This tree brought to you by the Delhi Metro

Song – Kandahar by Creature, and Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers.

Drink – cranberry & kiwi juice and duty free gin.

Pictures – clothes in Udaipur

Hindi in many ways is an easy language to learn. Most things invented in the past three hundred years have only an English word, and no Hindi translation. It’s perfectly fine to say “Bank kahan hai?” Or ‘Mere pas hotel hai.” I love living in another language. I wake up in the morning with things to learn to say in Hindi. I talk to auto drivers, and practice the future tense, the conditional, and the general sense of impending affront that is the camouflage of Delhi survivors. Hindi is also in many ways stubborn, just like any language. For example, ‘kal’ means yesterday and tomorrow. A bus that is stationary is male, but a bus that is moving is female. I had a language lesson over bowls of spices in Chandi Chowk. I’d like to imagine that the seeds and powders and twisted roots smelled much like they have for thousands of years. I imagine that middle-aged women are pawing through bowls of raisins from Damascus to Kolkota.

I’m starting to meet people, or at least to feel like when I’m alone it’s marginally intentional. It is still hard. I walk into a bar, and the waiters try to direct me to the other white people. Now that I have a phone, I often look at it as if it’s going to tell me something important. My friends from before are full of joy, and ladies nights, and advice like “You’ve never done it until you’ve done it in a sari”. The foreigners listserves also have useful information about finding gynecologists (hard to do), sex toys (illegal in India) and someone to take care of your children/dog/yoga posture.

I’ll not take personally the street signs that say ‘Say NO to Crackers! Delhi Police Department’. I tried to register myself at the foreigners registration office last week. The giant sign on the wall said that foreigners on research visa have to register. After three hours in line, the first clerk said I didn’t have to register. When I pointed out to him that his wall said I had to, he let me run outside, photocopy everything, and run back in. He was distracted by the rainbow of humanity besieging him. Imams from Nigeria, broke American students, Russian fashion models, and most recently Burmese and Afghan refugees circulate around the airless room, waiting for the centrifuge to determine their fate. The man directly in front of me was from DR Congo. He was on a student visa, but was taking rather long to finish his engineering course. Wouldn’t you? India attracts these lost souls from all sides. Some of them have the blue laminated cards from the UNHCR, some of them have the shadows of mountains in their eyes, some of them sit with bright eyed children covered in healing scrapes. No one has plans for the afternoon.

Often it’s confusing and terrifying. I’ve been followed home once by a strange car. Tonight, I had convinced myself I wasn’t being trailed by an Indian guy. Then he stops in front of me at the end of a metal bridge 3 ft wide, 40 m long, and suspended over an open sewage drain. After you, he says. Normally self-protection reflexes stick to me like 13 year olds on family vacations. I’m just going to have to overcome the allergy. Otherwise there will be no gram flour pancakes with stewed tomatoes and garlic in the mornings, no channa for lunch, no sprouted daal and lemon salad for dinner, no triple fried pakoras in between. I’ve still got to take the Northwest Passage and build my own canoe out of duct tape.

On a side note/shout out to my nerds: I learned that the language spoken by almost all of this region 60 years ago, according to the census reports, was ‘Hindustani’. Since then, the census reports show 90% self-identifying as Hindi or Urdu speakers. Needless to say the language hasn’t changed much in common usage. The Hindi newspapers, however, are replacing all Persian influenced words with Sanskrit, and the Urdu papers are removing Sanskrit in favour of Arabic, with the result that few in either country can understand anything.

Good chicken costs less!

Song – oh! how you used to know me well, the superfantastics. Castles! by Forest City Lovers
Drink – cranberry & kiwi Ceres juice and duty free gin.
Picture – Aileen’s giant new pants. Definitely room for another

It’s sort of raining, sort of silent outside, in the dubious transition of a Delhi September. Lightning lit up the sky today as we were driving back from the India team retreat. When we reached Delhi, traffic was blocked up for miles around. After an hour listening to Bollywood tapes with the delighted driver, it appeared that the traffic was emerging exactly from my colony. The silt from the flash flood was inches deep, and there were square blocks that looked important for someone else in the middle of the road.

Just another part of the adventure of living in Delhi. It gives a new-found appreciation for safety warnings. My 5 L butane gas cooker says “Winner! Super quality!” and finally “O.K. tested”. Today on the road I saw a shop informing “Good chicken costs less!” Yet, some things are absurdly precise. The ‘English wine’ shop sells only wine from Maharastra with the ingredients ‘water from grape juice, ethyl alcohol produced by fermentation, yeast’. I suspect these are the ingredients of every bottle of wine, but I’m not sure whether to be comforted yet. It was hard to concentrate on the shops tonight as the road we were driving along had the four middle lanes taken up by the Delhi Metro construction. There is no where to divert the traffic to. Everyone drives further up on the sidewalk than usual. So the construction company has embraced all the newfound obstacles with signs that indicate, ‘this tree brought to you by Larsen & Toubro’. It’s still safer than the crews demolishing the buildings on the Delhi – Gurgoan road, who stand two stories in the air and hack away with chainsaws on the concrete struts between their feet.

Delhi is starting to feel a bit more familiar. This Tuesday evening I was walking back through the market with my anti-tourist gear: a loaf of bread, dahi, and a sponge for the floor. I was almost mown down by someone I know. The samosa-walla and the flower sellers and even the crows in the dumpsters stopped while we had a big loud hug. When Ryan and I went to Chandi Chowk, I found the perfumerie that has been there since 1904, and whose bag houses Owen’s Apple Nano. Now I’ve mopped my floor, if not cooked a meal in my apartment. That must count for at least one pomegranate seed on the way to a season in a new world.

Death by Palaak Pakora

[picture - Progress!]

[music – boards of Canada, Bishop Allen, other b songs from Gavin and Amit]
[drink – Assam tea from Brown Sugar. Apparently rented. They call it stomach troubles, but really it’s just delegation of responsibility for trouble to the guts]

Three days in, this trip has still been a good showing for faith. The sewage drainage pit is downwind, and it is cool enough to sleep at night without an air conditioner, at least until 6 am. Delhi as also done what I expected it to, which is crystallize my identity as a white woman. I’ll have to try very hard to break out of the expat tracks. My helpful upstairs neighbours recommend a restaurant that is full of expats, and actually serves sushi. Right now that seems tasteless, but perhaps after a few more months of unrelenting infamy I’ll be ready for anonymous whiteness, however expensive. It’s not just people who are defined against elsewhere. The drygoods say ‘export quality’ and the sugar says ‘refined to European standards’. The coffee shop has faux 50s women on the walls and Avril Lavigne on the radio. [addition Sept 4 – it’s not just top 40, it’s the same top 40. They say ‘Justin Timberlake! Timbalake! every 3.5 hours] The table decorations are either non-functional hookahs or non-functional bongs, but too far from either to tell. Of course, this is the location that I paid more money to obtain. It’s quiet, and the rickshaw drivers who follow me home in the dark are comparatively deferential.

I don't like fans

Aug 30.
Delhi, India

[music – Oscar Peterson, Note by Note album]
[drink – ‘Inder Raj Rum squash special’ – Old Smuggler Indian rum, water, and ‘orange sqaush’, a nectar composed of sugar, water, and orange juice, in that order]

The Oscar Peterson is struggling to overcome the sound of the fan overhead. It’s behaving better than it was last night, when it cut out periodically, as if in collusion with the mosquitoes who crept in through the kitchen window. The room is pretty, and the capacity of my landlord to define reality through assertion is impressive. I shouldn’t need an AC because the hot season is almost over. I shouldn’t have any mosquitoes because they don’t come to the third floor. Fortunately he also has put a lot of care into my little apartment. The kitchen would be small by Manhattan standards, and so far has no electricity, or anything to use with electricity or gas. The bathroom is small but clean. It has the eccentricities of ‘conveniences’ over here. The sink drains through a tube onto the floor. It points into a hole in the wall, and from there I know not where it leads. The shower is a bucket on the floor, and the heater is OFF according to the giant red switch on the wall. The main room does have room for a bed, a couch, two chairs, two side tables, and a fridge. Take all your mental pictures of those items and multiply by about 0.5, and you’ll have an approximation of my furniture.

I’ve landed in a very nice part of Delhi. The houses are beautiful, set back from the road by walls and surrounded by trees and flowers of many different colours. Most importantly, there is no alley of mechanics shops. It is astounding now that I am here how much I took on faith. The window doesn’t look into someone else’s house, the house isn’t right beside the drainage ditch, the landlord truly wants guests. Regardless, I felt very timid in the market today. I was trying to buy batteries and bread, and glucose biscuits (for Shakti!) I couldn’t quite assert myself enough to find out what the bread cost, and I found it very hard to decide what kind of food I wanted. I ended up eating bread and jam for breakfast, and more for dinner. Maybe it would be better if my landlord weren’t so helpful, so I would buy my pulses and ghee myself. Maybe I’ll just do it myself and see what happens.

Tomorrow (today, really) I go into the office for the first time. We have a meeting with the CEO of our partner investor on Monday. On the plane over here, I tried to give myself permission to be competent and healthy and happy. That’s Ashoka terminology for, well, freeing yourself from all the constraints that no longer exist and you’ve ceased to struggle against, and all the barriers that you’ve given up resisting. But first, I’ll have to break a 500 Rs note and negotiate with a rickshaw driver.