it made me think it was lost as I stood in the Delhi airport by myself and began the mental planning of how I’d have to replace everything in it—but Amar doesn’t look satisfied with this answer. Truly, I’m being evasive.

The next things I noticed were the humid, smoggy air, the honking and the traffic.

This is the same thing another American visitor told him, he says. She said she could never drive here herself, but she felt safe with her driver who understood the rules. I tell him I agree with this wholeheartedly.

“Delhi is a hard city to like,” Amar says. I am surprised he says this so frankly. I don’t know how to respond. Agree? Disagree? I don’t feel I’ve been here long enough to have a real opinion on this matter—but I certainly have observed certain impediments to fondness. Take, for instance, sewage corner: the section of sidewalk I must pass to get to Defence Colony Market where all the men insist on peeing. I try to hold my breath when I pass this area but I usually end up gasping in the sewage smell because I’m waiting for a break in the traffic to cross the road. Take the few sidewalks that do exist that you can’t walk on anyway because they’re either broken, full of rubble or being used as a restroom. Take the garbage strewn everywhere. Take the obsessively honking drivers who will blithely come within two inches of you as you walk down the street. Take the beggars who will smash their faces against your window and tap on it for as long as your car is stopped in traffic. Take the frequent power outages and crumbling streets. Take the auto-wallahs who invariably lie about their meters being broken so they can rip you off. Take the extra fees foreigners (i.e. white people) have to pay for everything. Take the inability to break a 500 rupee note. Take the surly monkeys who killed the deputy mayor. Take all of this and still, somehow, I am having the most amazing time of my life. There is no objective reason for me to be enjoying myself, but I am.

Still, Amar is right; there is a lot not to like.

Instead of saying anything, I simply look at him, hoping he’ll say more. He obliges. “I told Debamitra it takes a while to like the place.” Debamitra, the movie buff, just moved here from Kolkatta about six months ago. “When I told her that, she just said, ‘You actually like the place?’” He does. “And for publishing, Delhi is the only place to be.” I tell him that’s like New York in the United States—another city that can challenge your loyalty with its various tribulations.

Shabnum agrees with Amar about Delhi being hard to like. “The people here are rude. They’re not soft-spoken. You have to be assertive,” she says.

That night on the way home, Sonu asks me if Delhi is like Chicago—or at least I think that’s what he was asking. “Chicago to Delhi?” he asks. “Chicago to Delhi?”

I tell him Chicago and Delhi are very different. American cities have taller buildings. I think this is one significant and relatively easy-to-explain difference. I don’t want to tell him that also, we pick up our garbage and don’t pee in public. This comparison I leave out.

“Do you like Delhi?” I ask him, knowing that he is from Punjab and wondering how the two places compare.

“Yes. Very. I like Delhi,” he says, smiling. I wish I could ask him why, but I think the question might sound insulting, like asking somebody why they like their own mother. Asking implies that there’s something not to like.

I wonder how I will feel about the city after I’ve been here for a while. I think of the temples I’ve seen, the beauty of the people here, the elephant ride, the ancient ruins. I’m so glad I had someone who likes Delhi show me all the good things about it. I’m fortunate my first glimpses of this city were largely seen through Sonu’s eyes.

Biscuits and Bangs

Monday is pretty routine. Mango, tea, toast, crazy ride to work, editing chapter one, lunch with Amar, editing chapter one, crazy ride home.

When I get home, I decide to walk to the market to see if I can find some tape to hang up the letter and homemade crossword puzzle my husband sent me. I also figure I might get a little snack while I’m there; maybe get some change for my 500 and 1000 rupee notes.

On the way to the market I meet the little brown dogs I talked to yesterday. They wag their tails again and let me pet them. I decide if they’re there on the way home, I’ll share my snack with them. The things I’m doing to make friends in India. It’s so unsightly.

When I get to the market, I happen upon an illuminated sign that says, “Verma’s Beauty Parlor * Ladies and Gents * Beautiful Hair Needs an Expert.”

Buoyed by my good experience with the pedicure the day before, I decide I’ll check out Verma’s. My bangs are so long they’ve been driving me crazy. I’d run out of time before leaving town to get them taken care of. I walk up a staircase and see a row full of men standing behind chairs. This is the gent’s floor. They point me up another set of narrow stairs to the ladies’ floor. I wonder why gender matters so much in this salon—it didn’t in the other salon I visited. Here it’s like women’s and men’s bathrooms. Totally separate. “Hair cut?” I ask the man in the red polo shirt behind the counter on the second floor, holding my long bangs out in front of me.

“Yes,” he says. “80 rupees” (about two dollars). He points me back toward the narrow winding staircase. The ladies’ floor is one more flight up.

I didn’t think there were this many stories in the building I’m in. I finally find the ladies’ haircut section. All the “experts” on this floor are female.

“Just front or whole?” the woman in the red polo shirt asks me. I think I’d better just go with the bangs at the off chance that some real butchery is about to ensue. Bangs can grow out pretty quickly when they have to.

“Just front,” I say, holding out my long, long bangs for a second time.

She sits me down in her chair, spritzes my hair with water, combs it, picks up a pair of scissors and performs one giant chop straight across the top. Three inches of finely tapered hair falls away. It feels more like an amputation than a hair cut. My remaining hair falls back across my forehead like a straight curtain over a proscenium stage. I think I gave myself a look like this when I decided to cut my own hair in second grade. I wish I had just bought a pair of scissors for the two dollars I will spend here.

“Good?” she asks. She wants to know if she should cut them shorter.

“Yes. I mean no! Good. Acha,” I hold out my hand making a stop-in-the-name-of-love kind of motion.

She has to stick the handle of her comb into the outlet to get her hair dryer to work. Even then, the plug keeps falling out of the wall causing her to repeat the comb-in-the-socket process. I’m getting the idea that Verma’s is not the fine, fine salon I was hoping for. Still, it’s nice to have a functioning blow dryer pointed at my head, even if it’s only for short bursts. The hair dryer I brought from home is too powerful for the adapter, so I have to use it on low. Even then, it doesn’t work right. It feels and sounds like I’m pointing a house fly at my head, the current is so weak.

A shorn lamb stares back at me from the mirror. “Baaaad haircut,” it mockingly bleats at me. Oh well, I think. At least my hair won’t be hanging in my eyes. At least I just went for the bangs. Imagine what might have happened had I turned this woman loose on my whole head. Looking at my desecrated bangs I realize what a masterpiece the rest of my haircut really is. I have really fine hair that is hard to work with, and the angles at which it’s cut and tapered are impressive and pretty. And then there are my BANGS. I smile, give the woman a 20 rupee tip and walk out into the humid night air. I realize Verma is right: beautiful hair does need an expert. Sadly, my expert is 7,000 miles away.

I decide to try to cross the busy street at the opposite end of the Defence Colony Market and check out a shop on the other side. This is another big step for me, much like taking my first solo auto-rickshaw ride. The shop across the way looks like a grocery store, and I wonder if they have a wider selection than “The Big Apple” on my side of the road. The grass is always greener, I suppose. I haven’t yet learned my lesson from Jaws.

I wade through traffic in the shadow of a local, letting him do the legwork for me. It’s not so bad getting across. The shop across the road is a little larger than The Big Apple, but they still don’t have water in anything larger than a litre bottle, which is what I was hoping to find. Oh well. I select a Diet Pepsi and a pack of British McVittie’s digestive biscuits. Still dealing with Delhi belly, I figure:

1. British food is the blandest in the world, and
2. If they’re called “digestive biscuits” they can’t be that hard to digest.

There is an actual cash register at this store, which is something of a rarity. My bill comes to a little over 150 rupees. I hand over a 500 rupee bill. “No. Change, madam.” The clerk shakes his head at me.

I have two hundred rupees in my wallet, but I need to save it for giving tips to Sonu during the week. I can’t ask for change from Sonu.

This guy has a whole cash register drawer full of change and he won’t break my freaking 500 rupee bill?

I could probably argue with him, but I just shake my head, exasperated, and hand over my hundred rupee notes. Jerk.

Outside I follow another local across the street, then open up the package of biscuits while I’m walking. I take a bite—or try to take a bite. They’re hard—something you could crack a tooth on. I think, maybe you have to dip these in tea to make them edible.

Back at the corner with the cracked pottery (that’s how I find the street back to my house), I find my doggie friends and offer them each a biscuit. They take the biscuits tentatively into their mouths then let them drop onto the ground. Starving, mongrel, wild, Indian dogs won’t eat these biscuits—and I really can’t blame them. They’re just that awful.

I think maybe these dogs are strict carnivores—you know, they’re sort of there to balance out all the vegetarian karma going on around them. Still, I thought they’d be hungry and wouldn’t care what it was they were offered. I guess even stray dogs have to have some standards—and McVittie’s digestive biscuits must be where even they draw the line.

Back at home, I check out my hair a little more closely and make some faces at myself in the mirror—faces I would have liked to made at Verma’s expert tonight. It’s just too bad I couldn’t meet the Prime Minister with my former, more skillfully cut bangs. Now he’ll never know the true glory of my haircut. He’ll only know me as Bad Haircut Vicki. “Ooo, who was that girl with those straight, bad bangs?” he’ll ask his trusted advisor. “That was Bad Haircut Vicki,” his advisor will tell him after consulting the list of invitees.

I flip on the BBC World News and gnaw on a few biscuits before getting ready for bed. I run my fingers through my newest souvenir: my messed up bangs.

Oh My Soles

Sunday I awaken a little later than usual, talk to Scott for a little while, then go downstairs to grab a quick breakfast before Julianne and Susanna come to pick me up for service at the Delhi Bible Fellowship.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a regular, Christian church, and the prospect still feels somewhat obligatory to me. This Sunday I’m going more for the fellowship than the worship, and I feel vaguely like I’m using God just to get to His friends. I hope He’ll understand.

Scott is concerned. He doesn’t want me going to this church from a place of weakness and getting sucked into something I wouldn’t otherwise be a part of. I tell him it’s not like that, but I see his point. I’m alone. I’m vulnerable. If some alien-worshipping kooks want me to drink their kool aid (or chai, as the case may be), there’s that much more chance that I’ll find myself sucked in by such an offer. But this is a harmless and nurturing Bible study group, and I hope I have enough wits about me to discern between a nefarious cult and innocuous worshippers.

Julianne arrives promptly at 9:15, and I’m still eating my mango. I tell her I’ll hurry and she says it’s fine, take my time, she’s just got an auto waiting outside. Her roommate had volunteered to drive about six other people to church this morning, so there was no room for us. I feel bad that I made Julianne get an auto just for me and come all the way out to my place, but she says she’s happy to do it.

We get to church a minute or two late, find Susie and sit down next to her. How is her toe? It really hurt last night. She had to sleep with it raised up on a duffle bag. But it feels better today.

The regular pastor is still in England with hepatitis. “Didn’t he get his shots?” I ask Julianne. Yes, but you can only get immunized for A, B and C. The hepatitis strands go from A to G, she says. I wince.

We again begin with a traditional hymn then sing a few modern ones with band accompaniment. I am thrown off by the imagery of the first modern song, “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord.” I get a visual of a Pink Floyd album cover: a heart with a slightly menacing eyeball in it. Hearts and eyes just don’t mix, I think.

The sermon is about the importance of prayer. The man giving the sermon gets into a repetitive loop about how Jesus knew it was important to pray, and he went up on a mountain to pray and he prayed for a long time because he knew how important it was to pray, so he went up on a mountain and prayed for a long time because it was important and so forth. If he were a computer, I would have opened the task manager to see if the program was still running. But I know he means well.

I think about the difference between prayer and meditation. In prayer we are so focused on addressing ourselves in our terms, in speech, to another person-like entity, who we expect to respond to us in terms we’ll understand—like a person might, albeit an omnipotent, omniscient person. I even remember someone explaining prayer to me as “a phone call to God.” You just chat Him up.

“How many people here have had their prayers answered by God?” the man asks. Many people raise their hands without hesitation. Mine stays down. I don’t even know what the question means. What is an answered prayer? A wish granted, like a genie in a magic lamp kind of thing? I pray for my uncle’s health and he gets healthy. I pray for a safe trip and have one. Is that an answered prayer, or is that coincidence or luck?

Or is it something more like the quiet voice I heard the other day in the Lotus Temple? Was that an answered prayer? The thought for some reason frightens me. It defies reason and logic. I had asked myself a question and answered it. That’s the scenario that makes sense. But is that what happened? I’m unsure. I had asked the question precisely because I couldn’t find an answer by myself. I “put it out there,” so-to-speak. And then the answer came to me in the second person: You are whole. I asked a question and got an answer. I didn’t even know who I asked the question of. Myself? The universe? The air in the Lotus Temple? The birds? Was this an answered prayer? I wasn’t praying in the first place, I think. I was meditating. Does that matter?

How were all these people so confidently raising their hands? Had they received postcards from God? Packages? Emails in re: your prayer, signed “Love, God”?

Then there’s the whole God-as-unfathomable wizard theory wherein you believe that God painstakingly answers every prayer put to Him. They’re all on big stacks of 3x5 cards, being transcribed by Jesus. It’s really quite an operation. Anyway, He replies to each and every one in the order received, it’s just that we, with our human perceptions, don’t always understand or even perceive the replies. The whole “God works in mysterious ways” theory. I’ve always found this tact dissatisfying. God answers all our prayers, we just don’t know it or can’t see it or understand it. It seems like a weasly way out of the conundrum of answered versus unanswered prayers. Why pray at all if what we get in return is scrambled code? Why not just let God take care of things the way He was going to in the first place?

This is why I think meditation works better for me. The stakes are not so personal; the focus is not on expectations either being met or unmet, requests answered or unanswered.

I prefer not to wonder if I will be one of God’s popular children and get asked to the dance, or if God won’t call me back because He’s busy or I’m not Chosen enough. I prefer not to think of God as The Riddler who answers my frequent requests with confusion and complexity.

I prefer to sit and think and try to feel what comes to me rather than worry about what I want from God.

I prefer to meditate.

We bow our heads in prayer, and I try to think of this act, instead, as meditation. It is freeing not to worry about getting an answer (or not) and then understanding it (or not). It is freeing just to wait, and observe, and see what comes rather than remaining wrapped up in everything I want to request from life, from the universe, from God.

It’s strange that prayer seems to focus so much on personal desires when a central principle of so many world religions is the need to get beyond that personal desire and become more selfless. Maybe I have never understood prayer at all, I think. Maybe I need the beginner’s course, not the advanced level where everyone raises their hands because their prayers have been answered.

After the service, we stand around and talk. There’s a group of Christian missionaries from Minnesota. They are spreading the Word when they can through aerobics classes on University campuses right now, but they hope to come back later and dedicate themselves to this work more formally, more full time.

The conversation draws to a close, and we decide that the group will go out to lunch: Susie and Julianne and her roommate Susanna and Susanna’s friend.

Susanna, Julianne’s roommate who can drive in Delhi, is from Hong Kong. Julianne tells me she came here to start a travel agency, and she did, and it’s very successful. Angshuman’s words about India echo back to me, “It’s all growing; it’s not already grown up. Whatever you’re interested in, you can do.” I wonder if this is how the United States got the moniker “land of opportunity,” because our country was a frontier like this once too. Our country was “an emerging market” not so long ago. But we have changed so much since those days when you could hang out a shingle and start a business or travel west and claim Native American land as your own. We have changed in ways that are regrettable and ways that are commendable. On the one hand, it’s harder to “make it,” and opportunities in America seem fewer and farther between. On the other hand, we hold “it” to a higher standard, with more integrity and better protections for our laborers and consumers.

I think of Upton Sinclair’s Jungle as a narrative of an “emerging market,” a world without laborer rights, or consumer protections and controls. I’d hate to tour the factories near the Pearson office. One day I was leaving the bathroom when another woman walked in. “Why don’t you use the other bathroom near the lobby?” she asked me. “It’s nicer. This bathroom is bad. There are all sorts of chemical smells from the factories nearby.” The bathroom is assailing to the senses with a corroded concrete wall, and an industrial looking fan that doesn’t fit tight into the space it sits in, and a floor that always seems to be seeping something. And if this is what it’s like next door to the factories, what is it like inside? I shudder to think what’s in the air I’m breathing over here.

Anyway, Susanna knows a good Hong Kong/Chinese restaurant we can go to, so we all pile into her little yellow car and head off down the street. The food is fantastic and reasonably priced (it costs about two dollars for lunch). Susanna tells us how to make all the various sauces that are used in our meals. I decide to try to drink the filtered water everyone else orders instead of buying a sealed bottle. Julianne does this all the time and gets away with it, so it can’t be that dangerous.

After lunch, Susie mentions she is going to get her eyebrows threaded and her legs waxed. I say I’d like to get a pedicure sometime, and she offers to take me along with her. I am thrilled. My feet have been like abused and rotten hams since I burned my soles at the Jama Masjid mosque, and I’ve just been resigned to dealing with it until October. So this is a thrilling revelation for me.

Susanna drops Susie and me off at Susie’s place, and we walk up to her apartment. It is also relatively nice with high ceilings and a new paint job. There are mattresses on the living room floor because her air hasn’t been working and the living room has a big ceiling fan.

Susie runs into the bathroom to bandage up her knee before we leave, and I check out her bookshelf: some John Grisham, The Ugly American, a few books by William Darymple (the famous Brit who knows more about India than the natives), and many India travel books.

Susie asks if I want an expensive pedicure where the massage will be a little more serious (done by a man), or the cheap one where they don’t really take a lot of the callous off. I say I need the serious pedicure.

We walk from her apartment to the Malviya Nagar Market just a few blocks away. She leads me into a salon which looks unremarkable. There is a front room with a counter at which the man makes appointments and takes your money. There are a few shelves of products for sale. Then there is the back room with sinks, hair-cutting stations and a few chairs against the wall. Susie sits at a hair-cutting station where they thread her eyebrows, and I am seated in a black plastic chair. “Don’t expect a massage chair with water jets for your feet,” Susie cautioned me—but I wasn’t expecting that in the first place.

A woman brings a sudsy plastic container of warm water, and my technician nods for me to put my feet in. My gaze fixes on a flat screen tv above the sink stations showing the Discovery Channel. Video of cave dwelling animals with no eyes plays as my feet are massaged, then soaked, then moisturized, then exfoliated, then soaked, ad infinitum. Aside from the lack of crazy massage chair, this pedicure is much like one I’d get in the United States, except it feels so much better because of the trauma my feet have been through since arriving: the dirty streets, the barefoot treks through temples, the rubble littering the walkways between my guest house and the market. As the metallic polish dries on my toes, a quiet Hank Williams song plays from over the wall. I wonder if this is chic here, as this is the upscale salon, according to Susie. My “expensive” pedicure costs about six dollars.

“My sister makes fun of me,” Susie says on the walk back to her place. “I never get any of this stuff done at home, but here it’s different.”

Services are cheap; goods are expensive, Brandon told me before I left. And beauty salon services follow that pattern. Why attempt something yourself when it costs so little to have it done for you?

Accordingly, there are no DIY stores here: no Home Depot, no Lowes. You hire everything done. And it is normal to have a maid and a cook if not a guard as well. The other day at lunch, Shabnum offered for us to try some of her okra curry. “Did you make it?” Amar asked.

“No,” she said, “the maid did.”

Back at Susie’s apartment, her houseguest for two months has created something of a disaster zone on the living room floor. Maggie is packing; she returns to Wisconsin tomorrow (by way of London where she has a little layover). Maggie just finished a two-month stint teaching English here, but has failed to get to the Taj Mahal during her stay. “Oh well,” she says, “I’ll be back.”

Susie asks Maggie if she’s had her PowerSweat yet. Maggie has had serious Delhi belly for almost a week. The doctor prescribed at least a litre of PowerSweat a day—but recommended two. Maggie wrinkles her nose. “That stuff is gross.” Anyway, she’s feeling much better.

Maggie messes with masses of bangles, scarves and a large container of chai to fit it all into her luggage, then leaves for dinner with friends.

I tell Susie I should go, too. I want to get to the market today and buy a shawl so I don’t freeze next week at work. I have to steel myself to make this decision to use the auto-rickshaws for travel by myself. I feel without a net, dependent on strangers to be kind and fair. I feel like Blanche DuBois.

Susie walks me down to the market and bargains with an auto-wallah for me. It will be 40 rupees to get to the Lajput Nagar market from here. “That’s fair,” she says, as the market is a good distance from her apartment. “But don’t pay more than 20 or 30 rupees to get home from there.” She and Julianne have taught me, “Meter say?” (That means something like, “Use your meter to determine the price.”) And they’ve taught me, “Tori dour hay,” which means, “It’s very close.” This should help me bargain for a good price if I can remember these phrases when I need them. This Hindi has a way of flying out of my head when I am faced with an actual situation. I can recite it all in my room but when I meet someone face to face, it’s like a nightmare acting moment where I go blank and forget all my lines. I walk through the market repeating to myself, “Tori dour hay. Tori dour hay.”

I also have to retain enough directional orientation to remember the street where I can catch the autos, but this shouldn’t be too difficult. I am more concerned about being at the auto wallah’s mercy because I am relying on him to know my way home for me. I can’t get there by myself.

At the market, it’s hard to find a store that sells shawls. The first man I ask shows me socks. The next store sells only material. The next store has a sign outside that says “Shawls, sale, 50%”. Inside I see a beautiful shawl made of Pashmina wool, but it is priced at 1,700 rupees (roughly $40). When I ask about the sale, he tells me “twenty percent.” White girl mark-up, I figure. This is much more than I want to spend, so I move on.

I wonder through the scene and a man asks me if I want hangers. Another man has a large shoulder bag he’s sure I want. There are baskets. There is fabric and clothing and kitchen supplies and food. Just as twelve cars smash into three lanes on the highway, there are five or fifteen vendors in the space that one mall store would take up in the United States.

The second place I find that has shawls is cheaper, but you have to really look at what you’re buying here. I learn this from the cautionary tale of Julianne’s 100 rupee sari told at lunch today. It is full of stains. Likewise is this cheap shawl.

Searching the vendors, I come across the 10 rupee earring stand I was hoping to find again. I buy 10 pair (10 pairs of nice earrings for about $2). They are pretty, good quality, and will make good souvenirs.

Finally, I find a “fixed price” store that has a sale: 20 percent off. They have no posted 50 percent advertisement, so I have to trust them that they’re not fleecing me. They probably are. Nonetheless, there’s an attractive, nicely made shawl with no runs in the fabric or stains on it priced at about fourteen dollars. It’s not as beautiful as the first one I saw, and it still seems expensive (especially for something I’m only buying to keep from freezing at work—something I probably won’t wear out around town or when I get home), but I can’t find a better price out here on my own and I’m getting tired of trying. I check out and the balding, smiling shopkeeper asks where I’m from. The United States, I tell him.

He’s been to Fort Lauderdale, he wants me to know. And to Las Vegas. The fountains at the Bellagio are the best, he says. And New York, New York and Paris, Paris. They are all very nice.

I am proud to have accomplished this much by myself. I found and purchased the two items I was hoping to find and purchase—even if I paid more than I expected for the shawl. I think, maybe shawls are just a more expensive item than I thought they would be.

The only remaining task I have on my plate is visiting the ATM I found here the other day with Julianne. I am running low on cash, and the ATM in the Defence Colony market dispenses 1000 ruppee notes, which are all but impossible to break in the land of no change. I can’t figure out which way the ATM is from where I am in the market. I wander for a bit, getting harangued by henna artists and a shoe salesman who convinces me to buy a pair for eight dollars (which I also think is a little costly). Before I have no money at all left, I decide to ask a rickshaw driver for help (like I’ve seen Sonu do when he’s lost).

“Namaste,” I greet the man on the bicycle, then, “McDonald’s?”

There is no end to how lame I feel being the only white girl in the market asking which way the McDonald’s is, but that’s where the ATM is, and I figure it’s an easier landmark to point me towards than the little machine that dispenses money. The rickshaw driver easily points me in the right direction, and I thank him. “Shukriya.”

At the ATM, I pop in my card, enter the info, then get an error message, “Incorrect Pin.” I try again, and get the same result. I try three more times, slightly panicking. What if the bank turned off my ATM? What if I don’t have enough money to get home in an auto? I don’t know the way myself and it’s getting dark and I might be stuck here.

I check the funds in my wallet. I have 100 rupees left. That is at least enough to get home.

I hail my first auto wallah all by myself. He wants 50 rupees to take me to the Defence Colony market. “Too much!” I say. “Meter say?” I ask him.

“No. Fifty,” he is firm.

How do you say very close again? Tori… tori… bahoot acha hay? No, that means very good. “It’s very close!” I tell him.

“Fifty,” he says, and a second auto-rickshaw pulls up beside me.

“Thirty,” he says, and I take the deal without even trying to bargain down to 20 or 25. I hop in and we cruise toward my market. We’re getting close, I think, and the wallah says, “Tikka?” Ok? He wants to let me out on a block that I know is near the market, but I’m not sure how near or in what direction. I had a vague nightmare flash that something like this would happen.

“NihaN,” I tell him insistently. “Defence Colony Market.” I just won’t pay him until he gets me where I need to be. He nods. Tikka.

It’s only a few more blocks, and I recognize the surroundings. “Tikka. Acha,” I tell him, and he pulls over. I give him the 30 rupees and hop out, relieved that I’ve achieved my first solo auto-rickshaw ride. It won’t be as hard next time. Next time I’ll bargain a little more. Next time I’ll remember the phrase “tori dour hay” because I won’t be panicked about my ATM card not working.

At the Defence Colony Market, I decide to try my luck with the evil ATM that gives out the big money bills. The same thing happens. I get a message saying, “Incorrect pin,” but this time I notice why. I am using my regular Visa card, not my debit card. My bank hadn’t shut down my access after all. I need to stop panicking when I get to an ATM, I think. I’ve made it ordeal now almost every time.

I get my money (including two 1,000 rupee notes that will haunt me for more than a week as I try to break them and fail).

It’s not getting dark yet, so I decide to take my chances at Sagar again. The food is so good. This time I order an uttapam and a fresh lime soda. With the uttapam (a thick pancake with veggies in it) they bring two chutneys for dipping, then a coconut dipping mixture and a sambar stew for dipping, then two more coconut dips and another sambar stew. I wonder if they just forgot they already gave me all the dips to begin with, or if they’re stuck in some sort of temporal dip-delivering loop. Either way, the food is good and costs about three dollars, dips included. They even break a 1000 rupee note for me.

I love Sagar, even if their idli gave me the Delhi belly.

After dinner, I remember that the tailor said my kurta would be ready on Sunday. I wonder if he’s still there. I walk out of the market and behind the park to his stand. I find him at his counter with a box of screws dumped out in front of him. He is smashing a metal fitting onto another metal piece with a pair of pliers, engrossed. He doesn’t even notice me until I greet him, “Namaste.”

He looks up from his project and I see recognition register on his face. “Ready,” he smiles and points at my shirt, which is hanging behind him.

“Bahoot acha hay!” Very good, I tell him. “Danyuvaad!” Thank you. “Namaste!” I unleash my entire Hindi vocabulary on him—except the part about the broken toilet. He smiles back and puts my shirt in a little plastic bag with paisley designs on it.

Since it’s still light, I wander into the small park across the street and notice some ladies doing some power walking. I fall in behind them, doing laps and trying not to sweat too much. An Indian parakeet flies right above my head and lights on a tree branch long enough for me to get a pretty good snap of it. A large Indian woman wearing an iPod and a t-shirt lopes around the walkway in the other direction. She looks like someone else has put her up to this exercise thing and she is resenting every step. I don’t really blame her, in this heat.

On the way home from the park, I see a little brown dog who wags her tail at me. I extend a hand, and she comes up to me and allows me to pet her. This is a great gift for me as I miss my animals back home so much. I thank her profusely. “Acha, acha,” I tell her. Good, good. I don't know the word for dog. She enjoys the attention much more than I thought she might. She may never have had her ears scratched in all her life.

The guard at the guest house opens the gate for me as I enter from my much longer than planned day. I left in the morning thinking I would sit through a church service then come home and write. But this is so much better. I have so much more to write about… if I can ever find the time to do it.

Jaws and Toes

On Saturday, my Internet is working, so I start the day with a Skype conversation with my Aunt Linda and my husband Scott. Scott has taken a picture of our fish tank and posted it on a blog about our pets for me. I tell him the picture is good. We talk about how surprisingly old our fish are, then Aunt Linda mentions that she once had a fish for well over ten years. I remember the giant goldfish: Jaws.

She says she would have had him longer, “but the dumb thing jumped right out of his tank” and when they found him, it was too late. Jaws had bailed once before, and their dog alerted them to this fact in time. The first time Jaws jumped out, my Aunt Linda went to the pet store and bought some netting to place over the top of the tank to prevent it from happening again. She asked the pet store owner why a fish would do something like that, and he said, “They’re just like people. We all wanna be someplace we’re not. We think it’s better over there.”

The salience of this conversation is not lost on me sitting in India talking to my family in Iowa and Chicago.

The second time Jaws jumped out, he jumped right through the netting. “He was just so strong.” This was the last attempt Jaws made to be some place he was not.

I have a quick breakfast, then Sonu arrives. I ask him to take me to the Lotus Temple before picking up Julianne and her friend Susie to sight see. I try to remember the lesson of the Buddhist stupa, and the lesson of Jaws: that I’m not going to the temple for something inside of it—I’m going for something inside of me; and there’s not necessarily something better than where you are at any given moment. I think of that plaque in the Lotus Temple:

Wert thou to speed through the immensity of space and traverse the expanse of
heaven; yet though wouldst find no rest save in submission to our command and
humbleness before our face.

I’m not going to the Lotus Temple for something in the Lotus Temple, I repeat to myself.

I feel a little anxiety as we arrive because it takes a long time to get there, and I told Julianne we’d pick her up at 11. That’s why I wanted to leave at 9:30 instead of 10 o’clock, but after Sonu’s traffic rescue yesterday, how could I argue about half an hour?

Once we get inside the temple and I sit and close my eyes, it’s as though time doesn’t exist. I try to mark the feeling so I can conjure it whenever I’m running late, whenever I’m stressed. The absence of the racing heart. The peace. The wholeness. The embrace. It is here once again, but it must always be with me. I just need to find it.

A man walks up behind me and whispers to the woman he’s with, shattering the silence. “What is this?” he says, and the woman tries to shush him. In the Lotus Temple, no one’s supposed to speak at all. “What is this?” he insists again, refusing to quiet. “Are they just shitting?”

In Hindi, it seems that most every “s” is pronounced with an “sh,” so Hindi speakers of English will follow this same principle, turning their s’s into sh’s.

“Are they shitting?” he needs to know. Sitting is what you call Buddhist meditation.

“You can pray,” the woman tells him. “You can pray.” With this, he is satisfied and falls back into the silence.

I open my eyes and nod to Sonu who is waiting patiently for me. We can go—right after I copy down another quote: the one I was writing about the other day. The one about not being perturbed when your shower is cold, and not throwing a party when your shower is hot:

Should prosperity befall thee, rejoice not, and should abasement come upon thee,
grieve not. For both shall pass away and be no more.

On the way to Julianne’s, she calls Sonu’s cell phone. Are we having trouble finding her? No, we’re just running a little behind. This is good, she says, she can use the extra minutes.

We have to stop and ask directions a few times, but we finally find Julianne’s place. It’s more spacious than I expected. There are three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, and even a little, private courtyard with an empty fountain and a ping pong table.

Julianne wants to know if we can also pick up Susie. I met Susie the week before at the church service I attended with Julianne. She has been here almost two years. She’s working for a consulting service that helps to train Indian employees working for American companies. Before that, she did one of those “teach English abroad” programs. She is bold—doing all this on her own with no fanfare.

Julianne says Susie’s place is just ten minutes away, but it takes Sonu almost an hour to get there. Instead of driving through the circle, Julianne says, Sonu circumnavigated almost the entire city. It’s okay. We get a good tour.

“I could have told him where to turn,” Julianne says, “but I thought he might have known a different way.”

No matter. We pick up Susie and we’re off to Qutub Minar—another ruin. Qutub Minar, says Wikipedia, “is the tallest brick minaret in the world and an important example of Indo-Islamic architecture.” It’s essential to either take a guidebook with you or do your research on these sites before you get to them, because there’s very little information posted or available as to what these places are or why they’re significant. And the locals and the guides will make up stories about them to impress you.

The tower was begun by Qutb-ud-din Aibak, the first Muslim ruler of Delhi, in 1193. There’s a lack of clarity over the purpose of the tower, but people think it was either built as a watchtower, or to call people to prayer, or to symbolize newfound Muslim dominance in the region. Supposedly, there were 27 Hindu and Jain temples in the area and they were demolished, and the rubble was used to build the complex of buildings that still stand (at least partially) today. As with all these sites, there is a mosque, some tombs (unmarked and seemingly uninvestigated), and a fortress wall. This site also has an early school—a college or madrassa. I think I read somewhere that over 110 people are buried here, but, then again, you can’t always believe the signs.

Susie and Julianne and I attract a lot of attention as we walk around the ruins, being three white girls. We find ourselves in the background of many family photos and videos. We take our own pictures too.

We’re only there for a few minutes when Susie climbs up onto a pillar for a snap. Julianne uses Susie’s camera to take the picture so Susie can have a picture of herself at Qutub Minar. She smiles, then hops off the pillar’s stump, but she doesn’t nail the landing. Instead, she falls forward onto her left knee. It doesn’t look like any big deal, but when she gets up, there is a hole in her pants, and when I see her toe, I’m filled with a slow dread. It is beading up with blood. Her big toe nail bent backwards and came off. It even looks like part of her toe is missing. What’s worse is you can’t wash wounds with tap water here because they can become dangerously infected from the bacteria in the water.

I imagine myself in Susie’s position totally panicking, but Susie is nonplussed.

I think our day of tourism has come to a quick close, but Susie says she’s fine. She pours a little water from her bottle onto the toe and insists on limping along to see the rest of the site. We trade cameras and take each other’s photos, all the while she is missing part of her toe. “In the United States,” I tell her, “you’re what we would call ‘a trooper.’”

When we get back to the car, we tell Sonu what happened and show him Susie’s toe. He gasps. We ask if we can stop at a chemist’s (a drug store) before going to the next site we planned to visit: Humayun’s Tomb. We drive to the nearest market, then pull in. Susie hops out of the car and walks into the chemist’s hoping for supplies with which to clean her wound. Sonu watches her go, then gets out of the car and follows her in. He wants to make sure she can find what she needs.

They emerge, and Susie has a bagful of first aid: cotton and gauze and medical tape and, the most special supply: beta-dine, a creepy red syrup that she can rinse her toe with instead of using water. Susie reveals that her mother is a nurse and would be proud.

In the parking lot of Humayun’s Tomb, Susie sits and dresses her wound while a collection of fifteen Indian men crowd around to watch. We laugh and take pictures to document the process. Snaps are really so much fun.

She finishes and we tell Sonu we’ll meet him back at the car in an hour or so. At the admission gate, the standard fees are posted: 10 rupees for Indian citizens, 250 rupees for foreigners. How do they know you are a foreigner? By looking at you.

Amar said they had a visitor here from the United States whom they took out to some of these sites and, since she was of South American descent, she had darker skin. They tried to sneak her in at the lower Indian admission price and it worked… until the guard said something in Hindi to her and wanted an answer. She was sent back to pay the foreigner’s admission.

Not only do we have to pay more, we have to pay in exact change because almost no one in India will give you change. Sometimes they just don’t have change, sometimes they are hoarding it because it’s so hard to come by (like at the grocery store I went to last night). I don’t understand this phenomenon, but it’s getting a little old. We have to pitch in and loan money to Julianne because the woman at the gate can’t break a 500 rupee bill.

Susie tells us a little about Humayun’s Tomb. She’s been here before. The Taj Mahal was patterned after its architecture, only built to be six times the scale. Humayun’s Tomb is a huge structure. I can’t imagine something six times its size. In addition to the tomb, there are the requisite other structures: fortress walls, a mosque and other entombments. “His barber and his jeweler have their own tombs somewhere here,” Susie says. “And so do his two wives: one from an arranged marriage, one from a love marriage.” As the story goes, in 1556, Humayun was descending a staircase at the Red Fort when he heard the muezzin, the Muslim call to prayer. He tried to kneel to observe the moment, but his foot got caught in his robe. He fell down the stairs to his death.

Geez, I think. This red sandstone must be really dangerous. It’s lucky Susie only lost part of her toe.

According to Wikipedia, Humayun, the second Mughal emperor of India, lost his Indian territories to an Afghan sultan and, with Persian aid, regained them fifteen years later. Having spent the intervening years in Persia, he brought with him a considerable influence of Persian art, architecture, language and literature. He is partly to thank for the grand style known so well in the arches and domes of the Taj.

We walk around the grounds of the tomb which is kept up quite well. Even some of the fountains are functioning. There is a huge team of workers pounding at large red tiles. Susie and Julianne think this would be a good place for a date, though they seem to be talking about it only in conceptual terms. Neither of them are talking about a date that they would bring here. I marvel at how these two are so absolutely fine with being by themselves in a country that is so different than their own, how they are so used to being the only white person in sight, how they are so happy so far away from their families for so long a period of time. They must know love without attachment, I think. They seem to be happily without that possessive part of a relationship wherein you have to “have” the other person to feel like you’re not alone.

There is an outbuilding that houses a fountain. Julianne and I climb up to it and walk inside while Susie waits at ground level for us—and I don’t blame her. This is where the well is that supplies the fountains on the grounds. I splash my hand into the stream of water. A loud rumbling ensues and the water seems to stop running. I picture a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where you touch something you weren’t supposed to touch and the whole temple begins crumbling around you. I expect a large rock to roll at me from out of nowhere. Julianne and I look at each other for a frightful second then burst into laughter. “I angered the fountain god,” I laugh.

In this building a white dog lays on her side. She wags her tail when she sees us. I try to pet her but she runs away frightened, then approaches me again, tail wagging. I hold out my hand, but she runs away again.

“You must miss your dog,” Julianne says.

Yes, I do. And I feel bad because you can’t really explain to a dog that you’re leaving for three months because you have the opportunity of a lifetime and you’ll be back soon and you love them. All your dog knows is that you’re gone.

We wander back towards the car.

“Is your power on?” Julianne asks Susie. It is. There was, apparently, some confusion about Susie not paying for her electricity even though she’d never received a bill. A man showed up at her door threatening to disconnect her service. But this is nothing compared to the time when she lost water for eight days. Again, she describes the situation with little fanfare, as though it were no big deal.

“Eight days!” I exclaim.

“Yeah,” she says, “I showered at my friend’s house.”

I’m beginning to feel like my place is pretty posh after all.

We ask Sonu to drop us off at the Defense Colony market so we can eat at Sagar’s. Sonu is concerned: it’s very early and we have very much time left. I have him for eight hours on Saturdays, and we haven’t used the full eight hours. But Julianne and Susie need to go. They have evening plans. I tell him I’ll see him on Monday at 8:30.

“Okay madam,” he smiles.

We eat dinner then part ways; Julianne and Susie hail auto-rickshaws and I walk back to my guest house. After all the commotion and fun of the day, I suddenly feel very alone. I talk to my husband for an hour on Skype (thankfully my Internet connection is working). He says he’s going to go get ready for the day, and I can barely keep myself from full-on weeping. It’s okay, he says. He can talk to me some more. But I’m unsettled and it feels like no amount of talking will fix it. I am my Aunt Linda's fish, Jaws. I've jumped out of my tank and I'm gasping for air. Scott wants to help, but he can't, and neither can Sonu or Susie or Julianne, because what I need is not talking. It’s peace. It’s that feeling of wholeness that is still fleeting. I want to know how to get there, but then think of a poster I saw in a market on the drive to Susie's apartment, "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." I'm confused, and I ache again, but this must be natural, like waves. It’s been the same getting used to the drastically different culture here. Sometimes I’m excited about the Indian food and all the new tastes I get to experience; sometimes even the thought of one more dal or curry dish turns my stomach.

This is what people mean when they say two weeks isn’t enough to really experience a place. It’s not enough to experience a person either, even when that person is the self.

I have a lot of learning to do in the next three months--and isn't it so hackneyed to come to India to find yourself, I think. But things are hackneyed for a reason, and it's because they started out being true. When you jump out of your fishtank and you land here, you are challenged. You've got to find new ways of breathing, of swimming. And for that, you need strength and patience and buoyancy. And for that, you need to rely on yourself in ways you've never done before.

So maybe it's a tired story, but this time it's mine.

My Elephant

The Island of Stop

By Friday, I develop something of a routine: get up, shower, talk to Scott, eat breakfast, relax and wait for the car to arrive. I can do this for three months, I think.

During breakfast, I usually try to make heads or tails out of the political stories on the front page of the Times of India. There aren’t two opposing parties here; there are many more. There are the BJP, the UPA, the CPM, the NDA and the NC for starters. One sentence, for instance, states, "Other groups like the TDP were pointing out how BJP had let the anti-UPA campaign down." Figure that one out. Once an issue isn’t left or right, black or white, it’s much harder to track. I'm so used to the polarities of American politics that I'm lost in this complexity. All I can really make out is that there is a lot of wheeling and dealing going on between the parties regarding the impending no confidence vote. People are exchanging money and promising appointments and favors in return for the vote that they want on this measure. Further, the outcome will be a matter or one or two or four votes. It's really close.

Friday at work I wear a warmer shirt. I found myself very chilly on Thursday. We work in the basement, and I guess that’s the coldest place in the building. If they turn the temperature up to make it warmer in the basement, the people on the floors above us complain about being hot. Debamitra, the film buff, tells me to buy a shawl at the market and leave it at work so when I’m cold I can just wrap up in it.

“Good idea,” I say, wishing that sounded like an easy task. I love shopping, but shopping here (at least for me right now) is hard work. The markets are so crowded with sights that I can’t see anything I’m looking for. I’m sure this is another matter of adjustment. And then there’s the white chick factor. Every price triples (at least) when the shopkeeper sees there is a white woman on the other end of his transaction. If you don’t know what something should cost and assertively insist on a fair price, you are liable to pay as much as or more than you would in the United States for most things. It all gets exhausting.

I have a meeting today with Soma, who edits engineering, science and math textbooks. She shows me an immunology text for which she had to work with artists on all kinds of illustrations and photos. She shows me the before and after: what the author originally submitted as art for the text and what finally got published. The change is dramatic and impressive. This is what development editing can accomplish.

Soma asks how I'm adjusting to Delhi. I tell her I'm doing fine, but it is an adjustment. She says it was for her too. She came here from Chandigarrh which is a very well-planned and clean city, she says. When she got to Delhi she was overwhelmed by the dirtiness of the place. But you learn to see in a different way here, she says. After a while, the city has an effect on you and you appreciate it for what it does and what it is.

Soma compliments my shirt. It's one of the kurtas I bought at the market with Julianne over the weekend. "You are totally Indianized!" she says. I find that I suddenly have no concept of what looks "Indian" and what doesn't. The day before I was wearing a market-find that I thought looked totally Indian, and Jonaki was surprised that I had found such a western-looking shirt at Lajput Nagar. This confusion must be what Julianne was talking about on Saturday when we went shopping. You loose track of your American sense of style really quickly in the whirlwind of saris and kurtas and scarves and shawls that swirl around you.

On the way home from work we hit a traffic jamb in front of the Sai Memorial temple. The stinky silver carriage shudders, then goes silent. Sonu turns the key to restart it, but it just whimpers. He tries again. A whimper. Again. Another whimper. Now cars, trucks, motorcycles and cows are swerving past us. We are an island of stop in a river of go. Horns wail. People yell. Sonu turns the key again. Nothing again. I think he should stop trying and we should come up with an alternate plan, but he keeps turning the key.

If I were with just any driver stuck in the middle of India in the middle of Delhi traffic, marooned, I can imagine that I’d feel sheer terror. But I’m with Sonu, and this development doesn’t phase me in the least. I know we’ll be okay.

Sonu says, “Madam, cell phone. Call Ms. Sonu.”

I tell him my cell phone is international and it will cost me big money to call Ms. Sonu. Can we use his?

He says, “No charge.” His phone isn't working. It's not charged.

I look for my cell phone but don’t find it in my purse. “Sonu, I can’t find my cell phone. I don’t have it.” I hope he doesn’t think I’m bluffing after being a cheapskate about the international call.

Now there is an irate Indian policeman in blue pants and a starched white shirt and a blue beret yelling at poor Sonu and flapping his arms like he’s going to take off. Sonu yells back. I sit, mute, in the backseat: the useless American without even a cell phone.

The policeman and Sonu yell and flap, yell and flap, then finally, Sonu gets out of the car and the two of them push it to the side of the road and into a parking space. The officer is satisfied. Sonu says, “I go find phone. Make call,” and disappears off across the street. I sit in the backseat of the car by myself. Beggars begin to knock on the car window. It’s an old woman, a middle aged woman and two small children. I think about the two granola bars in my backpack that I’ve been saving for myself and look at the two small children. The old woman is knocking and making a motion that I should give them money, and I’m trying to look away. Finally, I take the granola bars from my backpack and hand them out the window, one package to each kid. They smile and chew on the wrappers. The old woman motions for more. I have no more, I show her my empty hands, my empty backpack. “Food,” she says. Sorry, I have no more. Suddenly, two more young girls are at the car window. I roll it up, but they press their foreheads on it and won’t leave.

I don’t know what possesses me, but I snap a picture of the girl with her forehead on my window. Her eyes widen. I turn the camera around and show her through the window the image of herself. She points and dances and makes goofy faces. Then she poses. She wants another photo. I take it and show it to her. She laughs and points. She’d like a picture of herself with her eyes closed. Then she’d like a picture hugging her friend. A picture picking her nose. A picture flexing her arms. A picture sticking her tongue out. A picture with her shirt pulled over her head. More pictures of her more demure friend who bashfully smiles. I take as many pictures as she wants, and she wants a lot of pictures. Then the mother of the baby with the granola bar wants a picture of her baby. Then the old lady thinks she might have a go at it. I take the pictures and show them. I roll down the window so they can see the display better. At no point am I afraid these people are going to harm me in any way or grab for my purse or expensive electronic equipment—which they so easily could have. We are all laughing at this little girl’s antics and looking back through the crazy photo shoot when Sonu gets back to the car. He looks frazzled, whereas I had momentarily forgotten we were stuck in traffic at all. Sonu took on all the stress of this situation for me while I literally sat clowning around. This situation that could have been so bad and so scary was absolutely smooth and stress-free. Once again, I owe Sonu a huge debt of gratitude.

He says, “Car madam,” and I see that there is a large white car idling behind us with another driver inside. Once again, whatever I need materializes because of Sonu. I grab my bags, wave goodbye to my granola bar photo shoot friends and jump into the closest thing to an SUV that I’ve seen the whole time I’ve been here.

We are back at Defense Colony in no time. “Tomorrow morning at nine thirty?” I ask Sonu. I plan to go to the Lotus Temple, then pick up my friend Julianne to do some sightseeing at 11.

“Ten o’clock?” Sonu bargains. He doesn’t like getting up early.

“That’s fine,” I say.

Jama Masjid

Right across the street from the Red Fort (and up a hill) is the Jama Masjid. This is the huge mosque Shah Jahan had built around the same time as the Red Fort. You must walk through an open air market to get to the mosque, and when you get to the entrance, there are sheisters there who will tell you that you have to leave your shoes with them. When you come out to get your shoes back, they ask you for an exhorbitant sum. If you act angry, they give you your shoes back for twenty rupees. Or, at least, that's what happened to me. Once I got into the mosque, I realized most people were carrying their shoes with them. The rules for the temples and mosques vary, though. At some of them, carrying your shoes inside can be a terrible insult, and I didn't want to risk it.

Like the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid is also made of red sandstone, which I realized after walking through it barefoot, is much like the stuff they make that Pampered Chef baking stoneware out of. The soles of my feet were so burnt that they stung for about two days afterwards. But I got some good snaps out of the deal.

The Red Fort

Some pictures of the Red Fort. Structures inside include a mosque, the place where the Shah would hold public court, dwelling places for his wife and favored daughter, and a bath house. Sadly, most of these places are blocked off by armed guards and all of the fountains have run dry since the Jumna River was diverted by the British.

Here is a short video of a bicycle rickshaw ride I took with Sonu during my first week here. We went to see the Red Fort, which is a series of structures built by emperor Shah Jahan constructed in the medieval city of Shahjahanabad in 1639 A.D. This palace, mosque and fortress wall was the capital of Delhi's seventh city. Delhi is said to be the "city of seven cities," as civilizations would be conquered and new cities built in their place throughout the millenia. You may know the Emperor Shah Jahan because he commissioned the Taj Mahal as a burial place for his wife. The Red Fort displays a lot of the same Mughal Empire design characteristics, such as the onion-shaped domes, intricate stone carvings and inlaid marble.

The Red Fort is in Old Delhi, so we couldn't drive Sonu's car close enough to it to park. Old Delhi's roads were built before the British got here and are narrow and crowded. Instead, we parked about a mile away, then Sonu talked to the gentleman in the video and wrangled us a ride right up to the gate of the fort.

Open House/Empty House

Thursday my car arrives right on time—and I am still downstairs finishing up breakfast. Mira tells me “taa taa.”

“Driver?” I ask her.

“Yes,” she says.

On the way to work I see the word “taa taa” on a car dealer’s sign. It must mean car or ride or something like that, even though my Hindi dictionary lists “gari” as the word for car. I’m thrilled to have learned a new word by picking it up in context.

My time at the office brings more editing. I try to finish chapter one but there is more work than I first thought. So many citations need so much reformatting.

Just before lunch, there is an open house with the CEO, Vivek. We crowd into a conference room upstairs. There is no room large enough to hold all the employees in the office, so Vivek will have one meeting in the morning and a second in the afternoon.

The conference room has an LCD projector affixed to the ceiling and a screen at the front so that Vivek can present his slides. The office chairs are covered with white chair covers. The front of the room is covered in large squares of light wood paneling, but several of the panels are blackened with scuffs from who knows what.

Vivek wears a white collared shirt that is slightly creased from sitting during the morning. His belt buckle is plain. He talks about the year-to-date financials. The school publishing (primary and secondary books) business has record growth. The higher education publishing arm is on target as well.

At the end of this very familiar presentation, Vivek takes out a stack of papers and starts responding to comments people have written to him. Can we have snacks? Vending machines? Can there be a shuttle that takes you to the gate? What about leave to study? Or job exchanges? Will he support that?

Yes, he says. In fact, there is a visitor here doing a job exchange right now. I am introduced. “Come to Iowa,” I invite the room, forgetting about Brandon’s incident. He extended a similar “figurative” invitation and someone actually showed up at his office about a week after he’d arrived back home from Mumbai.

What about the evening snack—the 7:30 snack—can there be more healthy options like fruit? Are we getting a new office in a nicer place? This is expensive, Vivek says. He’s looking into what to do about office space, as the operation is clearly outgrowing its current digs.

What about training, more than one person wonders. Vivek shows the Pearson People Development website—the same one we promote in the United States. I think the folks back home would be excited about this. What about breakfast? What about a cafeteria?

He answers every question put to him on paper, even though most of them are about food.

On my way out of the meeting, I am stopped by a young woman from the school side of publishing. She wants to know how I’m finding India, how long I’ve been here, where I’m from, etc. “How are you finding the food,” she asks. The perennial question.

“Good,” I say.

“Where are you getting it from? How are you eating?” she wonders.

I tell her breakfast is provided by the hotel, lunch is provided by the office and I’ve just been having some snacks at dinner time mostly. I mention I tried a dosa at the restaurant near my house.

“Oh,” she says, “dosa. You be careful. You keep your thin,” she says.

So far, even though I don’t have much opportunity for exercise, I haven’t had a problem “keeping my thin.” It’s so hot that I don’t have much of an appetite. That, and a light touch of Delhi belly does dissuade one from indulging in too many foodstuffs.

Back at my desk after lunch, the power blips off six times and nobody skips a beat. Angshuman draws a crowd at his desk when he announces that the Watchmen preview is out. “Sweet,” he says, “They’ve got a doomsday clock going.”

An onlooker asks if he’s seen “the dahk connigut.” After a moment, I realize he’s talking about The Dark Knight and stifle a chuckle. This is amusing only until I think of all the Hindi words that I must have slaughtered while my Indian friends patiently tried to figure out what the heck I was saying--and not tricky words like "knight;" simple words like yes, no and thank you.

As promised, after work, Sonu stops at Indraprastha Park with me and walks over to the Buddhist temple, which I find out is not a temple at all. It is a stupa, which means when I ask to go inside of it to meditate, the guard laughs. You don’t go inside a stupa. There is no “inside” of a stupa. It’s empty, symbolizing the perfection of enlightenment. It’s simply a place for reverence with a bunch of beautiful statues on the outside of it.

What was I hoping to find on the inside anyway? I wanted another revelation like the one I had at the Lotus Temple. I want something deep to happen to me everyday. I want. I want. I want. Buddhism is the perfect antidote to wanting, and I learn a small lesson through my disappointment at the stupa. What I’m looking for isn’t going to be wrapped in a package waiting for me in one or another of these places. What I’m looking for is truly nothing. Emptiness. The Buddhist concept of emptiness holds that all our stress comes from the meanings and values we assign to objects and people in our lives, but those values are just creations of our deluded minds. We think, “I need ‘x’ to be happy,” wherein “x” is money or a specific person or a sign of success. But really, “x” has no actual value—all the value comes from our projecting. When we see “x” for what it really is (a neutral object), we understand a little bit about emptiness.

Emptiness pokes me in the ribs and makes me giggle as I photograph the golden Buddhas flanking the outside of the stupa.

This place was dedicated in 2007 by the Dalai Lama, a plaque on the front of it says. They’re still working on it, Sonu tells me, and I can tell he’s correct by the platform area in front of it that has a bunch of large red tiles stacked, leaning against it. Everything here is built from red sandstone.

We take off our shoes and walk around the dusty marble deck, looking at the four golden Buddhas on the outside. I take a few more snaps, then we walk back and put on our shoes. As we walk through the park back to the car, Sonu points. I can’t tell what he’s pointing at. He takes out his camera phone and takes a picture of two people sitting on the edge of a bench and kissing. He shows me the picture. I wonder how to explain that this wouldn’t be a photo worthy event in the United States, but think better of it. It is a cute picture, if voyeuristic by American standards.

We walk back to the car. I have to pay ten rupees for parking. This seems fair.

Dinner on Thursday is some Tetley tea and a piece of toast from the loaf of fruit bread I bought at the market when I went shopping with Julianne. I’m trying to shake this Delhi belly and “keep my thin.” Emptiness is not only a beneficial state of mind in Buddhism, it's a good condition for an upset stomache as well.

Hot or Not

I’m trying not to measure the quality of my days by whether or not I get a hot shower, but this Wednesday I was fortunate enough to get one, and, boy, it was nice.

Tuesday night I wrote a eulogy for my Uncle Joe to be read at his wake and funeral. Today at the office I’ll be able to email it to my mother. The eulogy closely follows what I said about him in yesterday’s blog. My bionic uncle.

I eat my breakfast mango, toast and tea and go back up to my room to await my driver. I don’t know who it will be, as Sonu told me his last day was yesterday. I hope somebody shows up in his place.

At home, I’m used to sleeping until the very last second possible, then scrambling around with my eyes half opened to get to work on time. Mornings here are different. I have time. This is partly thanks to the mind-bending time difference which is, right now, allowing me to happily awaken at 6:30 a.m. This time after breakfast when I come back up to my room and have nothing to do but wait for my driver to show up is delicious.

I lay back on the bed for a bit then think to look up how to say “broken toilet” in Hindi in case it still isn’t fixed today. “Taa-i-let too taa,” the book tells me. I repeat this out loud several times, trying not to sound too stupid.

The phone rings, “Madam, driver.”

“Shukriya,” I say, putting my book away. I grab my backpack and purse and head out the door.

Downstairs standing outside a small, beat up silver car is Sonu.

“Sonu!” I exclaim, probably showing too much glee. “I thought you were going back to Punjab.”

“Yes, madam, I stay only for you,” he says as he closes the car door behind me and climbs into the driver’s seat.

I feel bad that I’m keeping him from his family. “I’m sorry, Sonu, that you can’t go back to Punjab right now, but I’m very happy to see you,” I tell him.

“Yes, madam,” he says.

This “new” car is less, shall we say, posh than the other car we’ve been driving. The outside is dented, the seat covers look a little tired, and it has a, shall we say, scent inside. There are also no seat belts in the backseat. At first I’m unsure it has air (which is essential for an hour-long commute through the Delhi heat and smog), but then Sonu rolls up the window and monkeys with a knob and a cool blast of air helps dilute the eau de Sikh leftover from previous occupants.

Someone has written “God is one” on the driver’s side visor—both sides of it. In Sikhism, there is great emphasis placed on the belief that God is everything. Sikhs don’t anthropomorphize God; they avoid assigning a human form or attributes to their deity. Instead they believe that God is the entire universe and vice versa. Everything is united in God. God is one. I think this may be Sikh graffiti in our new cab.

This morning as we’re pulling past the industrial park gate that leads to the office, I see a turbaned man with a dog on a leash, but then realize that the dog is a monkey. He’s pulling it along against its will. And then they’re gone and I’m looking at street vendors and rickshaws and peeling advertisements and a sea of pedestrians, some in collared shirts and Dockers, others in rags. In the dictionary under “sensory overload,” it should just say “see Delhi.”

At work, I sign in to my computer and take up editing where I left off the day before: half way through chapter one of Operations Management. The author has definite problems with indefinite articles (using “it” and “these” all the time when he needs to actually say what “it” and “these” refer to), but this is an easy fix. The citations are also quite a mess, and these are a more complicated fix because I’m not familiar with the end note formatting used here. It’s not simply the Chicago or AP or APA style guide. It’s a house style I need to learn.

Today I have lunch with Amar again. “It is looking like our prime minister may be going,” he tells me. There’s going to be a no-confidence vote, and it’s not looking good for Monmohan Singh. Amar says he’s a good enough prime minister but there’s been terrible inflation here, food prices, gas prices, everything has shot up because of the world oil prices. Amar says Mr. Singh is paying the price for this situation when, in reality, he thinks the inflation is unavoidable.

“This is not good for our book,” he says, and I remember that the brilliant history book the department has just labored to produce was written by the prime minister’s daughter. Companies were lining up to sponsor the book launch and subsidize production in order to win favor with the prime minister, but now those companies are not so interested in helping. I’m suddenly very interested in whether Mr. Singh can win over the five or ten MPs he needs to circumvent the coups. I’m rooting for him. Well, I’m rooting for Pearson’s gorgeous, important book.

After lunch, I talk with Jonaki. She is another development editor who worked on the first book to undergo full development in the company: Macroeconomics. Jonaki went to school for engineering at Champagne Urbana in Illinois, so we talk about Chicago and her extensive travels in the United States.

Jonaki has an Emily Dickenson poem posted in her cube, and also a T.S. Eliot quote that I used to have in the front of one of my journals, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The story of my life, I think. At least my life in its present form, in India.

I think Jonaki is a kindred spirit.

We talk about being far from home. Her brother just went to Paris on business and she is jealous. “I’ve read all these books about Europe but never been there. I asked my brother what he’d done over the weekend and he said, ‘Oh, I just stayed in my hotel room.’ He is a geek!” she declares, then concludes, “I’m half geek.”

A man comes by with a box of sweets. They’re from Preeta, another editor. The sweets are diamond-shaped and metallic on top. I question the metallic sheen, but decide to try one. I bite off a corner and it tastes and feels like I’m chewing on aluminum foil—or aluminium foil as they spell it here. I wonder if I’ve been poisoned while Jonaki is happily munching her metallic diamond into oblivion. I wonder what kinds of consumer protections exist in India—who is checking to see that these treats aren’t slightly poisonous? Maybe no one. No one certainly is worried about people falling off the tops of crumbing monuments and ruins where there are no railings or even ropes. No one is worried about the women and children on the backs of the motorcycles who wear no helmets (while their husbands do). No one is worried about the dogs and cows traipsing into traffic. No one is worried about the three-wheeled auto-rickshaws tipping over when they take corners too quickly. There are a trillion hazards here, small treats at the office notwithstanding. Still, I wonder how much safer we are in the United States. We pretend we are, what with our bicycle helmets and health inspectors, but we still have accidents. We still get salmonella and e-coli. We go crazy and shoot each other with guns. All the bicycle helmets in the world can’t protect us from one wacko packing heat.

I return to my chapter and happen across a question on which I need consultation. Idli is an Indian snack food—kind of like a cake in a sweet yogurt sauce. The text says something about “a restaurant stocking idli that are later sold at a discount…” Is idli the plural of idli, I wonder, like deer is the plural of deer? Is the correct usage “idli is” or “idli are”? The question bubbles about the office. Everyone has an opinion. Idli, idlis? My office mates finally decide that if you’re going to say “are,” you have to say “idlis.” I change my text accordingly and shortly thereafter pack it up for the day.

Sonu is waiting outside in a different shirt than he had on this morning. “You changed your shirt,” I say.

“Yes madam,” Sonu says excitedly. “My sister, she is go United States. Today she go for ten years. Her children stay India.”

“Ten years,” I say. “Why is she going for that long?”

“Work,” he says.

“Are you driving her to the airport?”

“Yes,” he beams.

I ask Sonu if we can stop at the Buddhist temple near Indaprastha Park that we passed by, the one I tried to get him to visit yesterday when we went to the Lotus Temple instead.

“Tomorrow?” he asks. “My sister,” he says.

“Of course,” I tell him. “Tomorrow instead. Yes, be with your sister.”

Sonu drops me off at home and whizzes away to see his sister off to the United States. I decide I’m going to take on the market by my house on my own, but first I grab one of the shirts I bought over the weekend that was too big on me. I look up the word “small” in my Hindi dictionary and head off toward the tailor by the park.

“Namaste,” I tell him, and he folds his hands returning the greeting. “Chola?” I tell him. “Make it smaller?”

“Measure,” he says, and measures my arms and my chest. He looks inside and sees that the shirt came with sleeves that were not put on. “Sleeves?” he asks.

“Ha gee,” I say. “Yes. How much?”

“One hundred rupees,” he says.

This is two dollars and seems fair, but I bargain a little just on principle. “80 rupees?” I ask.

“Tikka. Ok,” he says. “Sunday,” he says.

“Shukriya,” I tell him. “Namaste!” and he folds his hands again in greeting.

I feel totally cool that I’ve been able to pull this off and speak a little Hindi to a native while I was at it.

Because I’m just too cool for words, I continue on to the market and stop at Sagar, the restaurant I’d eaten at with Julianne over the weekend. The gentleman opens the door and greets me with a bowed head. Here every restaurant and many shops have a gentleman who opens the door—that’s his job.

I sit down and order pani (water—though this word means “girl” in Polish). The waiter wants me to get a mango lassi. “Pani,” I tell him.

“Mango lassi,” he tells me. It’s a fruit and yogurt drink. Very good, but I’m more thirsty than in search of confection.

“Pani ki botal,” I attempt again. Water bottle.

“Mango lassi,” he says.

Mango lassi it is. “Tikka” (ok).

To eat, what could I order but one idli? It’s ready in just a few minutes and has a complex variety of flavors, from sweet to savory to spicy. Between the idli and the lassi, I’m a little over-sweetened, but definitely satiated.

After my idli and lassi, it’s pretty dark outside, so I wonder home dodging the traffic and the dubious puddles, ready for bed. It’s been a long day.

Before I can get into bed, though, my stomach stirs then I feel a stabbing pain like there’s an alien in there with a miniature sword. “This is a bad sign,” I think. I flip on the tv and watch some BBC news while the idli brews up something nasty in my midsection. Or maybe it’s the mango lassi that I didn’t want in the first place.

Whatever it is, before I go to sleep, I have my first official case of Delhi belly. All of my sources said this was inevitable. Still, I thought I’d make it more than two weeks. I thought I was being very careful. I thought my belly could stand the challenge.

No such luck.

Thursday morning brings with it intermittent stomach aches that make me want to double over. As does Thursday afternoon. And Thursday evening. And Friday morning.

Aside from the stabbing pain, my symptoms aren’t that bad, and for this I am thankful.

I am also thankful that Wednesday night when I arrive back at my hotel, my taa-i-let is no longer too taa.

Thank God for small miracles.

Goodbyes

No journey is linear, and today mine took a hard turn. I awoke to a cold shower even though I had the hot water switch turned on. My Internet was still not working despite the Herculean efforts of people on two different continents. And the morning call from my husband brought bad news. The great uncle with whom I shared a birthday died. He was 94. He had been suffering in recent months, and I can’t say his death was a shock, but it was hard to hear from the other side of the world when the most I can do is send flowers.

How will I remember Uncle Joe? As Mister Universe himself: the guy who ran two miles a day until he was in his seventies and would stand on his head “for his circulation” until he was just very recently incapacitated—surprisingly not from standing on his head.

I will remember Uncle Joe as the guy who punched out the checker at Cub Foods because he’d been overcharged for his beef. As the guy who didn’t get married because he didn’t want to waste money on dating women. As the bachelor with the dirty house that gave him the immune system of Superman. As the guy who’d get into a rumble over a parking spot. As the man who’d tell you you were too fat, or too skinny. As the guy who regularly insulted my mother when he came over for parties. “Gee, Dar,” he’d say, “I don’t know. This just doesn’t taste as good as last time.”

I will remember Uncle Joe as a war hero who served in World War II and lost brothers and came back intact and modest about what he’d seen and done. As the uncle from the Depression era who, despite the sexist world in which he grew up, looked at me and said I should “be a nuclear” because I was so smart.

I am not sad because my Uncle Joe isn’t suffering any more. I am sad to lose the presence of this exceptional person who had done so much and seen so much and knew so much. I am sad there will be no more absurd stories of who he punched or wanted to punch or will punch, or how he was still exercising at the nursing home—and not those wimpy exercises. The harder ones. I am sad because I won’t hear any more patented Uncle Joe insults at the family gatherings he was sure to never miss. I am sad to discover that my invincible, bionic uncle was human after all. Vincible. Anti-bionic.

In Buddhism, there is a concept called desirous attachment. Attachment is different than (and even antithetical to) love. Love is selfless; attachment is selfish, concerned with meeting one’s own needs, filling the bottomless well of wanting. It is attachment that makes me bawl and my nose fill up with snot when I hear about my Uncle Joe. I’m not thinking of him and the end of his suffering in this life. I’m thinking: “no more wise cracks and Uncle Joe patented insults at our family gatherings.”

This rationalization doesn’t make the grief go away, especially when it is compounded with unfamiliar surroundings and people, especially when after my ride home from work today, Sonu told me it was his last day in Delhi. He is going back to Punjab to be closer to his family.

“Okay madam,” he said as I was about to get out of his car, “I will miss you.” And as I leaned forward to shake his hand, I saw he had one of our snaps as the wallpaper on his cell phone.

Eight days ago, this man was a total stranger holding a sign with my name on it at the airport. Today, he is a good friend with whom I must part.

Apart from these losses, today was a good day at work. I got there early and spent the morning talking with Angshuman, who looks to be about my age and is one of the pioneers of the editing process at Pearson India.

On his desk is a Twin Peaks box set. Hanging on the wall over his desk is the cover from a Final Fantasy videogame. There is also a red sign with white lettering: “If I was organized, I’d be dangerous.”

He leads me to a conference room on the first floor so we can talk without disturbing people. The room smells vaguely of paint even though the paint on the walls is scuffed, bubbled and peeling in places.

His dark eyes shine and he works up a sweat as he animatedly tells the story of Pearson Education, India to me. He covers some of the same ground that Amar did yesterday, but in more detail.

When adapting books, he explains, we have to change not only cultural references, we have to make sure the common cultural references (like McDonald’s and Levis) still make sense. He says these brands are positioned differently in the Indian economy. “Levis are not a fashion product in the U.S.; they are here. Likewise, McDonald’s is not an every day thing here. It’s more middle range, luxury, take your family out to dinner.”

Or take the example of a sociology textbook from the United States. Race would play a large role in such a book, but it wouldn’t apply in the same way in India, so any content relating to race would have to be revised or deleted.

He gives many more examples. A simple picture of a family watching television had to be changed in a book because there was a lava lamp in the background and the student reviewers were distracted by wondering what this odd object was that they’d never seen. The cover of a book had to be changed because it had a yellow and black construction sign on it, and that meant nothing to the Indian audience whose construction signs are orange. There was a business book entitled, “Never Order Barbeque in Maine.” How do you make that relevant to Indian students?

Angshuman talks for two hours straight and excuses himself to get a drink of water. He is clearly inspired by what he’s been able to do here, moving the publishing house from reprints to original work and adaptations. “It’s all growing;” he says, “it’s not already grown up. Whatever you’re interested in, you can do.”

After our chat, I meet with Shabnum, one of the development editors who is working on an Operations Management book. She gives me chapter one to take a look at, and I am off, editing a text for publication. Just like that. Whatever you’re interested in, you can do.

On the way home, I ask Sonu if we can stop at the Buddhist Temple we drove past yesterday. I hope there I can stop my jangling nerves and feel whatever it is I need to feel about missing my Uncle Joe’s funeral.

Sonu misunderstands and takes me to the Lotus Temple. Once I realize what’s happening, it’s too late to clarify, and I’m not about to argue with a trip back to my favorite place in Delhi so far.

The guard at the Lotus Temple motions for me to stop at the gate and says, “Closed. 9 a.m. tomorrow, you come back.”

There will be no revelations tonight. Just the Delhi traffic, which really gets to me for the first time; I feel car sick—or maybe it’s home sick. Either way, I’m a bit wobbly, a bit guilty and I feel that heart-pounding anxious feeling I’ve been doing such a good job of avoiding as of late.

I try to write about it, but my brain is lazy—or maybe afraid—or maybe self-preserving. It doesn’t want to think through the situation too carefully or too closely.

I go to bed and wrap my left arm around my right shoulder, hugging myself. I don’t think I’ve ever done this before.

You have everything you need within you—not without you.

You are whole.

I feel slightly guilty for the sudden sense of comfort I feel, and I soon drift off to sleep.

Monday

Monday was supposed to be my first full day of work.

I woke up, had a warm shower, talked briefly to my husband on the phone since my Internet connection still wasn’t working, then went downstairs to breakfast: a juicy fresh mango, tea with milk, juice, and toast with slightly off-tasting jelly. As far as I can tell, the jelly tastes odd to me because the principal ingredient is sugar, whereas in the United States, we make everything with corn syrup. Everything’s better with corn. Everything. Even our gasoline.

Who ever thought I’d miss corn?

I should mention that somewhere between the shower and the mango, my toilet broke. The handle (which was more of a knob than a handle) came right off in my hand. So this was the new broken item of the day. I tried to tell Mira about it after breakfast. “Toilet broke,” I yammered like a dummy using as little English as I could. “Toilet broke.” She looked puzzled. “Flush?” I said.

“Flush!” there was a look of recognition on her face. I wasn’t sure of what, but it seemed like progress. “I tell the man,” she said.

“Sukriya,” I said. Thanks is one of the only Hindi words I have down—but it comes in handy, especially when there are so many people serving you: there’s Mira who makes breakfast, Pachu who brings it to me and who (hopefully) will come fix my toilet, the guard who opens and closes the gate every time I come and go, and my driver, Sonu. I do a lot of thanking people.

After breakfast, I went up to my room and waited for my driver… but there wasn’t one. On Friday I’d spoken with a woman from the hotel who said she was waiting to hear back from Pearson about the final arrangements. I never heard back from her, so I feared that Monday might find me in this predicament.

After looking up how to say broken toilet in my Hindi dictionary (it’s “taa i let too taa,” in case you’re interested), I called the woman from the Ahuja Residency back. Her name is Surrinder Singh in all the emails, but she goes by Ms. Sonu. There’s still confusion over what kind of car service I will use to get to work and how it will be paid for. Never mind this, though, she will send Sonu (the other Sonu) to get me today and we’ll figure it out later. Sonu will be here in ten minutes, Ms. Sonu assures me.

I take a deep breath and lay back on my bed, relaxing… and I stay there for about half an hour. It’s now 9:15 and I was supposed to be to work by 9:30. I call Sonu back—the hotel lady Sonu, not the driver Sonu. “Is Sonu coming?” I ask Sonu.

“He is not there yet?” she asks in her best customer service voice.

“No.”

“I will call him, and he will be there in just ten minutes,” she assures me.

At about ten minutes of ten o’clock, Sonu the driver appears. “Hello madam,” he says, smiling big, as he opens the car door and closes it behind me. We whip off through the insane Delhi traffic and I watch the now more familiar sights fly by: the men on motorcycles with their sari-clad women riding sidesaddle behind them, the dilapidated shops and peeling billboards, the makeshift bamboo hovels on the side of the streets, trucks with flowery paintings on the rear gate and always the reminder, “Horn Please.”

It is now that I realize that Indian traffic lights can take up to ten minutes to turn green. I previously thought we were in some kind of traffic jamb when we stopped for that long, and wondered why, all of a sudden, the deadlock would just abate and the vehicles would resume their reckless speeding.

The clock on Sonu’s dash reads 10:30, and I am beginning my work assignment by being over an hour late. I hope that what everyone says about time being less relevant in India is accurate.

We catch another red light and I watch a group of people working under a raised highway. They are breaking up dirt from a pile with bent-looking shovels, putting it into baskets and spreading it over an area in the middle of the highway that is covered in rubble. They’re covering rubble with dirt. The women put the baskets full of dirt on their heads to move them, then dump them out on the rubble. Stray dogs weave in and out of the stopped traffic looking street wise.

I think of these little clams I found on the beach in Florida the last time I was there. A wave comes and washes them up out of the sand, then they hunker down and bury themselves back in the sand, then another wave comes, and they bury themselves again, and so on. This is their existence: simple subsistence. Their job is digging.

Life is stripped to essentials here; there’s no escaping it’s harshness. The middle class can’t just look away because there is nowhere to look to. Beggars are everywhere. They are the other essential experience of a Delhi stoplight. They come up to your car window and motion with their hand to their mouth to tell you they’re starving, or they knock, knock, knock with their knuckles and show you a child, or the stump where their leg used to be. There is no way to give money to every one of these people every time they ask—and all the guidebooks say it’s best not to give lest you be harangued as when you throw a scrap of bread to a pigeon and the whole flock comes pecking at your head. The guidebooks say instead to give to a “reputable charitable organization” that does work in the country—but there is no end to the work to be done in this country and giving to a reputable organization will not help the kid with the distended belly and the dirty hair and the searching eyes being paraded past my car.

Julianne says it’s “hard to know if the need is real,” that there are also professional panhandlers who aren’t really starving and are just out to guilt you out of your money. Anyone who sees begging as their best option in life, to me, has a real need. It’s not necessarily for the ten rupees some passerby might throw at them, but it is a real need for education, for opportunities. But then who am I to determine that these people would be happier if they knew more or had the chance to do something else in life. Just because they don’t own a duplex in Coralville and have five spoiled house pets doesn’t mean they’re unhappy. Who am I to decide what their lives should look like?

There was another quote inside the Lotus Temple that I should have copied down. It said something to the effect of, “I should not rejoice when good things happen, and I should not despair when bad things happen because I know it is all temporary.” There’s a similar tenet in Buddhism which states that if we seek happiness through external means, we’ll never find it because even the best of life conditions are constantly changing. External measures of “happiness” are nothing but distractions from the true inner peace and compassion we should be working toward.

This ethic pervades the religions here and leads to a sort of acceptance of suffering as a fact of life—but it is still hard to stare it in the face at a ten minute long Delhi stoplight.

I promise myself to find out about some reputable charitable organizations when I get home. There is no other way I’ll be able to make it through the traffic, day after day, for three months.

We finally pull up to Pearson Education at 11 a.m. and I find myself in Amar’s office apologizing profusely as he wobbles his head. “It’s okay. I called your hotel and they said you’d already left, so this is okay.” He looks more concerned over the fact that I’m ruffled than the fact that it’s eleven o’clock. I decide I can chill.

He finishes up a conversation with a young, female development editor, Shabnum. How wide will the minor margins have to be? How many pages will the book be? How many words? Page number is very important for a book here, he explains. You just can’t charge as much as you want for a book because students won’t buy it, so you have to limit the page numbers. Shabdum leaves and Amar turns his attention to me.

He starts our conversation not with work but with a series of kind and sincere questions about my welfare. How am I doing here in India? What have I seen so far? How is the place where I am staying? And what of the food? Am I finding it too spicy and oily? Am I adjusting to the country okay?

I tell him of my persistent Internet woes and the fact that I’m having trouble talking to my husband because of it. He creases his brows. “This is very difficult,” he says with sympathy that almost makes me tear up. “We’ll have to see what we can do.”

I tell him about my trouble with the deadbolt and the hot water switch, and he reciprocates with a story of his own. When he visited the New Jersey office about two years ago, he accidentally called 911 from his hotel room when he was trying to dial the India country code, which is something like 011 + 91 + 11. Police showed up at his door. At least I hadn’t involved the authorities in my culture shocked bungling. We both laughed.

The day (what remained of it, anyway) passed in conversation. Amar told me the rather impressive but very brief history of the development editing group of Pearson Education. The group works on textbooks in the humanities, social sciences, business and economics. They also work on competitive exam books sort of like the SAT and GRE preparation books we have back home. Nothing gets published in hardback unless it is a high-end, academic book meant for a niche market like libraries or other institutions. Students won’t pay for hard covers. They’ve also done a few trade books on topics like fashion and cookery.

The business started in 1997 as a strict reprinting endeavor. They would get American or British titles, reprint them on cheaper paper and in paperback editions and manage the production and distribution of the titles.

This created a problem: something called global arbitrage. The cheap Indian editions of books would find their way back to the original markets to get sold at rock bottom prices. This wasn’t bad for Pearson Education India, which still made the money from the sales, but it wasn’t good for Pearson Education overall, which lost revenue they would have made from much higher sales prices in the established markets.

So a system of “enabling and disabling” was introduced. Before a title was reprinted, it would be adapted for the Indian market. This would simultaneously help Indian students understand the texts better (enabling) and make them less appealing if smuggled back to be sold at slashed prices (disabling).
The group worked with the authors of the original texts to include case studies, artwork and contextual examples that would apply to the Indian audience.

Then, just two and a half years ago, Amar and Angshuman began the development editing group for the higher education division in earnest. They went to the United States, studied the textbook publishing process in New Jersey, and brought back a version of it that they thought would work in India. Now, along with adaptations of existing texts, their group produces original textbooks that are commissioned, developed, published, produced, marketed and sold in India. This is something of a rarity.

The editorial process consists of three phases: commissioning, development and production. All other publishing houses in India go straight from commissioning a book to production (copyediting, typesetting and proofreading). The development editing process at Pearson Education is unique.

The process of development editing entails taking a manuscript and putting it through a rigorous cycle of reviews, research and edits. Development editors manage student and consultant board reviews of the manuscript, conduct research into competing titles and course syllabi, and work with authors and illustrators to improve the quality of the final product.

Amar shows me some examples of books that the department has created or adapted since its inception, the biggest deal being a gorgeous hardback text full of glossy pictures of India’s ancient history written by Upinder Singh, the Prime Minister’s daughter. This book is a risk for the company because, Amar says, Indian titles don’t sell well. Everyone wants the market-leading books that have been used in classes for decades, and these are books written by people from the U.S. and U.K. It’s hard to compete for authority in the market, but this plucky little department is doing just that.

The history book I’m leafing through, Amar says, is the first book of its kind written from a neutral, purely academic perspective. Histories in India have been written with a leftist bent and have tended to blur the line between mythology and fact. The book also has photographs of monuments that have since been destroyed. India’s sense of historical preservation is only now beginning to develop. I have seen this firsthand in Delhi, where the national zoo has enclosures that are clearly built on top of the crumbling walls of the nearby Old Fort, circa 1550.

They’re having a launch for this book, Amar says. I should come. The Prime Minister will be there, so the planning for the event is a hassle.

“Here we do everything ourselves,” Amar says. “We have no people to do this, so we make arrangements for authors when they come to visit. We plan these events.” Amar tells me some of the peculiar requests they’ve already had from the PM: no one can bring any prepared food to the event. The food has to be prepared at the event. And no one can turn their back to the PM, so they have to think about how he’ll be seated.

A succession of editors stops into his office for his counsel. The first woman’s eyebrows are raised over an email she got from an author whose book was rejected. “He told me, ‘How can you do this to me? I have a heart condition!’” The book was tabled after it had been in development because the competing title analysis proved there was unoriginal content in it. “I was careful not to call it plagiarism, but he still keeps saying, ‘How could you accuse me of this!’”

The next woman who steps in is wearing a long black sari and a deep red bindi. She is chatty beyond all get out. She has just seen nine movies at the Delhi film festival. Nine movies in one day. How did she do it, Amar wonders. “My mother used to shout at me in Kolkatta,” she says. “I would be out watching movies all day and all night and she would say ‘Why do you not just pitch a tent? Why do you even bother to come home?’” I’m not sure she had any actual reason for coming to Amar’s office.

His third visitor is also a young woman, but she is wearing western clothes: slim, black pants and a white collared shirt. Her author is arguing that he wants to keep the footnotes even though the reviewers agree that end notes are less disruptive to the reader. What should be done?

As the visitors abate, Amar tells me about Indian politics, the office phone system and his travels to America. He couldn’t get used to eating dinner so early, so he’d often miss it altogether. “There is a good, scientific reason to eating dinner early,” he says, “but I just was not so used to it.” Dinner here begins around eight o’clock, and that’s really still a bit early.

It’s about six o’clock and Amar says I can go if I want, but I actually want to stay and see if I can get the iPass and VPN software on my machine updated. 6:30 p.m. here roughly corresponds to 8:00 a.m. in the U.S., and I need the desktop support folks in the U.S. to be able to talk to the IT people here. Rampal (the IT guy) says he’ll be here until 6:30, so I go find him and tell him I need his help.

We end up working on updating my machine until about 8 p.m. Indian time. While we’re working on downloads and other fixes, Rampal and his friend ask me all sorts of questions. How do I like it here? Do I like Hindi music? What about movies? Which ones have I seen? Where am I staying?

“Defense Colony,” I tell them.

“Oh, very posh,” they say.

I think of my broken toilet and the lizard that crawled into my unsealed door. I try to equate this with my definition of “posh.”

“How are you getting to work?” they ask.

“I have a driver.”

“Doesn’t it take a long time?” they ask.

“Yes, it does, but the ride’s interesting.”

“Don’t I miss my husband,” they wonder.

“Yes, I do.”

They find all kinds of problems with my situation. Yes, the Internet doesn’t work. Yes, the commute is crazy. Yes, I miss my family. Yes, my toilet is broken. Yes, lizards can run into my room willy nilly and I share my living space with a healthy population of ants. Yes, yes, yes.

Somehow, none of this is the least bit bothersome to me at the moment, and I think I have found a little touch of the peace they talk about in that Lotus Temple quote: the kind that isn’t dependent on external circumstances.

Weather & Time

(India Gate)


If you want to know just how hot and rainy it is here, visit http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=176. The website gives the local time and a little weather forecast.

I'm told all this rain in Delhi is unusual; the monsoon usually doesn't affect this area. I must have brought the rain with me from Iowa. I just can't escape it.

I've actually had good luck with the weather. The rains have been coming at night, allowing me to get in all my tourism during the day and even commute back and forth to work in relative comfort. Of course, in some of my pictures it looks like it's rained on me. That's just perspiration, though.

Christians and Monkeys

After my mind-blowing experience with the Sunday paper, Julianne and her roommate Suzanne came to pick me up to take me to a Christian church service not far from where I’m staying. I’ve been to Hindu temples and mosques and the Baha’i temple. I could hardly say no to Christianity.

Julianne’s friend Suzanne is quiet, very thin and Asian. She has a tiny, bright yellow car and can perform the amazing feat of driving in Delhi traffic. I offered up my amazement, and she said I could do it too if I’d been here long enough. She’s been here four years.

I have no idea what to expect from the “non-denominational” Christian service we’ll be attending. We drive past a large forest reserve, then turn at a large auditorium. “This is where they have lots of events and concerts,” Julianne explains. For a second, I think our service is going to be one of those giant rock concert style born again affairs, but we turn left instead of right—away from the big auditorium, into the parking lot of a three-story, square white building. The little cross on the outside looks out of place. It is so unadorned: no garlands of golden flowers, no glittering colors, no blue guy with four arms, just two lines: a cross.

We walk up a white marble staircase into a room that thankfully has many fans going. The seating looks like it came from a 1950s movie theatre. There is a computer set up so you can see the English words to hymns on the projector screen, and a small lectern with a microphone.

The auditorium slowly begins to fill in with certainly the most white people I’ve seen since leaving O’Hare airport. But these white people are sporty—they are wearing kurtas and scarves, their hair is flat and straight; they look assimilated. I wonder if I will have this look before I leave. Julianne wonders the other way around: what will she look like to people when she gets back? She knows she’s adapted her style to fit in here—not so much as a conscious choice, but more from necessity. When she was pointing out “western style” clothes to me at the market, they cost much more than “western style” prices. Also, western style clothes are not the best in Delhi heat. They suck onto you and don’t give making you feel like you’ve been swallowed by a snake.

The service begins and we are singing some old Welch-sounding hymn that uncannily echoes the realization I had at the Baha’i temple the other day—the one about having everything I need, being whole:

Great is thy faithfulness
Great is thy faithfulness
Morning by morning new mercies I see
All I have needed thy hand hath provided
Great is thy faithfulness
Lord unto me.

I wonder if it’s possible that every religion is right and every prophet is real. I wonder how many times God has walked among man, and in how many forms. I still wonder about that blue guy with all the arms.

Julianne jumps up and grabs a microphone from Mr. Sanjay Patra who is officiating today in the absence of the regular pastor. The regular pastor, who is from the U.K., is recuperating at home with a case of hepatitis. He, apparently, didn’t get all his shots. I say a little prayer of thanks for the Travel Clinic in Iowa City.

Julianne and another white chick awkwardly draped in an Indian scarf join two Indian boys, one of whom plays a guitar. The sound system is all feedback and static, but the boy plays merrily on. We are now singing songs that sound more like top 40 American pop—no thou or thine or thee. There is a drummer and a keyboardist.

The singing concludes and the officiator asks that the children stay for a while before going off to their Sunday schools. Today we must take time for a special recognition. A young couple who have been active in the church ministry is leaving for America for three years, and we’re going to pray for their welfare while the elders lay hands on them.

The couple is asked onto the stage, as are the elders. The officiator talks about how much work the two have done for the ministry, then asks the young man if he’d like to say a few words.

The boy (he looks about 19) steps up to the microphone and humbles himself. “None of that is true,” he says of his introduction. He then asks the congregation to pray for him so that he won’t become arrogant in America and will remember to return to his beautiful country of India. He wipes tears from his eyes. He says he’s going to America to study because it is a good opportunity but he needs help to do what is right. His young wife, whose father is one of the elders standing behind them, smiles serenely. I wonder what prayers she will request. I wonder if she wants to come back to India too, but she doesn’t get the chance to speak.

The couple kneels down, and the boy continues wiping tears from his eyes. My eyes well up. I have a newfound sympathy for those far from home, or at the beginning of a long journey that will separate them from their loved ones.

The congregation bows their heads in prayer and the elders put their hands on the couple’s shoulders.

When the prayer is finished the boy is still crying and the girl is still serene. The elders present the young woman in an orange shirt and tan western-style pants a spray of gladiolas. They give the boy a green, foil-wrapped gift. It looks Bible-shaped to me.

There are no hymnals or Bibles. It’s do-it-yourself style here. BYOB(ible).

The children leave for Sunday school, and the young man leaves to teach it. Mr. Sanjay Patra gives a long, three-point sermon on forgiveness: is there a limit to it, what is the extent of it, and what is the result of it. He says he surveyed an interfaith group about forgiveness and asked, “How many times should you forgive someone for doing something?” Most people said one or two times. Then he asked, “How many times would you like to be forgiven?” The answers were a lot higher. He talks around this point for a very long time. He discusses a short Bible excerpt wherein Jesus tells Peter that he should forgive his brother seven times seventy times.

We sing some more and the service concludes when the keyboardist presses the wrong button on his keyboard, launching a brief samba beat into the auditorium.

Afterwards, there is much talking. I meet two girls from Minnesota who have the frightened look I must have had in my eyes just a few days ago. The sort of slightly raised eyebrows that silently ask, “Am I going to spontaneously combust any second?” I meet another of Julianne’s friends who has been here for two years and is doing cultural training for corporations like IBM and Sprint. It’s her job to try to make those call center calls more effective. I tell her she has her work cut out.

We drink a little chai then catch an auto-rickshaw back to the Defense Colony. Julianne says it’s good to get out of there early for a change; sometimes the service and socializing can take all day.

At the Defense Colony, I call Sonu because the plan was to go to the Delhi Zoo today, which is just 5K from my apartment. Sonu says “I am just twenty minutes away, Ma’am.”

Sonu arrives 80 minutes later and we’re off. On the way to the zoo, Sonu messes with his cell phone and passes it back to me. “Elephant,” he says, and I see that he’s playing the video of the elephant ride we took on Friday. I show Julianne and laugh.

He is a faithful guide at the zoo, springing into action as soon as we’re out of the car. He finds the right line, takes our money and gets our tickets for us, then trots on into the zoo. I follow him throughout our time there, keeping tabs this time not on angel wings, but on a tan shirt with the word “CAMERO” in blue lettering.

I love the crowd just to see all the beautiful fabrics in the women’s sarees and the mirrors and beading and embroidery. Women here look like living jewels with their sarees and bangles and bindis and henna. I notice lots of stares from Indian men and think, “Why would you be staring at my boring behind when there is all this beauty here?” Anyway, the stares are all more curious than ominous. Julianne says the same thing, “I feel safe here.”

As usual, I don’t know what to expect from the zoo and am surprised in wonderful ways. The first enclosure we approach is a monkey exhibit, but there doesn’t seem to be any attempt at a barrier that would keep the monkeys in the exhibit. This observation is confirmed when we see a sign hammered into an adjacent tree: “Beware of stray monkeys.”

A little boy on his father’s shoulders shouts “cow” at every animal he sees, and we walk on past exhibits of about twelve different kinds of Indian deer. Every time we run into stray monkeys (and we run into stray monkeys several times), they are having snacks. We first see a pair of monkeys chilling with potato chip bags on a low wall near a restroom. Next, we spot a lone monkey eating an ice cream cone just off a footpath. There’s no telling if the monkey stole the ice cream cone or if someone gave it to him, and there’s also no disputing the monkey’s total enjoyment of the icy treat. Since he’s so enraptured, I get really close and take a few good photos.

The zoo has pretty good habitats for the animals, though some of the cages are small—especially for the leopards. Sonu leads us from exhibit to exhibit, making sure we see every animal in the whole zoo. He runs ahead and asks the zookeepers if the animals are awake or in the exhibits and steers us clear when there is nothing to see.

At one point, he calls me toward a drain pipe and gasps, “Very dangerous animal!” Floating in the water is a foot long lizard at some point, not a zoo animal, but just a visitor to the zoo. I make a mental note to avoid this “very dangerous animal” should I ever see it.

As we’re passing by, a crowd gathers around a fenced enclosure outside the giraffe exhibit. The zookeepers let several people in and they circle around a tree and begin placing their hands on it. We ask Sonu what’s going on, and he doesn’t know. It’s clearly some kind of worship but we can’t tell anything else about it. We walk on.

Occasionally a small child sees me and decides to try out his or her English. “Hello!” they say excitedly, or “Hi!” I try to remember the best version of “Hi” I’ve learned in Hindi, but it fails me. I greet them back in English.

I have tried out some Hindi words. I feel more confident now that I can check out my pronunciations with Julianne whose been studying the language for six months. So far I’ve said “OK” and “thank you”. I know that isn’t too impressive, but even our words for yes and no are so different that it’s total relearning involving sounds that we don’t even make in English. The word for no, for instance, has a nasal “N” at the end of it that you must intimate but not pronounce fully. That’s why, Julianne told me, my Hindi phrasebook has seemingly random capitalized “N’s” in it all over the place. “No” (nihan) is shown as “nihaN”.

Sonu runs up to an enclosure and exclaims, “Water horses!” We walk up to find hippos, which live in India somewhere. One thing the zoo doesn’t do a consistent job of is saying which animals are indigenous and which are not. There are wild peacocks which are not on display but just hang out at the zoo because it suits them. They perch themselves over the Himalayan bear exhibit and the giraffe enclosure and look smart with their bright blue bodies and striking feathers.

We see more deer and birds and the reptile house and elephants. We get a little lost and pass the giraffes with bonus peacocks about three times. Julianne looks like she’s getting tired, but I think, “Ah, my long lost exercise!”

Sonu asks for one last snap as we leave. He invites Julianne into the picture but she declines. “You know you’re going to be his girlfriend now and his whole family’s going to see it,” she says. I tell her he’s married, so I don’t think I’ll be his girlfriend. Plus I don’t really care. I don’t think Sonu has advanced Photoshopping skills, so he probably can’t do much harm with my picture.

“Defence Colony, ma’am?” Sonu asks me, possibly for the last time, though I can’t reckon with that or say goodbye to him when he drops Julianne and me off at the market for dinner and pulls away.

He has been my lifeline this first week in this strange country all the way across the world. I am indebted to him for showing me all that I have seen of India so far, for finagling an elephant ride, for helping me cross the street, for being there waiting at the airport, for making materialize whatever it was that I asked for: a bank, a clock, a watch, an electrical adapter. He has truly been more angel than driver.

The Sunday Paper

I once again can’t blog live because my computer connection isn’t working, so I’m writing this offline and will post it when I can.

This morning I checked out the Life! section of the Sunday Times of India, a very short (4 page) insert on glossy paper. One of these four pages was taken up with a half page, full color ad showing a hot air balloon over a sand dune. “Experience Dubai the Country Club way” said the lettering at the top right. At the lower right was a callout photo of an Arab in the basket of the balloon. He was wearing long white flowing robes and a cloth on his head and giving a huge thumbs up to the camera. Above him it said, “Kool Global Dubai – The Ultimate Membership.” There are also tourism commercials on tv in this same ilk, and I’m pretty sure we passed a billboard with the same man giving the thumbs up and saying Dubai is “Kool” with a “K” as in the obscure cigarette brand, or Kool Aid. I’ll bet you didn’t know Dubai is “Kool” with a “K.”

Above this ad on the cover the Life! Section was an article entitled “It’s Sweeter Solo.” This article discussed the growing phenomenon in Indian cities of people living by themselves. It said that the trend moved from extended family living to nuclear family living, then from nuclear family living to single living. These new “Loners,” the article said, are not unhappy or lonely. “The Loner is also not a stop-gap to living a complete life,” it explained. According to the article, the emerging demographic is full of people to choose to live alone. “I share a beautiful relationship with my family, but I prefer my me-time,” one senior “Loner” commented. A point this article made but didn’t dwell on was the fact that this trend toward solitary living is putting even more severe pressure on an already squeezed housing market. There isn’t enough space as it is, and development isn’t keeping up with demand. The article improbably quotes Oprah Winfrey (who appears in this short Life section twice) as saying, “Nobody’s manufacturing any more space. I’ll take every bit I can get.” The article says that the concept of personal space is an emerging one here in India.

Not only personal space but exercise is a new concept here, and after being here for a week I’m beginning to understand why. Living here is exercise enough. I think I’ve lost about five pounds already just by sweating—and I’m not exaggerating. My jeans are loose on me. Were I to put on my sneakers and go outside to jog, not only would I have to dodge traffic (there are no real sidewalks) and jump around refuse and puddles, I’d have to be on the lookout for surly monkeys and deal with body-shocking heat and humidity—let alone the astonished looks I would prompt.

“I don’t think I can jog here,” I told Julianne over lunch yesterday.

“DON’T JOG,” she replied. “DON’T JOG.”

Still, we drove past a gym the other day, in the Golf Links neighborhood, I think (don’t let the name fool you—no golfing takes place there), and Julianne has a friend, Suzanne, who’s trying to start up an aerobics training class.

The next article I read was a short, quippy one called “Double Takes, Second Helpings.” It began with the precept that observing a waiter was a good way of “finding out the height of local good behavior,” then critiqued the waiters in a global array of cities in which the author had eaten. My favorite paragraph was a critique of Indian eating in London: “An Indian meal in London is one of the funniest experiences. Keeping in tune with easily exploding English tummies, some restaurants even offer boiled rice with softened cashews and oranges as biryani. As a lover of Mughlai cuisine, I protested only to be told by the Vietnamese waiter that I had no idea about authentic Indian cuisine.” This only made me wonder, “What is real biryani?”

Oprah’s second appearance in the Life section was in an article entitled, “Power of Black.” The subtitle for this article read, “That ol’ black magic still has us in its spin – it’s the colour of power and sexiness as much as of evil and discrimination. Here’s romancing black…” Under the title was an eclectic assortment of black people including: Oprah Winfrey, Naomi Campbell, Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and Priety Zinta. I think this may be part of a regular column on Oprah because the author’s name appeared as a callout under a pink box that read “O-zone.” I’ll have to check for the “O-zone” next week Sunday and let you know.

I have to say my first reaction to this article was, “Oh my God! They’re saying that black is evil.” But as I read and re-read, I cooled my jets. It’s still a fact that blackness is symbolically “bad” or “evil” in a lot of contexts—it’s just not fashionable in America to admit it. At least in the Yankee North, we like to pretend those associations are gone and that black is just another color.

The article talked about discrimination in America, skin tone preference in India, and blackness as a philosophical concept. The lead read, “Isn’t it amazing how black can make the most powerful statement style wise, and yet is the most disempowered colour as skin tones go?” Vinita Dawra Nangia is comfortable writing about the color’s significance in the American political election, fashion, astrology and religion. She ends her article without a conclusion but instead with a Hindi quote from a story about Krisna’s lover, Radha, giving up her fair complexion to be with him.

The openness with which this article addresses racism is initially jarring. It says of Indians, “…we are blatant in our preference for white skin.” And then it’s strange how these deep social problems are mentioned in the same paragraph as fashion tips, “A black tux looks great with a white shirt.” The article happily jumps from topic to topic, at one point wondering philosophically if black is even a color at all. “Is something black because it is actually colorless? Just as darkness is nothing but an absence of light?”

Really, the article reads like the first draft of a final project for Humans and Society 101. So many topics, none of them fully treated or resolved. Of course topics like these can’t be fully treated or resolved in the Life section of the Sunday Times of India—it’s just strange to me that they’re there in the first place.

Neither does the Life section shy away from religion. Next to the article about blackness is a personal testimony from S Sreesanth, a cricket player. “My day starts with the chanting of Gaytri Mantra and Om Namah Shivay… I feel nobody can be against me when God is within me.” The entire article is a first person account of the cricketer’s religious conviction.

Again, this article is presented freely, as most Indians I’ve met address their religion. It leaves me wondering, “What are we Americans so uptight about?” My Punjabi cab driver told me on the second day I met him that he was a Sikh. “Do you like this religion?” he asked me. Everywhere I look there is religious iconography or a temple or an impromptu shrine. The dashboard of every taxi I’ve seen holds a picture of Guru Nanak, the tenth Sikh Guru. The sight of garlands of fresh orange flowers is so ubiquitous, I see it when I close my eyes. These garlands are made and sold outside Hindu temples as offerings for the gods inside, but they are also placed throughout the city in shops and roadside shacks in makeshift shrines.

The fact that religion is so pluralistic in Delhi (with significant populations of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Baha’i, and Jains just to name a few) creates a totally different public context for religious practice. In America which feels almost monolithically Christian in many places, public and institutional expressions of faith have been a way to bulwark the monolith, thus binding religion and power in uncomfortable ways.

I don’t know enough about Delhi to say how religion and power work here—except to say that the government is a secular democracy with religious parties within it.

I know that occasionally, riots break out between Hindus and Muslims, but for the most part, these groups coexist peacefully.

I know that here religious practice is life and vice versa. Religion isn’t saved for a one hour weekend observance; it is an organic part of every moment, and there are so many ways to God or the Divine or Inner Peace or Moksha or Enlightenment or whatever you want to call it, that offering your beliefs here just makes the fabric more beautiful instead of destroying someone else’s weaving.

And that’s why it’s a joy to hear about cricket player S Sreesanth’s deep beliefs in Sai Baba. It doesn’t mean I have to believe in them myself. It’s just another flourish in the fabric of religious life in India.

I didn’t think I’d find quite so much to think about in the four page Life section. It’s probably not as thought provoking for the locals—at least, I hope it’s not. Imagine how long it would take to read the entire paper.

This Past Saturday

This Saturday I woke up and took a warm shower now that I am smarter than the hot water switch on my wall.

In these matters of everyday difficulties, I am only comforted by the fact that everyone whose been up to my room has shown similar confusion when confronted by my deadbolt—even the hotel’s IT specialist, Alok, couldn’t figure the thing out. Julianne couldn't close the door behind her. So perhaps I’ve been facing these bizarre challenges for good reason.

Anyway, after my shower and a Skype conversation with Scott, I got a call from downstairs, “Ma’am, your driver Sonu.”

I said, “No, I don’t need Sonu today. I told him that yesterday.” I wasn’t sure if Sonu was just hoping for work or if there was a problem communicating, but I hoped for the former. I’d hate to be the reason for a day of unemployment on his part.

Shortly after I hung up with the guard, my phone rang again. It was Julianne. She’d arrived at ten o’clock on the dot, just as she promised when I spoke with her on Thursday.

Julianne is the sister of a woman who works in my Iowa office. She has been in Delhi studying language for six months already. I called her when I got here, and we planned to get together on Saturday. She said she could meet me where I was staying—and I think I had a hard time believing that an Iowan was just going to show up at my door, but she did.

We’d emailed briefly, but I really didn’t know much about her save that she was younger than her sister. I walk downstairs to meet her. She looks really young (or maybe I am just feeling older). Her brown hair is pulled back and she’s wearing a flowery kurta (a long Indian style shirt) with brown western-style pants and a pair of sandals she had custom made to fit her feet for around six dollars at a hill station north of Delhi. She carries a big shoulder bag that is a pastiche of embroidered fabrics. I compliment her bag.

“Thanks,” she says, “Maybe we can get you one like it today!” We planned on visiting some nearby markets.

She asks if I still want to shop today and I say absolutely. I’d packed light on clothes because I planned on buying some while I was here. Julianne wants to know if I want to shop for western style or traditional clothes. Now I am less decisive. She looks down at her own outfit, a mish-mash of both cultures. “I think my style has changed since I’ve been here,” she says. “I don’t think I ever would have worn these things back home.” I debate the kind of clothes I should buy. When I visited the office I was surprised to see that very few of the women had a very western style. Most of them were dressed in rather traditional Indian styles—and why not. It’s all such beautiful clothing, so shiny and glittering and bright and fun. Still, I don’t know that I’d be comfortable adopting an Indian style. I might feel like a poser. I tell Julianne this and she says not to worry. “People won’t think you’re weird for dressing Indian. In fact, you’d probably blend in more that way.”

I tell her it doesn’t matter what kind of shopping we do, and she says she knows a great place to go for clothes. I tell her to lead the way.

We set out from the Ahuja Residency toward the Defence Colony market just a few blocks away; from there we can catch an auto-rickshaw. Julianne says this is the cheapest and easiest way to travel short distances. We’re headed for the Central Market (also called Lajput Nagar), and it’s not too far away.

Julianne and I are happily chattering away and walking when she stops. “Monkeys,” she says with some trepidation. I stop and follow her gaze. Two monkeys are crossing our path in the road.

“Monkeys!” I exclaim, and scramble for the camera in my purse.

“Be careful!” says Julianne. “They steal things. They’ll take your camera.”

I envision my splendid, new Cannon getting smashed to bits or carried off into the Delhi rooftops by these hooligans. “Should I not take their picture?” I ask.

“No,” says Julianne. “Just be careful. The monkeys are mean. They take things from you, especially food. They break into people’s kitchens sometimes.”

I snap a few furtive shots as the monkeys scowl in our direction, then hide my camera in my purse. We wait for them to pass as though it’s West Side Story and they’re the Sharks on their way to a rumble.

That night I tell my husband about the monkey incident. He asks what kind they were and I describe them to him. He looks it up on the Internet and, instead of finding information about the species of monkey, he finds two recent news articles: one about drunken monkeys attacking a rural village, and a second about a throng of angry monkeys knocking the deputy mayor of Delhi off his balcony and to his death. Monkeys killed the deputy mayor. If you don’t believe it, Google it for yourself.

Luckily, the monkeys Julianne and I encounter are not out for blood. We let them cross the street then hurry on. “Can they smell my fear? Should I avoid eye contact?” I wonder as we speed our pace.

At the Defence Colony market, Julianne begins talking to the auto wallahs (the auto-rickshaw drivers) in Hinglish—a curious blend of Hindi and English spoken by most people here. “Lajput Nagur,” she says. “Meter say?”

The auto wallah replies, “Forty rupees.”

“NihaN. Too much. Twenty?” Julianne replies. The driver shakes his head no, and I follow Julianne to the next rickshaw where she proceeds in the same fashion but this time gets her price of twenty rupees. “They’re supposed to run the meters, but almost none of them do it even though it’s the law,” she says. “So you have to just bargain with them.”

We climb into the back of the rickshaw. I wonder what will keep me from flying out. There are no seatbelts, no handles. I am pleasantly surprised that the auto-rickshaw goes pretty slow, so there is no careening around corners and between giant trucks. It’s a calmer ride than I thought.

We get to the market and jump out of the green and yellow rickshaw. Julianne has favorite stores here and takes me to them all. When we arrive, the shopkeepers are just opening their shudders and pulling their merchandise out. It’s a bit early for business: about 10:30. We find an open shop and look at a few kurtas. They’re all priced around 350 rupees—about eight dollars. Since I’m low on funds, we ask the shopkeeper for the location of an ATM. He points us off down the street. On the way we find a cute blouse. Julianne buys one in white and I buy the same one in tan. Because we buy two, we get a better price. Julianne tries to talk them down further because we’re the first customers of the day. This is auspicious, good luck. “First customers!” Julianne pleas, but the shopkeepers are firm. We get the blouses, then continue our quest for the ATM. We walk past what Julianne says is a stationery store. You would never know it from the outside. She wants index cards for her language study and thinks they may have them. We go inside and she describes to the clerk what she’s looking for.

“Oh,” he says, “You want library cards. Nobody has those.”

India is like this. Think of some mundane item you bought at Target or Wal Mart or the grocery store last week and chances are you wouldn’t be able to readily find it here. And if you do find it, it’s by chance. Julianne wound up finding her index cards when we wondered into a “toy store” in the Defence Colony market by my apartment on Sunday evening.

After the stationery store, we find another clothing shop, which is what this market is known for. Lajput Nagar: the place to go for clothes. Markets seem to have their specialties. The market by my house is good for restaurants and food shops (I won’t say “grocery stores” because they really have no relation to our concept of such).

Anyway, clothing shops are in no short supply in the Central Market, nor are jewelry stands, tailors, shoe shops, henna stands and whole shops that sell Indian bangle bracelets.

At the next clothing stand we find, all the tops are 99 rupees. It dawns on me just how much I’ve been overcharged this past week. Oh well. I still like everything I’ve bought—and I still think the prices were decent by western standards.

But now I’ve found some authentic shopping. These 99 rupee shirts are two dollars a piece—and they’re beautiful. I get three.

Then we find a ten rupee earring stand. I get five pairs (and spend a bit over one dollar).

Julianne asks if I like bangles and I say “no” until we walk into a bangle shop and I am hypnotized by their glinting shine. I also see that they cost fifty cents for twelve. I get a dozen bangles.

We still haven’t found an ATM, but everything’s so cheap, I don’t need one.

I buy a sleeveless shirt, and the shopkeeper tells me the sleeves are sewn into the inside. If I want the shirt to be a short-sleeved shirt, I can pay the man two booths down to sew in the sleeves for ten rupees. I decide to do this just for fun. They measure my arms, and ten minutes later, I have a short-sleeved shirt.

After more shopping and bargaining, we decide to find lunch. There aren’t many places to eat in Lajput Nagar. We have our choice of a food court or McDonald’s. Each sounds fascinating in its own way. I tell Julianne I’m a vegetarian so we’d better check out the food court, but she says McDonald’s has almost no meat. Just chicken. All the burgers are vegetarian. This is something I have to see.

We visit two ATM’s before dining. The first one tells me “transaction denied,” and I totally panic thinking my bank shut down my card even though I notified them of my travel. Julianne looks at my card. “Oh look at that! That’s my bank too,” she exclaims, happy for the little shared slice of home.

We try a second ATM and my card works fine. Relief.

We walk into the McDonald’s, and it’s very crowded. People keep pushing ahead of me in line. Julianne says people will do that here and it’s not rude. Just like the traffic, if you see a chance, you take it.

So you can’t order a Big Mac in India. You order a Maharaja Burger. I opt for the Big Cheese combo dinner. It costs extra for Diet Coke, as this is considered a luxury for some reason. It comes with fries. The same gross fries you get in the US. It seems like all the gross things are the same: the pigeons, the fries, the flies.

They throw four packets of condiments onto my tray, and I go find a seat before Julianne gets her order. It is the last table left. The place is packed.

I look at my condiments. Two packets say “chili sauce” and two say “ketchup.” I try the chili sauce for my fries first and kind of like it. It tastes a little like barbeque. When the chili sauce is gone, I open a packet of ketchup.

“This is interesting,” I say to Julianne.

“It is?” she says, surprised. “It tastes normal to me. Is it weird?”

Yes. It is weird. It tastes like the chili sauce without the spices, which is to say it is watery and is not like any ketchup I’ve ever had.

“That’s so weird,” says Julianne. “I guess I’m just used to it.”

We have this conversation many times: I bring up all the things that surprise me about India and Julianne laughs at how normal these things seem to her now, remembering her similar shock as a newbie in the country.

“There are no seals on the doors or the windows!” I exclaim, telling her about the lizard that ran into my room.

She replies, “Oh, I guess that’s different. Yeah.”

The Big Cheese “hamburger” is also an oddity, but Julianne doesn’t dispute this at all. It comes encased in a mountain of mayonnaise and is composed of a hard outer breading with tiny bits of in-tact vegetables inside. I can make out a pea here and a chunk of potato there. It is, in a word, terrible and has the distinction of being the only meal that has soured my stomach during my stay in India to date.

Go McDonald’s! I should have known better.

We are both pretty tired after lunch, so we decide to take another auto-rickshaw back to Defense Colony. Julianne does her expert bargaining again and sees me home.

We decide to do church and the zoo together tomorrow, and hug goodbye.

Unity

This afternoon I finished trying to make my computer work for the day, leaving it in an even worse condition than before. Not only did I have no Internet connection, I couldn’t even log in to use the other programs offline. I was supposed to get a call back from IT in Iowa, but I decided not to wait around and waste my last week day off before starting work. I called Sonu and said, “Let’s go to the zoo,” which is only five kilometers from where I’m staying.

The zoo turned out to be closed on Fridays, but Sonu suggested we see the Old Fort, which is right next to it. As we were parking the car, he held up his cell phone and said, “This camera, all snaps, yesterday, gone. No work.” What he meant was that yesterday at some of the sights he’d asked people to take our picture together, and that something happened to those pictures.

“Oh no, that’s too bad,” I said. “I can send you my pictures when I get my Internet connected. Do you have an email account?”

“Yes,” he said.

We got out and walked toward the Old Fort entrance. Admittance was five rupees for Indians and one hundred rupees for foreigners. I couldn’t slip past as a local, so I had to pay the full $2 to get in. I gave my money to Sonu and he had a brief Hindi conversation with the man behind the ticket counter, walking away with two tickets: one for himself and one for me. We walked under a huge Persian arch in red sandstone. A man tore our tickets in half and started speaking at length to Sonu. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I think what happened is Sonu tried to get in for free as “my driver” (like a seeing eye dog) and they weren’t falling for it. I offered to buy Sonu’s ticket but he said no, I should go inside and meet him at the arch when I was finished.

I walked through the searing white sun to the Purana Qila plaque that explained this was the site of Indraprastha, an ancient civilization that mysteriously vanished, and that the Afghan ruler Sher Shah built the fort during his rule from 1538 to 1545.

I was reading the plaque and sweating profusely when Sonu popped up behind me. “Are you okay?” he said. I think he’d seen several people ask me to take their pictures. This is a new phenomenon for me. Complete strangers see you have a camera, say “Ma’am, photo?” and then pose for you with their children or date. They don’t even want to see the picture after you’ve taken it. They just want to be photographed.

I told Sonu I was fine and we walked off toward the crumbling exterior wall of the fort, stopping for photos every few hundred feet. When we got right up to the wall, I noticed there were stairs. This fort, unlike the Red Fort I’d seen yesterday, was not locked down and patrolled by guards and officers with large guns. This fort was totally free for exploration. I followed Sonu up the centuries old flight of stairs and into a chamber of arched doorways and windows. We walked right up to the edge of the window and looked down about two stories. I thought, “This would never happen in America,” and, “Hrm. Someone could just pop up and push me right off this ledge and that would be the end.” People walk close to the edge here in India as a matter of routine. Today I saw a woman riding side saddle on the back of a motorcycle through Delhi traffic, holding a tiny baby in her lap. Even the cows seem unphased by the potential dangers around them, standing serenely in the middle of intersections while all manner of traffic swerves within inches of their lives.

After we exited the chamber, we climbed up another level onto the roof—again with no railing, again hundreds of feet in the air. From the roof, the city unraveled. Sonu pointed out the Akshardam Temple and the Lotus Temple we’d seen the day before. We saw mosques and high-rise buildings engulfed in bamboo scaffolding and miles of low rise shacks all baking with us under the white heat.

Sonu took a cloth from his pocket and wiped the sweat pooling on his face. I think all the locals have such a cloth on them at all times. I did not, so my hands had to suffice. I thought about the bottle of suntan lotion I’d used right before leaving my room. “Water proof. Sweat proof,” it said. Somehow, I don’t think Bullfrog tested their product in the Delhi summer sun because my arms suddenly became white with lotion as I watched it just melt off into the heat.

Sonu scrambled down the rocky path in front of me and people stopped me, “Ma’am, a photo?” From behind, I realized that his shirt had a design of two wings—one of each of his shoulder blades—and thought, yes, he’s certainly been a good guardian for me these past few days.

We walked to the abandoned mosque on the premises, glad for its shade. An empty pool sat in its front courtyard. Before the River Yumna was diverted, it ran near the fort and would have kept this fountain full of fresh water for people to wash in before they performed their prayers.

“Too bad it’s empty,” I told Sonu. “I’d like to jump right in.”

We heard a persistent squeak squeak squeak. It was a child in sandals that have, like, dog toy squeakers in the soles. I’ve seen kids in such sandals everywhere I’ve gone. Imagine stepping on a dog toy with every step you take. Maddening; some kind of sick joke on the part of parents tired of chasing their children around, perhaps. “Those sandals are funny,” I said to Sonu.

“Yeah, funny,” he said with a look that betrayed no humor on his face.

After the mosque we walked to the front of the wall, but it was under construction and piled with bags of concrete mix and boards. Unwired spotlights stuck out of the ground at intervals. As we walked past the vestibules, Sonu would point out what was inside. “Doggies,” he said, and, more menacingly in a lower register, “Delhi mosquitoes.” They were the size of mayflies.

Exiting the front gate, Sonu said, “You enjoy the boat side.” The front of the fort had a small lagoon with paddle boats in it. I agreed. We could take a look at the fort from the boat side.

We walked down a shaded path. Vendors sat on the ground cross-legged selling bits of food. I followed Sonu all the way down the path to the boathouse where there was a price list: fifty rupees for one hour. I was literally soaked with sweat. The color of my shirt had changed to a darker grey because it was totally wet. The last thing I wanted to do was exert myself, but Sonu looked so eager, so I forked over the cash.

We hopped in the boat and began paddling into the little stagnant lagoon. “Delhi mosquitoes,” Sonu’s admonishment echoed in my mind. I could just imagine coming down with a case of [insert exotic name] fever before I ever got to my work assignment in India. That would go over well. As I kept my eyes tuned to searching for airborne beasts, Sonu got out his cell phone camera. He laughed and pointed it at me. “Say hello,” he said.

“Oh my God,” I thought. I was so wet I looked like I’d had a bucket of water dumped over me. My hair clung to my face like a dead octopus, and here he was capturing the moment. I could only laugh myself at the absurdity of the situation.

We paddled and paddled, nearly missing other boats and having one full-on collision. “Oh my God,” said the woman in the exquisite glittering sari as her companion steered their boat right into ours.

“Hey, driver,” I joked to Sonu, “let’s not crash again!”

He paddled joyously with seemingly no effort as thought, “How lame would it be for me to tell him my legs are really tired and my feet hurt and I need to rest? How much longer can I do this?”

I was so relieved when we pulled into shore. A man walked toward our boat. I thought he was going to pull us in, but instead he motioned to his watch. Sonu held up our ticket. The man was telling us we had more time, and Sonu turned the boat around and paddled back out. “Oh well,” I thought, “since I can’t exactly do my 5k jog around the neighborhood and I have no gym, this exercise is as good as any.” I approached my task with renewed enthusiasm, if not much more energy.

When the boat ride finally ended, Sonu pointed out another section of fort wall at the end of the path. “Snaps?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said. We got up to the section of the wall and he wanted to do one of those put your heads together and take a photo of both of you maneuvers. I couldn’t believe he wanted to get within three feet of my slimy self, but who was I to argue. He took the picture then showed it to me, smiling. “Cute,” I said.

“Yes. Cute,” he said.

I’m not sure what all this snapping is about. Sonu’s married and has two small girls, three and six years old. I don’t think it’s a romantic thing. I do think I am somewhat of a novelty here. At more than one tourist location I’ve visited, men have stopped and asked to have their picture taken with me. I’m trying not to let it all go to my head, but I have to say it is nice to be considered cute even in the depths of my sweatiest sweat hogging.

On the way back to the car, we spot an elephant. Sonu runs ahead through the gate and talks to its keepers. We can take it for a ride, he indicates. I’d told him earlier in the day on the way to work how much I love animals and love to see the elephants here, so he knows this will be exciting for me.

The ride is a straight up thrill. The animal’s keepers take our cameras and take pictures of us as we bobble around on top of it. The animal’s head is painted with orange flourishes and he flaps his big ears back and forth as he ambles on. At the end of the ride, the keepers yell a command and the animal slowly kneels down so we can disembark. I slide down his neck as he bats an ear back in my direction. I am amazed at the elephant’s simultaneous immensity and gentle nature. I stare into his eyes and take a few last snaps as the keepers ask for their money. Sonu tries to haggle over the price, but I don’t care. I just rode an elephant.

We head back to the car and I can’t contain myself. “Wow,” I exclaim, and, “That was so cool,” wondering if “cool” is an idiom with which Sonu is familiar.

Sonu wants one more snap before we get into the car. Give it up already. “How many snaps do you need,” I think, but smile big because I just rode an elephant!

We get in the car and Sonu says, “Defence Colony?” I look at the clock. It’s only five and we hadn’t started out until about ten thirty that morning. I’ve got a little time to kill.

“How far is it to Lotus Temple?” I ask. “Can we go for just a little bit?” I was bewitched by the palpable peace I’d felt there the day before and wondered if a second visit would bring the same sensation.

He smiles and says yes, we can go.

We whiz over and park on the side of the road. As always, Sonu doubles as my crossing guard, helping me negotiate the perils of pedestrianism in Delhi traffic.

We cross the street and go through the gate to the manicured walkway that leads to the Lotus Temple. This time I feel it before we even get inside: a sense of deep connection and communion with everyone I’m walking past, almost like a membrane that enfolds us all.

We check our shoes and listen to the same schpeal we heard the day before about not taking any pictures and observing complete silence once we get inside. We walk in and sit on one of the cool marble benches. On Thursday when visited, there was a cool breeze at my back and what I thought was a recorded sound of a bird. Today there is no breeze and no bird sounds, but I realize it wasn’t a recording—that the architecture is such that bird cries from outside get amplified and echo lightly through the temple.

I fold my hands and close my eyes thinking that since these conditions are different and I am still disgustingly soaked from my paddle boating adventure that I probably won’t feel the same thing I did the day before. But it is there before I can even complete this thought: the feeling. A feeling of being embraced. By what? By air? By light?

“What is this feeling?” I silently ask, wanting to be able to name it, to take it with me, to duplicate it outside the grounds of this place, and from somewhere, an answer comes: “You are whole.”

What?

“You are whole. You are complete.”

I am whole. It doesn’t mean much at first, but then I recall my phone call to my husband this morning wherein I started crying when he said goodbye and made him stay on the phone longer. I recall not being able to look at pictures of my pets without bawling because I miss them so desperately. And somehow this message takes away the desperate longing and replaces it with sheer peace.

You are whole. You can love your husband, your family, your pets without grief and pain because you are whole without them—in fact you are one with them and they are with you. You have everything you need to figure out your remote control and your deadbolt and your phone. You have everything you need within you—not without you.

Layered over this realization is a sense of oneness with all humanity. If we are all one, there is no you or me. There is no desperate, painful longing because we all carry the whole of existence within ourselves.

And suddenly I know this is the real reason I came here, to India, by myself: to discover this truth.

I open my eyes to find Sonu sitting next to me, leaning back in his seat, patiently waiting for my epiphany to draw to a close. I lead him over to a plaque I noticed the day before that seemed custom made for my visit and copy down the words in my notebook:

Wert thou to speed through the immensity of space and traverse the expanse of
heaven; yet thou wouldst find no rest save in submission to our command and
humbleness before our face.

Baha’ u’ llah

I don’t know who the “our” are in the quote, but I kind of think of it as God.

We leave the temple in silence and get a voucher from a woman outside to visit the Information Centre for free. We retrieve our shoes and walk back down through the delicately manicured garden to the Centre at the other end of the walk.

Inside there are explanations of the Baha’i faith, which is the faith behind the Lotus Temple. I never knew much about it, but am stricken when I read that its central and prime tenant is “the Oneness of Mankind.”

I copy down another quote:

May you become as the waves of one sea, stars of the same heaven, fruits
adorning the same tree, roses of one garden in order that through you the
oneness of humanity may establish its temple in the world of
mankind.

Abdul ‘l-Baha

I don’t try to translate the weirdness of this experience for Sonu, but I don’t feel I need to. We walk around the Centre looking at quotes and pictures of Baha’i temples and institutions around the world, read a little about the history of the faith, and then they turn the lights and fans off. A woman in a long white flowing salwar kameez says in a refined Indian accent (the kind with a little British mixed in), “In case you were wondering, this is not a power outage.” The people around her chuckle. “We are closing in five minutes. Kindly move to the front of the museum.”

Sonu and I leave the red pyramid-shaped building and he pauses. “Snap?” he asks.

Sure.

Patience

I had convinced myself that yesterday’s cold shower was a fluke because in the morning I’d gotten up a later and spent about an hour on the computer talking to my family in a pretty nifty international conference call. It was close to 9:30 when I showered, so I figured all the hot water in the place was used.

So today I arose at 6:30 thinking that the hot water wouldn’t be consumed by then, but now I’m afraid that Tuesday morning’s hot shower was the fluke and my usual ablutions will take place in cold water.

There are signs all over here compelling you to conserve water. “Collect rain water,” one billboard we passed yesterday suggested. Maybe I should. It would be warmer than the stuff in my shower.

Thus continues the pattern of getting one thing fixed only to find another thing not working.

Yesterday morning I started the day (after my cold shower and phone call) with my usual breakfast of fruit and toast. At breakfast, I let the woman downstairs, Mira, know that my television stopped working the night before. I had no sound until I pressed the “up” key on the volume on the front of the television. At this action, the sound came back, but the picture turned to rolling stripes. Mira said something I didn’t understand, and I left thinking I’d have to try talking to her husband Pachu about it later.

After that, I called Sonu who said, “Yes ma’am. Half hour.” When he arrived an hour later, we went back to Khan market where I’d purchased the watch that stopped working the day after I bought it—the one I’d been entrusted with before I fully paid for it.

When we got to Khan market, I first tried to open an Indian checking account so I could deposit the check from Pearson and use the money to pay for my cab fares. Once I start work, I will not have Sonu to be at my beck and call all day—and I will miss him. I’ll have to hire a metered taxi to take to the office and home again, and (unlike the hotel’s driver service) the metered taxis demand payment in cash, in full at the time of service—just like a cab in the US would. Sonu’s services will be paid for when I check out by Pearson, but we don’t have a way of paying for these metered cab rides yet.

Because it’s going to be a considerable expense, Pearson wrote me a check, but I failed to recognize that I wouldn’t be able to cash it or deposit it when I got here, and I just packed it in my luggage.

Bank of India was an education in Indian bureaucracy. I had to talk to three people who kept sending me in circles to talk to one of the others. Back and forth they pointed me. “Talk to this lady,” they’d point. Finally, they made a list of things I'd need to open an account: a photograph, a letter from my employer, proof of residency, my passport and visa, etc. etc. So I think I'm going to contact Finance in Iowa and see if they can cancel that check and just do a direct deposit instead.

Next, Sonu walked me around the corner to the watch stand. The man immediately recognized me and smiled. I said, “I owe you 500 rupees, right?”

“That’s right,” he nodded.

“But first, the watch is broken. It isn’t working.”

“No? Give it to me. We will fix or give you another,” he said.

He took the watch from me and handed it to a small man who was sitting on a bench. He said something in Hindi and the man popped off the back of the watch.

“We think it might be the battery,” he explained, as the skinny guy on the stool replaced it with what appeared to be another used battery. “We have no idea how long it’s been sitting. It’s probably the battery.” I noticed all the watches in the case were running rather then being on display with the pins pulled out to save the batteries.

I took out the money and the man said, “You wait. We see if we fix.” He wouldn’t take the money until he saw that the watch worked. It did, and I thanked him and paid him the remaining sum. One broken thing fixed.

Later that night before dinner, I again asked about my tv. This time Pachu, the grey-haired gentleman on staff who lives downstairs, was in. He followed me up to my room and mashed a bunch of buttons. “This and here. Press volume,” he told me and nodded. Somehow I had a picture and sound back. The tv was doing this weird flashing in and out every few seconds, but it had been doing that since I arrived and I wasn’t going to complain, what with a picture and sound and all.

So two broken things fixed: the watch and the tv. That just leaves the hot water and the long suffering Internet connection.

A Very Happy Addendum: So the whole hot water issue was all user-error, and don’t I feel like a fool! Turns out, as Pachu just showed me, I have to have the hot water switch turned on in order to get hot water. It looks like a light switch and seemingly does nothing, but it actually turns the hot water on and off. Thank the Lord for Pachu and for the return of a humane shower. Looks like conserving water will be more difficult again. At least now I can stay in there long enough to shave my legs.

I believe at least half of my “disrepair” issues arise from my cluelessness. Take the deadbolt which I could not figure out for my life when I first got here. It works perfectly fine once you figure it out. As do the magic keys. So does the shower. So does the tv. So does the microwave with the knob and the amusing precook settings and the switch on the outlet that you have to turn on (which looks like off to me) in order to get the micro’s power to come on.

I think poor Pachu and Mira must think I’m a dolt having to drag them up here for these mundane problems all the time, acting like everything’s broken when all I have to do is be patient and think a bit about how all this must work.

I’m getting better, though—or at least I tell myself I am. I at least understand the big hot water switch and the deadbolt, so I’m calling that progress. The phones remain somewhat of a mystery, as does the tv. But I can’t say I even understand my tv at home, so I’m not holding it against myself. I’m one of those wives who makes her husband hook up all the electronic stuff. This is my chance not to be—and I’m still trying. That would have been a good answer for Lowden Singh. Too bad I just thought of it now. “Lowden, I’m trying not to rely on my husband for my cable tv dilemmas. That’s why I can’t carry him with me here.” I’m sure that would have satisfied him—or at least made his jaw drop again, which was fun to see.

I have no idea why the tv and phone work or don’t work as the case may be, but I’m growing more convinced it’s because of my reckless button mashing that these devices become uncooperative. I just have to stop and think a little more analytically about what I’m doing instead of just wanting everything to be automatic, instantaneous. “Work, hot water! Work, door lock! Work, phone! Work how I expect you to work, not how you are made to work!”

The computer is still my biggest enigma. I had no idea I was so addicted to the Internet. I should use this experience to examine this deep attachment I have to the virtual world instead of using every disconnected moment to obsess about getting my computer fixed. I should think of this moment as an opportunity rather than a torturous albatross.

It’s just that I have so much to blog about and I find myself much more motivated to write when I can “publish” it immediately. What I’ve been doing in the meantime is typing up Word documents that I’ll be able to cut and paste once I have connectivity. Maybe my writing will be better that way. I’ll have a chance to reread and revise before I post.

This week has been a lesson in patience that I have been resisting. If I resist much longer, I’m going to drive myself crazy. Things will work when they will work. I will have a connection when I will have a connection. Sonu will get here when he gets here. But just as important as patience with others, I’m finding, is patience with myself. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a pernicious streak of self-criticism that keeps me perpetually dissatisfied with myself. If something isn’t done right, and isn’t done to a standard higher than any reasonable person might expect, I berate myself for failure. My sophomore year drama teacher first put a name to this when he saw my upset after a performance in class one day that he considered quite good. “You’re a perfectionist, aren’t you?”

Yes, that’s what you can call it.

So I took a day to figure out the lock on the door. I took two days to figure out I had shut my own hot water off. The phone with its array of seemingly random beeps, blips, messages and music throws me off. I’ll figure it out. It will be okay. It will have to be. This is the situation I’m in and I can’t change it. I can only figure it out with the time and resources at my disposal: my Hindi phrase book, Mira and Pachu the hotel staff, Sonu my driver, the Ahuja Residency owner, the people at the Pearson office in New Delhi, my family and coworkers back home. I really have so many people supporting me that it’s ridiculous.

It was never just me and the giant snail and the mumbling guard. I am really not alone at all.

Appliances

YesterdayI tried out my microwave to make myself some hot tea. The first oddity I noticed was that it had a knob on it. I’ve never seen a microwave with a knob. Next I looked at the precook options listed. They were:
· Tea/Soup
· Idli/Dhokla
· Rice
· Spaghetti
· Jacket Potatoes
· Fish
· Tikki/Kebab
· Chicken
· Mutton

What, no popcorn button?

Akshardham World

This is the new Hindu temple that my brother’s Indian boss told me I should not miss when I was in Delhi; the same temple that Amar recommended I stop by on my way home from the office. All I know going into the place is that it’s huge and new—in fact they’re still finishing bits of the building.

Sonu finds this place with no trouble. We park and he tells me he’ll wait by the car. I take my purse and walk toward the sprawling complex, Indian music wafts out of a loudspeaker. I get near a gate and see a sign prohibiting cameras and cell phones and pens and notebooks inside the complex. Sadly, I find Sonu and ask him to put my stash of these items in the car until I return. My documentary skills will be severely inhibited on this venture, and it’s too bad, because there is much to document.

Safely past security, I begin walking toward a great hall. There looks to be miles of minutely carved buildings and carefully tended gardens ahead of me. Just then an old man in a long white tunic and pants flashes a toothless smile at me. “Helloooo,” he croons. “I am Lowden Singh. Where are you from?”

“USA,” I reply.

“Where in US?”

“Iowa,” I answer him, but he crunches up his eyebrows and shakes his head. “It’s by Chicago,” I clarify.

“Ah, Chicago. Have you ever heard of the great …” And I wish I could duplicate the string of consonants that danced from his lips but without having stopped to ask him to write the name in my notebook, I can’t. Suffice to say he was asking if I’d heard of some Hindu teacher.

“No,” I replied.

“No!” his eyebrows raised and his eyes widened as though this was somehow unimaginable. He asked me if I’d heard, then, of [insert lots of letters here].

“No,” I replied.

His jaw dropped and he gasped so I could again see the spaces in his teeth. “NO!”

“No. Who is he?”

Through garbled syntax I could only make out that the man with the long name had been in Chicago at some point.

“This temple very peace, very clean. Very clean,” he changed the subject. “You have husband?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“Iowa,” I said.

“Why he no here?”

“Because he has to work,” I explained.

“Why he no here?” he repeated as though I’d not said a word.

I tried again, “Because he has to work. His job is in Iowa.”

“Bhwa, work,” he said. “Why you come here without him? Why?” he pleaded.

“For my job,” I said, a bit unnerved. I certainly didn’t reveal that I’d chosen to come here by myself, that I wasn’t forced into this “predicament” by circumstances—not that my new companion would have accepted that for an answer anyway.

Why had I come here all alone? Why was I always looking for something other than what I had in front of me? What was I hoping to find? To discover? What was I trying to prove?

“You no miss him?” my companion interrupted my fugue.

“I miss him very much,” I said, trying to avoid feeling the cleave.

“Then you should carry him here. Then he should be here,” he concluded, and motioned at a sign on the wall which explained some details about how the temple was built. “You come,” he said. “I show.”

I figured I could use a tour guide, even if he was a bit quirky. We walked out of the welcome hall and down a long stone sidewalk toward the main temple.

“You have children?” he asked.

Oh no. Here we go again. “No.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because we both went to school,” I explained. “We just finished school.”

“Time. It passes fast,” he warned. “When you have babies?”

This was maddening. “When I get home,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t think even that would be soon enough for Lowden Singh. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Why you don’t know? How you have inspiration in life if you have no babies?” he said. “Children are for inspiration. You no like children?”

“Yes, I like children,” I said thinking of my one-year-old niece. I keep a photo of her on my computer desktop and everyone who sees it inevitably asks if it’s a picture of my daughter. “I like them very much.”

“Then why you no have none? Why?”

Because I sometimes find it hard to take care of myself, let alone be completely responsible for a whole other human life? Because the thought has, until very recently, terrified me? There was no answering Lowden Singh, so I stopped trying.

We came to a shoe check before the temple and Lowden got a burlap sack and a check number for his shoes. “You put in,” he insisted, and I did without thinking too much about it, but this made me totally dependent on him to get my shoes back. If I lost Lowden in the temple, I lost my shoes.

“Very clean, very peace,” Lowden said as we walked toward the massive beige stone structure covered from top to bottom with intricate filigree and sculptures of elephants and Hindu gods. Inside, a giant, gold-gilded statue of the Hindu saint Bhagwan Swaminarayan occupied the central space.

“Is solid gold?” Lowden asked me.

He was supposed to be my tour guide. I said I had no idea.

“Look like solid gold,” he said.

On the outside wall of the temple were a series of paintings depicting the life and works of Bhagwan Swaminarayan. On either side of the paintings were plaques explaining the content: one in Hindi, one in English. Lowden visited the Hindi side; I visited the English side and tried not to lose my only ticket back to my shoes as we moved from painting to painting and he made little effort to make sure I was anywhere near him.

Between paintings he saw me and pointed upwards, “God is up there, and we are down here. All we are down here,” he said.

This wasn’t the tour guide I was hoping for. We came to another plaque and I asked what Moksha meant. Lowden looked at me puzzled, then a woman in a bright blue sari explained that Moksha is like enlightenment; it is the final beatific state you obtain in order to escape the cycle of reincarnation.

We came to a statue of Lakshmi and some other god—I didn’t recognize his name and I was confused because I thought Lakshmi was Vishnu’s mate. “That’s Vishnu,” the woman explained, “it’s just another name we have for him.” I looked up and saw that Lowden had moved on without me. I hurried to catch up with him.

We had finally made our way around the monument and, to my relief, walked back to the shoe check. We retrieved our shoes and made our way toward the exit.

“You carry your husband here with you,” he reminded me. I said okay. “You want to do boat ride,” he asked. I had no idea what the boat ride entailed but thought it might be fun.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Then we say goodbye. Boat ride costs and I no it pay. If God wants efficiency, we meet again, if not, we don’t.”

I didn’t quite understand, but nodded and parted ways with Lowden. As I walked toward the “boat ride,” I noticed one of my sandals sticking to the ground. I looked at it and it had a giant wad of pink gum stuck to the bottom. “Very clean, very peace my behind,” I thought. I’d felt nothing but stressed the whole time I’d been there.

I went to pay for the exhibition. It cost about six dollars and consisted of three parts: The Hall of Values, The Giant Screen Theatre and the Boat Ride. I was ushered through a Walt Disney style maze and into a cool theatre with walls that made it look like a cave and a ceiling that made it look like the night sky. I sat down with a group of people and a smooth bass voice came over a loudspeaker.

“Welcome to the exhibition. The exhibition welcomes you. It took 7,000 artisans over five years to carve this monument. But how many people does it take to carve a human life? One!” A big rock at the front of the theatre then spun around to reveal a man carving himself out of the stone.

“You are in control of your destiny and you are the only one who can seek for spontaneous happiness.” Coincidentally, just before that statement, I found myself chuckling as silently as I could at the absurdity of an amusement park-style “ride” at a temple.

After this brief presentation, the doors to the right of us flew open and we were ushered into a room full of animatronics. Talking robots at a Hindu temple: who would have thought! These robots told the story of how Bhagwan Swaminarayan brought some fish back to life at the age of seven with his tears of compassion and converted the fishermen into vegetarians who respected all life.

Then, the doors to our right flew open and we saw another scene, and another, and another.

The sequence ended with a lobby that had little displays for each value that Bhagwan Swaminarayan embodied and taught. The first value was vegetarianism. This display was full of painted wood cutouts of animals with quotes around or on them. There was a rhinoceros with all red capital letters on its back that read, “Veg Power.” Then there was an elephant holding a sign in the same red capital letters, “Be strong. Be veg.” Then there were some ducklings with a speech bubble above their heads that read, “Mum, why do humans eat us? We never eat their babies.”

When I was done with this exhibit, I emerged feeling like I’d spent a lot of time at Akshardham Temple and I had better get going. There were some dark clouds on the horizon and I didn’t want to get caught in a torrential downpour. And, after all, Sonu was waiting for me. I made for the exit, but a Hindu guard stopped me.

“No ma’am,” he said and pointed to the two remaining tickets in my hand.

“I have to go home,” I said, and he nodded as though he understood, then he took my arm and started walking me back toward the exhibit halls. I looked at the boat ride ticket, labeled “3.” It said the ride only took ten minutes (as opposed to the fifty minutes that the previous exhibition had taken). I gave up trying to argue and thought, “What harm can ten minutes do?”

As I waited in line, two more guards approached me. “Madam, you must see. You must see when you are done. Spiritual movie. Fine spiritual movie.”

To make a long story short, I went on the boat ride showcasing thousands of years of Indian history and culture wherein I learned that Indians invented, I think, everything from rocket ships to plastic surgery to the game of chess. Then I saw the movie that again reiterated the life story of Bhagwan Swaminarayan, only I had to wear a headset so I could hear the narration in English.

That night, back at the Ahuja Residency, I ran into the owner. “What did you do today,” he asked.

I told him I went to the Akshardham Temple.

“That place is like Disney World,” he said, and I agreed.

Fauna

I rode an elephant today. I can't post the pictures now because my connection's too slow, but it was an amazingly beautiful animal. At the end of the ride, the keepers told me five hundred rupees, which is roughly twelve bucks. I quickly forked it over, ecstatic from the experience, but Sonu started speaking in Hindi to the keepers. He talked a bit agitatedly for a while, then motioned to me that we should go. "That's too much," he said. "Five hundred rupees too much."

He was trying to get some of my money back from the men. I told him it was okay and that I didn't mind paying that much to ride an elephant.

On our way back to the car, little chipmunks crossed our path left and right. They're blonder than our chipmunks, but otherwise exactly the same. So are the pigeons. Chipmunks and pigeons are ubiquitous.

As we walked around in the park, I wondered why I hadn't seen any lizards. I thought they mustn't have them here until I was in my room typing and a little pink and green hued guy scrambled right into my room through the crack in the door.

I realize some people might have been upset by such an occurance, but I was happy to have this guest. Lizards eat bugs, plus they're cute. He only stayed for a minute before exiting the same way he came in. As far as I'm concerned, he's welcome back anytime.

Elephants, Monkeys and CEOs

Wednesday morning I was wise to the rumble tumble dehydrated onion omelet situation. I asked only for fruit. Bold from the previous breakfast, which did not make me sick, I even drank the whole glass of fruit juice they provided.

After breakfast, I went back up to my room and used the magic key that I had become the master of to unlock the door.

It felt good to understand that to close the door behind me, I just had to turn the big knob on the deadbolt to the right. Stay away from that good-for-nothing little knob. It does nothing but mess you up.

Once inside, I tried calling my Pearson contact at the office to see if he could help with my computer connection. The phones are confusing because the tones don’t make any sense. The dial tone is a high-pitched buzz that sounds like feedback. Then when you hit “9” to get an outside line, it sounds like the phone is ringing. It’s not, though. That’s just another, different dial tone. Then sometimes in the middle of entering the numbers, a blipping sound like a heart monitor starts—then a sound like someone having a heart attack. Then sometimes there’s a woman’s voice with an Indian accent saying “Check the code. That code does not exist.” Then sometimes there’s soothing music and another Indian woman speaking English telling you you’ve screwed up again. “The number you have dialed could not be found. Please check the number.” Cue soaring violins.

Then you dial the exact same number the exact same way a second time, and the call goes through.

Phone numbers here are confusing as well. They seem to have no set number of digits. They are just strings of numbers with no separations or groupings. My driver’s number is 9810873876. Ten digits. But then I got a message from Meeraj at the help desk and the number they gave me to call back (which still hasn’t worked) was eight digits long. My phone number at the hotel is eight digits long. My friend from Pearson’s number is ten digits. No comprendo.

I didn’t think I was so wedded to consistency, but I’m really seeing its merits and feeling a need to deal with its loss. Everything around here seems to work, but only sometimes.

In this fashion, the third time I dialed Amar’s number, the call went through and I got his voicemail. I left a message, but also tried his cell. He answered right away.

“Amar! This is Vicki with the New Directions program!” I hoped I didn’t sound too overeager. I hoped my introduction wouldn’t be greeted with a “Who? From what? I don’t need any new directions. Thanks.”

But Amar came through. “Vicki! You’re in Delhi? You made it!”

I explained to him what was happening, and he told me I could come in; they’d help me with my connection. He asked if I’d like to stay for lunch. I said sure.

After three more attempts at the phone system, I got my driver on the phone. “Sonu, can you take me to my office today?”

“Yes ma’am. One half hour.”

One hour later, Sonu was downstairs and we were off. I gave him the address: 482 FIE Patparganj. He said, “No problem.”

We were off, and Sonu would intermittently comment on buildings and landmarks we’d pass. “India Gate,” he said when we came to the scaled down arc de triumph. “Raj Path,” he nodded to the wide avenue between the arch and the Indian government buildings.

At one point, traffic came to a full stop. There were three lanes of traffic painted onto the street and I counted twelve rows of busses, cars, motorcycles and auto-rickshaws stuffed into them.

The beggars and street vendors took full advantage of the traffic jamb, tapping on windows to ask for money and parading their merchandise through the few inches left between vehicles. I had my choice of coconut wedges, towels, steering wheel covers, or glow-in-the-dark stars to stick on my ceiling. I took a pass and instead watched the construction workers in collared shirts working on huge pillars for a raised highway that is yet to exist. I guess these are the signs of an emerging market: metros and highways springing up to support the commerce that will traffic on them.

As the jamb let up and we began to move again, I glanced off the side of the highway and saw an elephant. Yes, an elephant. It was surrounded by people who looked to be “using” it—putting cloths on its back or something. But as soon as this sight was there, it was gone and we were in another smash of rickshaws, busses and trucks with gates reminding us, “Horn Please.” Such unnecessary reminders.

I was waiting to see the section of town with the big glass office buildings, but instead we seemed to be driving into an increasingly messy series of stalls, stands and shacks. Sonu pulled the car over to some bicycle rickshaw drivers who were lounging in their seats. “One minute,” he said as he sprang out of the car for the first of about five times to ask for directions.

We made u-turns. We drove off-road past heaps of junk where stray dogs were rummaging for food. A man peed on the side of the road. I assumed we were very far away from Pearson.
The thing is, we weren’t. We were getting very close: a few more turns and over a bridge, then past what Amar told me later were factories but looked to me like run-down two and three story apartment buildings. Not more than three blocks from the office, I spotted a monkey perched on top of a wall. The streets were busted up and littered with trash and green stews of waste and monsoon rain.

Then, in the midst of all this, Sonu pulled over and nodded to me, “Pearson.” I looked up and saw the only glass building in sight, trimmed in happy, clean Pearson yellow and blue.

I had to spell my name for the guard in the glass box at the front of the building. When he was done writing, I saw something resembling “Hbicki Kejawjsig” in his notebook. Close enough, I figured. He gave me a visitor’s badge and a slip of paper I’d have to bring back to him with Amar’s signature on it. “Sign,” he said, pointing to the part of the form I needed to get filled in.

Up a flight of stairs, the front lobby had wide glass doors with silver handles and a prominent arched desk of light wood with a large silver sign behind it: “Pearson Education.” A woman in a bright blue sari and bindi greeted me. I told her I was looking for Amar.

“Amarjyoti, yes,” she said and called him. “Can you wait two minutes? Have a seat.”

The lobby was cool and lined with Pearson Education, India books. The only way you could tell the office was in India was by looking at the people inhabiting it or glancing out the front windows.

I met Amar who took me to his office and asked if I wanted some coffee or water. I said coffee sounded great. He got on the phone and ordered it up. “I bet you don’t order coffee in your office,” he beamed. “This is something of our culture here. We have someone to bring us coffee.”

I thought of the coffee shop across the street from work where I went everyday to get fresh roasted, fresh brewed, French roasts. What arrived was a blue mug full of something that tasted like that powdered French Vanilla drink you get at gas stations. “No, we certainly don’t have anyone to bring us coffee. We have to go get it ourselves,” I said, perhaps smiling a bit too hard.

We sipped our drinks and he leaned back, “So what’s going on with your computer?” I explained my woes, and he called an IT employee to help. I didn’t catch his name, but he hopped on my computer and flew through a dozen different windows and settings. I was online in a few minutes.

Amar asked what I was doing with my days off to explore Delhi before I start the work assignment. I said I went to some markets to get supplies I needed like electrical adapters and such.

“Do you want to go to markets where you can bargain? These are where my wife can spend forever.” He said the market names but I couldn’t quite make them out. I asked him to write them down in my notebook and he happily obliged. There were other places I could go, too. Had I seen the Akshardham Temple? It was on my way home from work. A good place to stop for the afternoon.

Just then, Srinivas the publishing manager popped into the office to say hello. The CEO wanted to meet me. He ushered me upstairs to a spacious office with its own small reception area. Inside was Vivek Govil, President and CEO of Pearson Education, India. Vivek was totally amiable and welcoming. In more than just job title, he resembled Doug Kubach with a dark complexion—same haircut and clothing style. He wanted to know a little bit more about what I do in Iowa, and he requested an hour of my time so I could “explain the assessment business to him” next week.

I swallowed a feeling of total inadequacy and assured myself that I could do what he was asking of me.

“Our assessment business is just beginning to grow, and I know you have an established business in the US, so I’m hoping to gather some information about that. I had a little time with your CEO but not enough to understand.”

“I’d be glad to help,” I gulped, recognizing one of the reasons I’d been chosen for this appointment and hoping I could be as helpful as they wanted.

When I got done speaking with Srinivas and Vivek, I ate lunch with Amar at his desk, newspapers spread out under us to keep from making a mess of the soupy curries. Then he took me around and introduced me to the development editors and a few other groups. Soma and Preeta and Angshuman. Arun and Sumita and Vishal. Names I will certainly need reminders of when I return next week Monday to begin.

I thanked Amar for the lunch and said I’d see him on Monday. “Eight o’clock?” I confirmed.

“Oh no!” he almost gasped. “Nine, nine thirty. Today I got here at nine forty five. What is better for you? Nine or nine thirty?” Judging how the ride had gone that morning, I told him the later option was probably best. I’ll be getting into work around 9:30 and knocking off around six.

Amar walked me out front to make sure my driver had waited for me. He motioned for me to watch my step, at one point indicating what appeared to be a giant heap of vomit inches away from my sandal.

“This isn’t the nicest place,” he apologized. “We are the only decent building here. The rest of these are factories. You can’t tell because there aren’t any signs. But it’s all industrial here. There’s nowhere to go out to lunch. We want to move our office.”

I thanked him again for lunch and the help with my computer and said I was looking forward to Monday. I have a lot to learn about the editing and publishing process and am so happy that I have this wild opportunity to take it all in.

Markets & Carpets

After breakfast on Tuesday, I called Sonu, my Punjabi Sikh driver, to ask if he could help me run a few errands. In my delirious stupor on Monday night, I'd made a "to do" list:

• ATM/money exchange


• Open checking account for taxi fees?


• Adapter/help with adapters


• Clocks or clock and watch to tell time here & in USA


• Hangers


• How to make calls out of room?

I was pleasantly surprised to be able to cross many of these items off my list after breakfast, but I still thought that Sonu could help with the remaining ones.

He took me to an ATM. The first one was out of order and we had to find a second. At the second machine, I inserted my card and entered my pin. It asked for the denomination in 100s. I keyed in 800 rupees. It asked for the denomination in 100s. I again keyed in 800 rupees. This happened about four more times, then I noticed a line forming behind me. I looked to the guard at the door (there are guards at every ATM) for help. He acted like I'd never ask. "Yes," he said. I said, "I'm trying to get money but it isn't working. I'm asking for 800 rupees but it just keeps saying enter a denomination in the 100s."

"No," he said, smiling, "Thousands. One thousand rupees minimum."

So I entered one thousand rupees and out came my exotic cash, to the relief of the men in the queue behind me.

Next, Sonu took me to a shop that had an adapter I could use with my hair dryer (the power strip from the Ahuja Residency was all taken up with cell phone chargers and what-not). Then he took me to Khan Market, "Very very nice market. Very expensive." I wondered why we couldn't go to a cheap market, but didn't want to ask a lot of questions. Here, he said, I could find a clock, as there was no clock in my room--another source of my disorientation on the night of my arrival. I didn't know what time it was here; I didn't know what time it was at home. I felt I had flown out of the world instead of across it.

The digital clock cost 250 rupees, which is about six dollars. I thought that was okay. Then I asked for a watch so I could keep that set to American time so I'd know when I could call home. The watch would cost me 900 rupees, which I didn't have left after buying the clock and the adapter. The second man at the clock shop offered me a cookie. I said no thanks, but he said, "No, take." So I shoved a dry cookie into my mouth and said I'd have to decline the watch. The first man asked, "How much money do you have left?" I looked in my wallet and saw 400 rupees. He considered the bargain then shook his head. 400 rupees wouldn't work. Then he began talking to Sonu in Hindi. They conversed for a while, then the man turned to me. "Okay," he said. "He will pay, then you pay him back. I know him. Is good man." Sonu was reaching for his wallet. I said absolutely not. I didn't want my driver fronting money for me. The man considered for a moment then said, "All right then, you pay me back when you can. I trust my God. If I do good in business, I have good business."

So off I walked with a Gucci knock-off and digital clock. Sonu was driving me home when he asked, "Would you like to see Indian handicrafts? 15 minutes." I thought maybe I only had 15 minutes left with him as my driver. Then I figured out that he meant the "Indian handicrafts" would take 15 minutes to get to.

I recalled the "scam" I'd heard about in the guidebooks and from Brendan wherein a driver takes an unsuspecting customer to a specific shop and, in turn for bringing in business, gets a cut of any profits that are made. "Don't go look at carpets," Brendan had said.

I'd already agreed to go look at the Indian handicrafts by the time I'd figured out what was going on, so I figured I'd be a sport and see what happened. We drove to a store nestled under a highway. Across the street is a village of hovels and makeshift shelters built out of discarded construction materials and fallen tree limbs inhabited by people whose only possessions appear to be garbage: filthy blankets, used 2 liter bottles. One man is using a stack of paper as a pillow.

Sonu gets out of the car and ushers me into the store where the proprietors give him a subtle greeting. I expected an outdoor market, but this looks like a western shop with glass counters and wooden shelving housing figurines and carvings.

I am first greeted by a man flashing silk scarves "of very good quality. Amazing quality." After I finish looking at the scarves, a woman in a yellow sari emerges to show me papier mache boxes. "You like Santa?" she asks and starts piling box after box on the counter for me to see. The Santa is a little pink and deformed. When I express disinterest she springs out from behind the counter, "Then you like tunic?" Now we are looking at clothes. "I'd just like to look around," I attempt, but this is clearly not going to happen. I am wrapped up in a process and there is no going back. I will not be able to leave the store until I have spoken to each clerk and every counter.

Everyone who knows me knows I am a sucker for clothes, and here I find some items I really like. I also packed light and planned on buying some clothes while I was in India, so I actually consider a purchase at this station. I find a shirt I like for approximately twenty dollars. "All hand stitching. All hand made. Very good quality." But this is not enough for the sales woman. "You like long skirt?"

"No, I don't really wear skirts," I explain.

"No, you look so pretty at your office. It match tunic."

"No," I insist and walk toward the next counter where a man starts extolling the virtues of tiny white marble boxes, "each hand made and [guess what] of very good quality." A bit tired of the pressure, I move onto the section that I really wanted to look at when I first arrived: the carvings. My dad told me to look for a particular type of hand-carved elephant while I'm here and I figure they might have them. But no. They have sandalwood carvings of Hindu gods and rosewood carvings of animals--all expensive. The man is impressed when I recognize the gods--or maybe that was just his sales technique. I move on past the carvings.

But wait! The man also has hand-made wall hangings to show me. These look just like the things I find in Indian restaurants. I like one of them and I think it will look good in my Indian-themed room at home. I tell the man this, but the price is a little high. $36. I bargain him down insignificantly then tell him I'll have to think about it. Maybe later. "There is no later. There is only now," so not only flatterly but now philosophy. I like the hanging enough and decide he's probably right--I don't know when or if I'll ever see something like this again. He got me. I bought it. And some garam masala spice that my friend asked me to look for, and some elephant keychains that I figured would make good souvenirs for people. I knew I was being a first-class sucker, but by western standards, the prices weren't really expensive at all. They just weren't third-world cheap. And so what if my driver gets a cut of this? As far as I can tell, he's making about $36 a day. He can have a cut of my tapestry money. He was willing to shell out cash for me when I wanted a watch. He's okay in my book.

When everything adds up, it's under $100 and I've really got a lot of stuff. As I'm about to leave, the man who sold me the tapestry gestures to a whole room I haven't noticed. In it are hundreds of rolled up carpets. "But wouldn't you like to look at some rugs before you leave?"

"No thank you," I say, restraining a laugh.

I walk out front to find that it's poured in the hour I've been inside, but stopped raining. Sonu is conspiring with a guard from the store. He looks a bit surprised, then hurries to the back door of his car to open it for me.

"Back to Defence Colony, ma'am?"

"Yes, Sonu. Thank you."

Rumble Tumble Breakfast

The Ahuja Residency stay includes a breakfast, so after my salvation-bringing shower on Tuesday morning, I walked downstairs to find the actual common room and the cook's kitchen. A plump woman in a sari was in the kitchen and her husband was sitting in the adjacent vestibule.

"Breakfast," I said, trying to use as little potentially perplexing English as possible.

"Yes," the man said, "Omelette, fruit, toast and tea. Sit," and he motioned towards a six-person dining room table.

I walked toward the table regarding the magazines and newspapers on the shelves and tables in the room. The big headline was an attack on the Indian embassy in Afghanistan. 40 people dead.

There was a western-looking Indian man on the computer station I noticed in the room. I wanted to speak to him, but he was engrossed in Googling.

The man who'd told me the menu came in and served me a glass of juice, a cut up mango, a banana and toast. I thought back to my guidebooks and the Book of Dread I'd received from the University travel clinic: "Do" drink bottled water. Was there a "Don't" for fruit juice? Was there also a "Don't" for all fruit? There might have been, I thought, as I ate and drank. The mango turned into sweet juice with every bite. I thought if it made me sick it was worth it, and ate the whole thing.

Then the man brought out an omelette filled with dehydrated onions. "Were these rumble tumble eggs?" I wondered, as I also ate them in an effort not to be rude. Only time would tell.

Just then, the gentleman on the computer greeted me. Turned out he was the owner of all of the Ahuja Residencies. He asked how my stay was so far. I said "Lovely," (mostly thinking about the mangos) but mentioned that I couldn't plug anything in because none of my adapters work. He said he had a power strip that he would have brought right up to my room. I mentioned that I couldn't call out of my room using the instructions that I found on the desk. He said to try hitting "9" instead of "0" to dial out, and that he would send up someone from the staff to make sure that worked for me. He said if I ever needed anything, that I should just ask the people I'd met that morning. He asked if this was my first time in India. "Is this your first time in a third world country?" he wondered, and I saw empathy in his eyes. I thought I was exuding confidence, but this last question betrayed my transparent trepidation. We talked some more. He said his son is going to school in Kansas and that he's from Dehra Dunn, which is the same town my friend Anup is originally from. He said he's staying here for the week to get some Visa arrangements made, so he'll be around to help with anything should I need it.

As soon as I got back to my room, the man from the kitchen appeared with a power strip and to make sure I could use the phone.

After the trauma of my rebirth in India, a good shower and an edifying breakfast almost had my head back to its original shape.

What Brendan Meant

Before I came to India, I met with Brendan Kealey who worked in Mumbai for three months on behalf of Pearson. My first days and moments in this country have been filled with realizations beginning with the thought, "So that's what Brendan meant." One of the first things Brendan told me about India was that people honk their car horns a lot. I wondered why this was even significant, but found out as soon as I walked out of the airport into the chokingly humid Delhi smog and heard the cacophonous racket of traffic. The roads are a surging mess of auto-rickshaws, scooters, cargo trucks, cars, pedestrians bicycles, and cows, eight lanes wide but then the lanes don’t really get used when the lines become inconvenient. You squeak in wherever you see a space, or think you can make one—sometimes it doesn’t even matter if you stay on the road if there is a chance to evade stopped traffic by driving through a muddy ditch filled with garbage. As we participated in the contest of whose car can fit through the smallest crack in traffic, I watched my driver’s face in the rearview mirror. He was placid—not even a shifted eyebrow—yet he was blowing his horn like an obsessive compulsive gone mad. As far as I could tell as our car careened from the airport to the hotel, you honk your horn to indicate you’re going to change lanes. You honk your horn to indicate you’re going to pass someone. You honk before cutting someone off and avoiding a full-on side-swipe by two inches. You honk if you think someone’s going to cut you off. You honk at inanimate objects if you’d like them to move, ad infinitum. In fact, most of the trucks here have quaint hand-painted lettering across their rear gates, “Horn Please.” As though honking is really the polite thing to do… It’s much more like when you were a kid and you had that little bell on your bike that you just liked to jingle to let people know you had a bell on your bike, and also that they should pay attention to you. Honking here is more communication than complaint. Honk! Here I am. Beep beep! Here I come.

So when Brendan said "they honk a lot," he was referring to what is really a deep cultural difference inasmuch as driving is such a huge part of American culture. The really amazing thing after seeing this traffic is that somehow the cars do not look like crumpled Coke cans. They are actually some of the cleanest things in the city. It's not uncommon to see a driver polishing his windshield pulled over on the side of the road waiting for his fare. Somehow this "Horn Please" system works well for everyone who understands it--dogs and cows included who pensively wait to wade through traffic at intervals that won't kill them or others.

This is why every Indian guidebook begins with the admonishment of not planning to drive while you are here.

I also learned what Brendan meant when he told me I had to adjust my expectations. He said he'd be looking at housing that looked dilapidated and dishevelled only to find out that it was middle class or upper middle class accommodations. "Nice" has a totally different frame of reference in India.

Right before I left Iowa, I talked to a man with whom I took a class at the University: Anup. Anup is from Delhi. When I told him I was staying in Defence Colony he raised his eyebrows and said, "Very nice. Defence Colony is like the Manhattan of Delhi."

So I held these two juxtapositions in my mind even as it turned to jelly from the 15 hour flight and the shock of arriving half way around the world and hurtling through Delhi traffic Indiana Jones style.

By the time I arrived at the Ahuja residency, my legs felt like the same quavering jelly that ate my brain. My driver took my bags out of the car and pointed toward a guard in front of a gate with a sign: C-83 Defence Colony. At least I could see I was at the right place.

The guard at the gate silently nodded and took my bags as he walked up two flights of white marble stairs into a room with the door ajar. He entered the part of the room that looked like a kitchen and living room and walked through to the bedroom where he deposited the bags, nodded his head and left.

And there I was. Alone.

I couldn't tell if the kitchen/living room was supposed to be a common area, which would mean only the bedroom was mine, so I didn't even know which door to try to figure out how to lock. I couldn't figure out how to turn the lights on (up is off and down is on). I didn't have a room key. I took a moment to steady myself then went to the open door of the kitchen/living room area to try to lock it. There was no doorknob--just the deadbolt which seemed stuck. I had a vision of myself locked in my room with no way out, banging on the door to no avail.

I wandered down to the guard at the gate and told him I needed help. He wordlessly followed me inside as I noticed a brick-sized snail-looking thing on the pavement out of the corner of my eye and just avoided smashing it with my sandal. Back at the room, he jangled the lock until something seemed to click. "Hrmp," he said, nodded, and began to walk away.

"A key?" I asked, and he nodded in agreement and left.

Walking back into the room rather exasperated, I finally found a set of skeleton keys on the desk. They looked like something that might unlock a magic box in a child's fantasy movie--not like something that would secure a Manhattan-style hotel room.

Still, I decided I'd have to lock the doors and get to sleep eventually, whether I got locked in or not.

I closed the door and the deadbolt latched. I stood against the door and considered my surroundings. Most upsetting was the camp stove in the kitchen. I'd expected modern appliances, not a portable gas burner. I'd expected a doorknob and a credit card-type key to my room, not the Jumangi props I found. I'd expected a front desk with lights on and a hospitality-oriented English-speaking person to greet me, not a mute guard at a dark gate. I'd expected a closet with sliding doors and a chest of drawers, not the wooden cabinet that was built into the wall with the lock on it that didn't work and too few hangers for my clothes.

I fumbled through my luggage to find my electrical adapters and my husband with impeccable timing called my cell phone to see if I'd gotten in okay. Instead of reassuring him (as I'm sure he was worried), I cried because the two adapters I'd found didn't work, and I couldn't find the third adapter at all--and I was sure that one would work. What made matters worse is that my cell phone battery was dangerously low as I'd spent almost an hour waiting for my flight to depart at O'Hare on the phone with my husband using up the last free weekend minutes I'd have for three months. I was sure the battery would die and I'd never speak to him again. He told me to get some sleep. I told him, "But I have a camp stove and a skeleton key!" thinking that this would the urgency of the situation, my utter loneliness and low grade panic. He told me the important thing was that I was here and safe. He told me to go to bed.

Of course, I didn't.

Instead I unpacked, placing my toiletries in the bathroom and my clothes in the sticking wooden drawers and finally finding the third adapter--which didn't work. Then I decided to try my computer connection to email people and let them know that I'd arrived okay--and that didn't work. Then I tried to call my husband back on the phone in the room--and that didn't work.

Nothing worked, and I was alone in India with the mumbling guard and the large snail-like creature.

Seeing my options exhausted, I decided to sleep. I kept the bathroom light on, and the light in the kitchen. I closed the bedroom door and grabbed the stuffed animal that my father bought for me on the day I was born (the tiny orange dog's name is Puppy). I cried, then, finally, slept.

The next morning when I woke up and I was able to turn on the shower and hot water came out of it, I was filled with abundant joy and relief. I was okay. It would be okay.

And that's what Brendan meant about adjusting your expectations.

A New Arrival

I can only describe the process of travelling to India as one of rebirth--and not the beatific figurative kind. The kind with blood and primal grunts where you emerge with a smashed head that takes a while to get back to its original shape.

Home is the womb where all your needs are met and the surroundings are familiar. It's peaceful. You know where the food's coming from and that it's decent grub with plenty of vitamins.

The birth canal is the plane which you suddenly find yourself jammed inside at very uncomfortable angles for over 15 hours. You work real hard to get yourself out of that tight spot--even get pushed by people with giant carry-on luggage--only to find at your eventual emergence a world of confounding sounds and smells and people so that all you can do is bust out crying until someone slaps you (in case of travel alone, slap self).

Eureka!

Relief! I have the Internet back. If you noticed a gap in my postings, it's because I travelled to India and had all manner of trouble with my wireless VPN software preventing me from accessing the network at the hotel I'm staying with.

I phoned the help desk in America that connected to an office in the very city I'm in. How's that for irony. Anyway, the help desk was maybe a little too hopefully named, because they really didn't provide any help whatsoever. I phoned my coworkers who connected me with a contact in the US who tried to help but couldn't perform the fix because she needed to send me files, and for that, I would need Internet access. More irony.

Finally, today I took my computer to the Pearson office in Delhi even though I wasn't supposed to go in to work until next Monday. A skinny, Hindi-speaking IT manager performed some kind of miracle and now I have Internet access.

I have much catching up to do, so the next few entries will chronicle my first two or so days in India.

Last Moments on Terra Cognita

So my last few days have been filled with a vague panic over finances. Important suggestion to anyone pursuing this program: get these details worked out early.

I think I was trying to be polite when I didn't force anyone into firm answers early on about who would be paying for what and how, but this politeness isn't being reciprocated with a happy outcome so far.

Even though I am going to India, the expenses I will incur are considerable. It seems they are learning how to cash in on the oodles of western business people making their way through the country, and I can't blame them.

I, however, am left in a bind. I don't have the cash to pay for everything up front, and that is how the guest house where I am staying would like payment: cash. They accept MasterCard for the lodgings, but for my driver who will be paid by the hour the whole time I am there, they tell me they want a lump sum payment upon checkout. My estimate is that this lump sum will be around three thousand American dollars (times that by forty to calculate the rupees and the sum sounds even worse).

So here I am, four days before I take off with no way to pay for this venture.

Finance here is trying to come up with solutions but there is so little time (especially because the Forth of July holiday is now approaching), that the possibilities are limited.

They've asked me if I can rent a car instead of hire a driver. They've asked if I can stay somewhere else, and I am hard pressed to answer any of these questions. For help with any of this, we need to contact India, and that takes 24 hours since they are a full ten and a half hours ahead of us. They're gone for the day by the time we start working.

So my last few days are a bit harried, wondering if I should push back the trip if we can't get this worked out. My fear is a vision of myself in India at the checkout desk with no way to pay, getting handcuffed and dragged off. I wonder if an Indian prison is anything like an ashram. I would have a lot of time to get some good meditation in.

I should have started getting down to specifics sooner, but there was a necessary progression that took some time: find the place I'd be staying, identify the dates, assemble a cost estimate, etc., etc.

Still, somewhere early on in that list should have been the checkbox: contact Finance and start asking them all kinds of questions.

I'm assured this will all be okay (and thank you to Finance for the assurance), but lots of people are doing lots of last-minute scrambling that could have been handled much better if we had more time for these phone calls and emails to make their way around the world.

Under the fog of the finance question, I am also making other last-minute preparations. I had to get a "vacation override" at the pharmacy so I could take three months of my prescription drugs with me. I have to stop at the bank in downtown Iowa City to exchange some cash so I can hit the ground in India with a decent stash of rupees hidden somewhere on my body. My sock, perhaps? Those money belts are just so ugly.

Otherwise, I need to start packing for keeps. Since mid-June I've been picking things up and casually placing them into my suitcases, then taking them back out when I need to use them (nail clippers, for instance). But I need to get serious and actually start thinking to myself, "This is all I'll have with me when I get there. What do I need?"

I've set all my bills up so I can pay them online, and I've settled the outstanding accounts with doctors and chiropractors that I knew were still pending.

I'm lucky because my husband will be taking care of the house while I'm gone, so I don't have to make any additional arrangements for lawn care or pet care, and I don't have to forward the heaps of junk mail I'll get so it catches up with me in New Delhi.

I've downloaded Skype so I can communicate over the computer for free. Anyone wanting to do the same can visit: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/windows/

I've made sure my husband is on my checking account so he can pay any stray bills that may filter in while I'm gone.

I've participated in the creation of a Vicki Tracking Device at my office: a paper chain with a link for every day that I'll be gone. Each day, a link gets removed so the chain always indicates how many more days until I return. It's an awfully long chain right now.

And that's it. My shots are done. The airline tickets are purchased. The reservations are made. A driver will be holding a sign with my name on it at the airport when I get there and will take me to the Ahuja Residency where I will sit down after two straight days of travelling and likely melt into a gelatinous puddle of human being.

I leave Cedar Rapids on Sunday morning at 9:20 a.m. and take a 55 minute flight to O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Then I have a layover there until 7:15 p.m. Fortunately, my family lives about ten minutes away from O'Hare, and I can visit with them during the layover.

The 777 that leaves O'Hare at 7:15 on Sunday night will arrive at Indira Gandhi Airport in New Delhi at 8:35 p.m. on Monday night, after being in the air for 14 hours and 50 minutes and crossing enough time zones to create a ten and a half hour time difference.

As I wonder how I will record this travel time on my timecard, I am besotted by the fact that my high school math teacher was once again right: I will use trigonometry in real life.

Not sure I'll post again before I leave. Next time I write, I may be able to describe for you what fifteen hours on a plane feels like. I'll have to pack some really good books.