December already?

It’s December already? So it’s winter with a capital W in Bombay. My space bar is broken making typing this out rather tedious and annoying but I’m going to forge ahead while cursing my brains out. Thankfully I woke up at my typically early (I inherited this from my father’s side of the family) habit of 5am. Feels so good. I have been in sort of a Kumbhakarna (was he the dude who slept a lot or ate a lot?) mood lately, just sleeping and sleeping, waking up with a start in the morning, and scrambling around to get the children up and ready for school! (It’s Bakasur who eats a lot!*thank you Wikipedia) Yeah, so Winter, capital W, not so much. People keep showing up to the bus stop in the morning with sweat shirts and shawls. Even my traitorous children wake up in the morning and ask me to turn the fan off, because (and I have to quote here because it’s just too unbelievable not to!) “It’s so cold!” WHAT? Too cold? Too cold? Are you children insane? Are you pod people? Who are you? This isn’t even freaking early Fall weather. I just can’t. I have to say, despite all the feigned outrage, it amuses me to no end that they are “cold” in this weather. What is to become of them when we go to Nagpur in January, where it IS actually cold, where there is a real changing of seasons!
Yeah. So, it’s December and it feels just like a regular month. There is no hum of excitement as there is in the Northeast United States, no nip in the air, no Christmas Carols starting on the radio much too early. No x-mas displays going up well before Thanksgiving is even over! It barely feels like the end of the year,oh that’s right, maybe that’s because the world is going to end before that. The children keep coming homewith new end of the world scenarios. This idiotic hysteria finally seems to have reached the OIS student body. My favorite (I am sure Arjun got this from The Time Machine) is that the world will end because the moon is going to crash into the earth. No reason, it’s just going to spin out of orbit and crash into the earth and that will be the end of all of us! Pretty neat! If it happens, I hope it crashes directly on India at night! It’ll be one hell of a way to go!
It’s high wedding season! Everyone is rushing to marry on 12/12/12 apparently, all the halls are booked around here. In the suburbs (where I live) the hotels have Santas arriving to please the expat population. I’m mulling over taking the kids to the Westin, the same place we went to have turkey and all the trimmings for Thanksgiving for the festivities. But again, I’m not overly enthusiastic about it, unless the kids express an overt interest in it, I’m not going to broach the subject.
I need to get my wardrobe together for my cousin’s wedding early next year. The saris that have been laying around since I got married (worn only once each) need to be worn again so despite my woeful sari wrapping skills, I am on a mission to learn how to wrap those suckers before the last Lakhkar girl weds in January. To that end, I need to get a hold of some nice shimpi to stich some blouses for me…damn I wish I could just plunk down some nice change and get myself somenew pre stitched saris that I could just slip into, tie a nada and be ready to go. Like the navvar I’m debating wearing. Alas…it is not to be.
Last night I had the MOST fabulous dream. Nitin came to me and said, “S babe, go ahead from now on you can buy anything you want.” BEST DREAM EVER! Then I woke up all excited! At 4am. Unfortunately I was so excited I couldn’t go back to sleep. What’s a girl to do? So I tried on my pretty heels, that are wasting away in Bombay, they’re so lonely and bereft, I can’t wear them anywhere, I wore them around the apartment for a bit, made some tea, and then the JVLR started buzzing, and the cars started honking, and the heat started rising, and my day began…

To Elton John and Songs being right.

Wow. All my angst BS. What am I seventeen? What did Gloria Estefan say after she almost died yeah died and came back? Something about getting on your feet? After she ALMOST died? Not after she moved and lived in luxury with two maids to clean her floors and do her dishes and a dude to drive her around but still she complained because she wasn’t making friends fast enough?
Yeah.

Hints and Allegations

things that totally rocked this month!

• Kids don’t have chicken pox, it was just HFMD
• I finally sacked my squirrlyass Bai who was just a jerk and all around biyotch
• Ganpati bonus, really Bai. You’re a stupid MOFO if you thought I was that gullible.

things that didn’t rock this month

• the constant crying/wallowing
• the missing my mom
• being so freaking sick of Indian food
• feeling completely and totally trapped

This sucks as an entry. But anything I try to write right now comes off so pathetically whiny and pathetic that I can barely stomach putting it down for anyone to see and read, much less bear coming back to read it at a later date. What does strike me about this time though is the mute terror that I feel now. That I am never ever going to have friends irrational kind of fear I felt when I was 10 and we had first moved to the States kind of fear coursing through me. I know on some level that this is just a childish fear and it couldn’t possibly be true. But for some reason this move has just brought out every little fear that little girl had. Even though I know that it’s’ early, that it will take time, I keep repeating to myself over and over, what if it doesn’t happen, what if you never meet people. What if they just don’t like you, loudmouthed American1. Bam! There it is!
And then of course out comes the wallowing, the United States rah rah rah! Bit! Don’t get me wrong. I’m the first one to criticize the States, but my adopted country, faults and all is the only place I will ever call home. Maybe even in the few short months that I’ve been here I’m romanticisizing what it was like there, but I think not. I swear to the great spaghetti monster in the sky I will never EVER bitch about the line at the DMV EVER again. EVER. I swear…In the States I was part of something. Here, the freaking UPites…talk about these Marathis, the Marathis talk about how they're put upon and how the Marathi manoos is all woe is freaking me! (get over yourself marathi manoos!), the Tamils talk about the Andhraites…everyone talks about everyone…and anytime a woman is raped…oh then it’s the fault of the bad old West…In a land of blame someone else, nothing can ever improve because that other will always have another to blame.
I feel like a square piece trying to fit in a round peg. It sucks.

Baby Steps

My neighbours (trying out the English English spelling out here) would come and meet and greet in the first few weeks that we were here, quickly taking a peek inside our rather empty apartment, or flat as they call it here. And I would pertly inform them that our furniture was due to arrive in mid July. I saw the look, you know that look, I’d often heart the tone in my relatives’ voice but had never been privy to the look that accompanied it…until now….it was the, “Oh you poor deluded American” look, “you have no idea how things run here”. My neighbors would smile and nod and say, “Well, they might be a few weeks later than that.” My neighbors were right of course. It turned out that the ship had arrived in Bombay harbour on time, but had no place to dock! So I guess it just sort of sat there until there was space? And then there was the unloading process, and then the stuff had to just sit there as per regulation (I don’t know why) and then it had to clear customs…in the mean time in quiet little Andheri (E)…which I’ve come to find is sort of like Staten Island is to NYC…..even to the auto rickshaw wallahas who will freaking ignore you if they even start with Andh…
>_<
It is the day that the children start school! They went to school! Nitin went to work super early and fell and shattered his ankle as if he’d taken a hammer to it..lovely! He spent that entire week in the hospital! The day he came home was the day the movers brought home our boxes upon boxes of unnecessary stuff that we had foolishly packed and brought. As the neighbours had hinted, our movers had brought our “stuff” exactly three weeks behind schedule! RIGHT ON TIME! My mother-in-law and I fiendishly worked and put the house together… Nitin, despite being a gimp did wonders by putting together some of the IKEA bed and putting away stuff in the storage space…and two months in…most boxes are emptied…
And then I hired a bai and it was good. Well not really because it turns out that having a bai is a cause of great discomfort. Not that I don’t like all this being done for me. I love that I don’t have to sweep and mop the floor, and just don’t have to do all of this house stuff anymore but just the idea of having a servant makes me queasy. I don’t know why. The hierarchy feels wrong somehow, I don’t know if I’ll get used to it. Arjun keeps asking me, “Mom, why do people have to live on the street?” I don’t know what to tell him, I don’t think there’s a right answer. And that’s how I console myself about the bai, it’s that much more money she’s making. Baby steps…

There's only one line!

Bombay things (possibly India things) that are on my mind right now.

• Papayas with no seeds! Seriously, what’s with the seedless papayas Bombay? Freaky!
• What’s with the walking into heavy traffic and putting your hand up, like you’re a traffic cop, so you can stop traffic and cross? What’s up with that actually WORKING?
• How is star anise SO freaking expensive?
• What’s with the skinny jeans in all this heat?
• Morphing into a quasi bargain hunter who will traipse into the next town to find a cheaper kilo of cucumbers.

So, as of right now, we have a completely furnished kitchen. Our building shockingly lacks a gas line and so we had to go it the old red cylinder route. We decided on a three burner stove top, got a fridge, washer and dryer. That covers our food and clothes, and of course, we now have the most important thing, the cable hooked up. I’ve been watching almost old Hindi movies and have been in a frenzied downloading streak. Thanks Pavani! Papuyaar has been a life saver!
I had traveled to Vile Parle (quite close to where we live) and ordered curtains for our living room and bedroom. Unfortunately, what will be now referred by me henceforth as the great curtain tragedy of 2012, I ordered them too short. I eyeballed it and of course, was way off. Nitin didn’t wig out and so we’re going to add some contrasting color fabric and pretend our original intention was to have color blocked curtains. That covers two rooms….the other two, we can wait on. Our furniture is finally going to arrive in Bombay tomorrow! BUT, all the unloading, blah blah, customs, blah blah blah will take two more weeks. I hope that we do get our stuff the second week of August as promised. Otherwise I am going to crawl into the little storage space in the guest room and rock myself back and forth. As nice as this place is, I really miss my stuff and am growing tired of looking constantly like a behenji with my salwar kameez uniform.
Speaking of which, I finally found the harem pants I have been searching for. They are available in abundant supply in department stores and in little mom and pop establishments. I’m bored to tears of going to the malls. This is especially true on the weekends. I suppose during the unpredictable rainy season, the malls are a good refuge, I just can’t stand the crowds. Again, this is probably the wrongest city to be in if you can’t abide crowds. So, ok, it’s not crowds I can’t stand, it’s confined crowds. Also, buying stuff is such a challenge. I decided to buy two pairs of those harem pants that I’ve been coveting and went and stood in line. I was super happy that the line was only two people in. I thought I would be done quickly. After defending my spot by telling other’s who tried to cut in line that there was only one freaking line, and after standing for nearly half an hour, I realized why the line was moving so slowly. The cashier had to walk every credit card transaction to another FAR corner of the store to run it. EVERY time. Why? Why? I don’t understand?
Sigh.

Rain!

It has been raining for three days now and though the initial spurts of heavy rain had brought some relief from the heat, now there is no relief. The only true respite is the time I venture forth and go to market. The market is quite close to my mother in law’s apartment (where we are currently living). Initially the streets, dimpled with potholes that serve as reservoirs for rainwater, were a source of some distress. I tried to hop around the puddles, trying to make my way through the maze but sometimes, I’ve figured, it’s important to just stomp through it. It’s important to just shove through the crowd, the endless and teeming crowd that always seems to be going in the opposite direction from me.
So, in the few short days that I have gone alone to the market, I have learned that there is only one bhaji walla selling jhambul, that you have to venture closer to the train station to get the bigger lemons. The coconut seller taps the coconuts tap-tap-tap to insure a good product! I have learned one important thing, that if you favor one bhaji walla over another you get some free stuff. And that brings me to the poor bhaji wallas! All day they sit in the sometime torrential rain, with their goods covered in tarp, they themselves sometimes soaked. It’s got to be rough for business. All the cilantro is wet, as is the mint and kadi patta…not their fault, still I heard many a customer complaining at the dismal quality of the herbs…Poor dudes.
A trip to the market is nice, even, maybe because of the rain. There’s a camaraderie in everyone trudging through the rain, the equalizing quality of rain is something marvelous. Though I imagine, the Ambani household doesn’t participate in this equalizing…