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.