Day 13: Unforgiving Sun

Today was the hottest day yet. We left the Taj, that oasis that never really felt real except the overpriced everything. The following events happened before we actually went to work. The driver eventually showed up but then he had a flat tire There were two white young men in the lobby, looking at Jennifer constantly and as persistently as any Indian men had, though probably for different reasons. Finding any white people here brings up many feelings for any other Westerner, curiosity, desire for connection, most of all. The car had no AC, as Jennifer had usually asked for, and at first it was all right, but the heat became increasingly unbearable. The driver, which is new to Jennifer, has a knack for honking constantly, much more than anyone else! Driver just assumed he knew where he was going until we asked and made him realize he was wrong. It was an extra 30 minutes in the stifling heat. Visited a bookstore in this market area of the district of Aliganj. That was when I realized how really hot 120 F was. The sun looked down on us with a sullen face like a father quietly angry with a child while contemplating the little person's fate. Not even a brief moment at a cafe was enough of cool me down at all. The driver was nowhere to be found when we returned to the shady spot he left us. A driver must always be there when the client/master returns to the car; such is the rule of the relationship. We were quite miffed considering how hot even in the shade it was. Finally we were in the office. I started working on a small program for them. I felt bad that the people using the program was already there and were just waiting, as they did the previous two days. At the same time, Indians, and people in the developing world in general, have so much patience, especially if they are poor (even by the standards of their own countries). There's some strange correlation between how much patience you have and how little money you earn. I am not talking about forced patience, but a kind that you grow up with. When resources are scarce, you just grow up waiting for your turn without really knowing when that turn comes. The electricity went out at some point. Different neighborhoods lose electricty at different frequencies (usually related to how wealthy the neighborhood is), but every neighborhood loses electricty at least once a day. Hotels and restaurants usually have a generator outside to serve as backups, but brilliantly somehow they made it so that when the generator kicks in the AC doesn't work still! The office has no generator so we just sat there and bore the rising heat. My headache started to pounce in, and I didn't know why. I just thought I hadn't had enough sleep. But by the evening, it became clear that I had suffered from heat exhaustion. I was nauseated, my body started aching, and the headache refused to go away. Father Sun has exacted an easy vengeance on this foreigner. Many locals didn't seem to be fazed by the sun, but I am sure they have their own system of coping with the unforgiving sun, a system not so easily discernible by these foreign eyes of mine. I was too weak to even get out of bed by evening. This entry is made three days later; it would take more time to recover from the heat exhaustion only to subject this weakened body to Delhi Belly II!