India: Day 25: Walking Alone

Today the cook-maid came early and made us the usual chai and lunch. We weren't so happy with how she has been cleaning the rooms and she forgot or neglected to prepare the daal (lentil). So we had our translator/friend call her to complain. Later in the day for dinner she made the daal but still didn't make more than one vegetable dish. Dealing with servants, an integral part of Indian society, is something that takes a long time to understand. Dealing with them is part of the social fabric that foreigners like me find very hard to adjust to. There are no contracts, but the social norms are, at least in appearance, different from how we behave with one another. The oppressive relationship between servant and master is at least ostensibly cruel but I don't understand it enough to judge, and, in this case, not enough to do anything different.

After that's all done we went to the office. No electricity or water, as it was the norm there, at least once a day. So no AC and no computers, but I worked on my laptop. After that we went downtown and I spent an hour and a half walking around by myself. Here're some high-lights:

The saga of the mobile modem continues. They rejected our application because the original lease was not notarized! The guy explained to me that it wasn't discrimination against foreigners per se, more like for non-residents of this state, and that residents of other states would have to go through the same hoopla. Whatever! We decided with much anger in the end that on Monday we would go back and get our money back and forget the whole non-sense.
I witnessed a fight among three girl urchins. Two younger ones were fighting against the oldest. When one of them threatened to hit the oldest one with a piece of rock, the oldest one grabbed her by the hair and grabbed the rock from her. There were lots of screaming and a few rickshaw-wallahs nearby were amused. Then the smallest of the three went and got a piece of brick and threatened to throw it at the oldest one. Then after more yelling the little one made good on her threat but the missile just bounced off the oldest girl. After more yelling the oldest one struck the girl whose hair she was hold on the head, with the edge of the rock! I could see the shock on the victim's face that lasted about a second, and the wailing started. She screamed and wailed and kept looking at her palm after touching the point of attack on her skull. I didn't see blood but she was screaming like there was no tomorrow across the busy road. I was tempted to follow her. I wonder where these urchins go after their daily routine of begging. There were other urchins with more official-looking urns in their hands that had a metallic shape of child, probably for some organization, ostensibly. I ignored them too, just as the locals did. Those urchins were always boys.
A chubby little boy ("chubby" is not an adjective I would use commonly here for any living being) came up to me and shatted with me in English. I suppose my huge SLR camera distinguished me from the crowd, as opposed to my skin color. He and his brother, who also talked ot me after mustering the courage, seemed extremely upper-class, both wearing polo t-shirts and in very good shape and had very fair skin. (As I might have hinted before, skin color, though does not reflect race as there is really just one race here, does reflect class and wealth backgrounds.)
Another boy came up to talk to me after making a U-turn with his bike. He even managed to get my email address (the one I use for spam). He's in a school that got in the Guiness World Record for having most number of branches in a city (beat that, USA!). He is studying computer engineering and was delighted to know that I was a programmer.
Got a little lost in the wealthy neighborhood of Aliganj, where the houses are beautiful and very new. I did see a bunch of propped up shanty houses owned probably by some goat herders who were squatting in an empty lot. Another empty lot was squatted by probably the servants of the people who owned the houses there. I saw the usual shirtless children, and, as I call them "The Simpsons" because they always wear the same shirt, albeit full of holes.
I was very moved by the sight of this old man, in his eighties, probably. He had short white hair, tall, but only seemingly so because his legs and arms were sticks. His legs looked hardly enough to prop up even that frail body. He was walking very slowly, not in the manner of a stroll through this posh section of one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city. But rather, he seemed like making an effort with every stroll. The old, dingy bottle of water of questionable quality in his right hand made his struggling walk ever more pitiful. I wonder if he was walking out in this heat (though it was overcast) because he didn't like to be in his nice home or because he had no real home to go to. He didn't look like he belonged there, and if he did he was too old to be a servant and at most living with children who were servants. His age and his struggle to do the simple task of walking with those sticks called legs reminded me how meaningless life is as poverty lingers until one's death.

Overall it was good to be alone, walking down the streets of this busy part of downtown. I don't know if I have started to get more desensitized about the poverty, the abject depressiveness a huge slice of society here, but I want to go do something else, to see more lively sections of the city not marred by abused urchins and hopeless and abandoned elderly people. I am looking forward to seeing the muslim quarters and the old town.

We took a "shared auto" home. That's a motorized rickshaw that behaves like a tempo where people hop in and pay a fixed price for the length of the trip. I got to sit next to the driver, and when he kept bumping his left arm to me I realized that was because on his right was another passenger. Mind you the driver's bench is meant for ONE PERSON! The driver! But this is Asia outside Japan and South Korea and all the rich pearls of the vast continent. This is where you cram as many people in one place as possible to maximize your income while still being able to offer affordable transportation to the mass.

Before that interesting trip we took a tempo to do more shopping for vegetables and fruits. We were told later to buy just for the day and not so much. I guess you would always get freshest produce, but we don't have time to do that. So perhaps in the future we would just have the cook do the shopping. But how do you reimburse her in this stratum of society where no one uses receipts? Our dhobi came today; that's a washer woman. Usually they refuse to wash underwear and socks because touching such sensitive or lowly thing is reserved for the lowest of the caste system, but she didn't care, not sure why. But if she is low caste she certainly is more educated than our cook, who neither knows how to write (in Hindi) nor know any English word (not even numbers, which are as used in English as in Hindi!). The dhobi seemed more enthusiastic about working for us. We couldn't figure out what the price plan was so we had our translator/friend come again to do all the explanation. One thing that stood out for me regarding her was the thing with the brick. She asked if we had a stool, and obviously we didn't have that or much else in this empty apartment. Instead of complaining that she wouldn't be able to do a good job like that, she just went out and down the steps and came back with a block of brick! I mention this here to remind people that poor people aren't dumb. If anything, they are more creative with the little knowledge they have than those learned upper-class people. Surival skills aren't learned in the comfort of a classroom.

For those who don't know, you usually have your clothes washed and ironed in this country by a "dhobi", though washer-drier is becoming more common. So we had her wash the stuff and they get returned after one full day. On my lone walk around Aliganj I saw several men ironing. They use these really old fashion irons that you have to put hot coal in before using. The women were the ones I saw doing the washing (which involved scrubbing and beating using well water or city water).

When all the food was prepared the whole raucous of talking and talking was done, and everyone has left, we finally could eat. We had this really interesting mango, smaller than the big yellow ones we been having, and the skin greener. The flesh is a lot more yellow and the taste is actually better, the flavor more complex and interesting. I wonder if one could be a mango connoisseur here! More varieties will arrive!