Day 17: Moving In

Today is the big day! Supposedly we can move in in the morning! Guess not! We called and it would be after 6PM. It is difficult to plan your day when you don't know when you can do what. We would like to buy some food, furniture, and other household stuff, but it's not possible if we don't know for sure what there is in the apartment. So the waiting game continues. But I couldn't, just couldn't, allow myself to be completely reshaped into the tedium and unpredictability of this culture. Not when it comes to something important like housing, not after having lived out of suitcases that aren't meant for a life of living out of suitcases. So I did the best I could to arrange for a car at the most optimal time. But in the meantime there was more waiting. I have lost track of time. I didn't even realize it was Saturday. I only realized it when we arrived in the office and I put myself in the working mode again. Then again, Indians work on every other Saturday. My schedule didn't completely work; the apartment wasn't ready at 6PM as no one was in the office to greet us. It wasn't until past 7PM, when I was busy getting "grumpy", as Jennifer accused me of, and trying to find phone numbers to get an update, that the people came and announced that the apartment was ready. "Ready", what does that mean? Now I have to question every word. When they said the AC was "ready" they discounted the requirement for electricity to be able to to feed it! So we went to do some shopping, but with so much time lost, we had little left with the driver, who is paid by 4-hour blocks. We were in this market, crazy, as usual. A few events are worth noting: The Foreigners We needed a simple chair, like the plastic ones from the office. We went to a place where the merchant said to our friends that each would be 250 ruppees ($5). But then somehow when he saw us, especially Jennifer, the price went up by 100 rupees! Our friends were annoyed and didn't want to pay this foreigner's "tax." He wouldn't budge so we left. I wonder, why did he prefer to lose a sale than lose the dignity of charging wealthy foreigners that extra $2? Or maybe I missed something. I must have missed something. I wish I understood enough Hindi to see the nuance of this irrationality. So from now on we were more wary about appearing too soon with our friends. Not everyone had this foreigner's tax. The next furniture seller didn't charge more than what he normally charged, that same 250 rupees. The Ditch I think the city is slowly, finally, putting in more (still open) sewers in the streets. There is a big ditch lining the market, causing a lot of traffic congestion. While waiting for the stupid chair-wallah to decide on a price, I saw two children in rags sitting in the ditch, one holding a tiny human creature, probably his brother or sister, who was not moving, too tired, just wrapping his sleepy body around the boy's neck. They were not moving much in the dirt. All three of them, even in the dimness of the ditch, were scrawny, malnourished, and at least temporarily abandoned. Words can hardly describe how pitiful they were. They seemed weakened among the cacophony of traffic, shoutings of merchants, and the general aloofness of the poor capital. And a few meters away was a boy in better clothes peeing into the dirt. And the section just below me is a puddle of unknown liquid with shoe-prints in it. This ditch is not just dirt, apparently, and those poor children were just sitting there, among the invisible filth, waiting for something to happen in their lives, at least tonight. The Cow verses the Phal-Wallah (Fruit seller) We bought these funny-looking melons that have only starting popping up all over the city in the last two days. After the usual haggling we got three. Then I heard a scream of anger, and I saw a cow, in its mad desperation, dare to pull off a melon from the stack and started munching on it. The fruit seller whacked it with a long bow, but it was more for venting his frustration than preventing the bovine (bold-vine?) robbery or even deterring future ones. The cow, like most cows in the city munching on the nectar of edible jettisons in Lucknow's trash heaps, was probably starving and in a brave and desperate moment could not resist a fresh fruit. The fruit seller was helpless in protecting his precious commodity that would help bring more than fruits to his family's table. I didn't notice his expression after he spanked the huge animal. I just saw how content the cow was munching with glee the juicy melon pieces on the ground. Cows are never startled. They have this face whose expressions rarely change, not by the shouts of humans who find them pests but can't slaughter them for a religion that brings them some meaning in life, not by the constant honking directed to them or not, not by the stifling heat, and certainly not by a torturous life of daily run through the different trash heaps. Seeing a cow or a bull munching on garbage whose contents I cannot discern is one of the saddest sights in this country that I still can't shake off after two and a half weeks. I've never found cows to be cute or had any affinities for them; I've always simply eaten them. But to see them outside the pastures, outside the life they were meant for, even as servants of humanity, and being subjected to the same state as strayed dogs and cats, this huge, docile animal, to see its expression brings me immense sadness; it's like seeing a slave, a servant, a child, accepting beating without cringing or anger, merely acceptance, to see that no change will come because it is in their nature to accept life as it is. Wake up! Perhaps the most disturbing sight of the evening's shopping experience was in the curtain store. While waiting for our friends to discuss the measurements and, of course, the price, of the cloth we needed for the curtains, from the corner of my eye I saw a man smack a teenager's head against the metal racks that hold the cloth. The teenager, a worker, was apparently dozing off and the man was very angry when he smacked his skull against the heavy dividers. They exchanged a few words. The teenager, rudely awaken from his stupor, was confused and angry too, though I am not sure if he was talking back or just justifying himself. I have not seen such violence done for a long time. I have seen mothers, especially low-income ones, smack their little toddlers in the US, but a man smacking a teenager's head against metal? Only in the movies about some era decades ago. And the man could do it because he was expected to do it, I believe. I haven't seen much but Jennifer says such behavior is not unusual here. Servants, especially lower caste, need to be reminded quite frequently of their place in society. Was this the case? I partly can't imagine any reason because I can't believe such public, condoned, violence can exist. And in front of customers. But what about the customers? I didn't know what to say. In retrospect, especially after talking to Jennifer about it, we should have just left in protest, to show that this behavior was unacceptable however normal it might be in this country. But at least I was shocked; I couldn't think of anything else or felt anything other than shock for a moment. But then this customer stopped thinking about it, stopped feeling the shock, and went on to do something else, like observing them turn the cloth we bought into curtains (here in India everything is custom made and very cheap!). Jennifer still asks me if I am still shocked to see cows munching in the trash heap or the many slums I have been seeing. She eventually stopped seeing them after time. I wonder if I will. I don't want to. I don't want to stop feeling for the injustices I see, injustices that isn't the fault or responsibility of one person or one factor. But the feeling of helplessness persists. Besides, the fact that the smacking of that teenager's head against the metal bar quickly dissipated as I took greater interest in the man sewing our curtain might be a sign that we human beings are fully capable of covering up our sentimentality.

spot the cow! bored at work crazy market