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.