Day 28: Return of the Heatwave

The cook was still a no-show. It's really annoying, actually. I would just clean my own apartment and cook my own food, but once you're part of a certain fabric of society where servants and management of their tasks are integral threads, you just have different pressures and responsibilities. The Dhobi, Neelam, showed up with our clothes, a day early. She wanted to see when we could visit her. We told her to come back the next day. She seemed so interested in getting to know us, and getting photos of us. I wonder what her thoughts were about life, her aspirations, her desires. Or maybe being simple means you don't have so many varieties and such complicated thoughts. When I go meet her I would find out more, I guess. Tuesday seems to be the free food day. That's when religious tents are found everywhere and people giving out food of some sorts in little bowls made of leaf, probably betal leaf, the central ingredient to paan, though people don't eat or chew the bowls. I saw some gooey orange grainy sort of thing in some, and rice in others. It's interesting how many religions entice and maintain membership based on food, on giving food, on the meaning of food. The absence of the cook means we had to get lunch outside again. (Why don't we just cook lunch for ourselves? Not sure.) We decided to walk in the 100+ degree heat, and we realized two things. One is that we could bear the heat a little better now. And two, because of the heat, or just the way Indian society is structured for those with money, we never get to walk very much. So we walked to this The food was surprisingly good for restaurant food, though really expensive (meaning quarter of what you would pay for lunch in the Northeast). This was in this little shopping area between the office and our apartment. On our way back we walked through the slums in front of the office. It's still a moving experience going by the slums and see the people, especially children there. Often you see the women, because they are the ones left behind while men go out to fetch some rupees. Today I saw a middle-age woman walking down the road to fetch her children. And I noticed that she had nothing under her thin sari. There's nothing sexual, let alone attractive about a woman who is just skin and bones under an overused sari; her appearance is just a simple, stark manifesto of poverty that can invoke too many feelings to explain for someone outside, someone with money, someone who still sees those slums through an invisible and protective window. I always wave at the people I see, especially poor people, to let them know they are no more invisible than me, but still I feel like I am the Pope inside a bullet-proof glass cage as I roam through this desert of poverty. I saw a lot of boars roaming the field where the slums were. I saw random people, women and children, squat down among the tall grass to do their natural business because, obviously, there is no sanitation system there. And then they just would get abstracted into images within my glass cage.

waiting for free food again thin as a stick boars in the midst burning trash child in the slum