pre monsoon rambling

In the days prior to the advent of the Monsoon, people begin talking about the heat and humidity that peaks right before the rain begins.  It is only pleasant, never.  The heat is persistent all day and night long.  At 7am it feels like the afternoon and by afternoon it feels like you're sitting in a souped up stereophonic oven that only pipes in traffic noise.  This year, the rains have stalled somewhere outside of Kerala, and are expected to come three days late.  It's a wonder how this can be predicted so precisely, though I'm certain it's akin to taking a gander at a Weather Doppler and just playing spot the Monsoon?  The cause for the stalled rain is Laila the cyclone which was in the Bay of Bengal, just near Tamil Nadu.  (Cyclone is southeast Asian for hurricane, mmm hurricanes)

My maid  started talking about the impending rain in April, she comes in at 8:30 in the morning and in in the middle of rolling the chapatti dough, she said to me, "Doesn't it feel like it's going to rain?"  And I nodded in ascension, a little puzzled because the heat felt the same to me, all that was different was the haze that graced the city, it seemed thicker,  a permanent smoke film filter that increases and decreases depending upon the season.  That's really the only way to tell the seasons apart, the ebb and flow of the smoky haze.

Then some time during the Month of may everyone slowly begins looking skyward at the expanse of blue.  No clouds, how is it going to rain this early?  Nitin said to me, there's no way the rain will start before June.  Still, hopeful clouds began gaining momentum. The cloud cover began in gusto just last week with a few morning clouds clustered above Powai.  Every day these were quickly eviscerated by the strong near equatorial sun.  And then I woke up this past Saturday to thick and looming grey clouds that I scrambled to take a photo of (there! Posted to Instagram!).  But wait! There was rain, it was only a light drizzle, they call this kind of rain rim jhim....the little drizzle lasted a few minutes. 

BUT! RAIN!

Now I've turned into one of the hapless Bombayites who looks up from eating mangoes (because it's mango season! but not really because I'm not that crazy about mangoes) and looks on at the ever darkening and gathering clouds and thinks to herself, it looks like rain.  And I say to N, do you think the rains will come early this year?  And I chat with my maid and we talk about the rain.  And you know what? It feels like rain I think.  I hope I get to be here for that first shower before we jet off to New Jersey, where it still feels like early spring.  I am suddenly a wee worried.  We have no warm clothes, what if it's cold in the States...going from this HEAT! to an early summer chill, will feel like a Bombay winter all over again!

Oshiwara Old Furniture Market

A jaunt to Jogeshwari (w) yesterday. Photos are of my buddy Neha's prizes!

Loving where I live little by little

I know I've been hard on this country, I think perhaps even harder than people who are completely foreign to it.  I tend to be less forgiving, more embarassed by the lack of progress, quick to criticise, mortified by the lack of manners, the lack of civic duty and quick to point out all the in equities and injusticies.  I do it very often, I know.  Too often, I know this too.  So often that it's likely that people think that I dislike my entire experience of India and that's not true.  I am growing to love this country, (country of my birth), even this city.  This very difficult to navigate and love city. 

Much of the credit for this love goes to this great group of ladies from Powai that I've managed to find through another OIS mother.  The Powai Explorers they're called, started by another intrepid lady who said to me the other day, "I needed more than a once in a month book club and a coffee morning", and so she started this, and in doing so changed my experience of Mumbai dramatically in a matter of a few months.  Through this group I met a whole group of women and you know what, I found out?  That most of my initial, "ohmygod what was i thinking moving here?  This was an awful decision! the worst decision ever!" Was not really an India thing at all, it was more of an adjustment thing.  Just knowing that, assuaged so much of my anxiety.  I think it freed me up to just let go man...to quote Mel Brooks, "you got to let the coolness into your vertebrae" Except hey, we don't do that, I'm a mom. Right?! Right!   So this post has really become so stream of consciousness, I began it with the best of intentions...it was going to be a well thought out and rehearsed post and now look at it..it's gone to hell in a handbasket...

My friend...She said to me, on a car ride home from our most recent jaunt into Goldeval Market and Chor Bazaar, that the most important thing for her right now was to have helped, even if it was just to have helped one girl stay in school, be educated and become something, instead of having to go the leave school in the 10th grade, get married, have children route that seems to be the only bleak option for the majority of girls in the slums, that will have been something...

I marvel at her spirit.  International Women's Day was last week and the women of Mumbai celebrated by getting spa treatments and pedicures and drinking champagne and going shopping.  I would have done the same really, well ok, only the champagne part, a whole lot of the champagne part!  So with my champagne in hand, and shakily standing up (you kow because of all that champagne) I think of women like her quietly fighting the good fight. 

Peace out.

quick one before i go

After a while, it becomes easier to have the google search page as your home page.  It is easier not to be assaulted with the, "three minor girls raped, and dumped in a well", "minor raped by police constables", "No arrests in rape case", it becomes much easier to indulge in  Highheel Confidential or Fashion Scandal.  Who wants to read about News when everyday all I read about is how awful it is to be unlucky enough to be born a girl in India.  I skyped with one of my very good friends yesterday and she asked me if I could see myself making a permanent home for myself here.  I find myself conflicted despite the perks that my husband's job affords us.  The richness of history and language and family that we are afforded in India all are no match for the freedom that women are afforded in the States.  I want my daughter to be able to make the same rotten choices that my son will be allowed to make.  And for that reason I don't know if I can continue living here; I don't want my daughter being limited at every turn.  My cousins tell me, India is different now, but it's not, not in ways that matter to me.

I know that my friends living in the States, who have grown up in India won't ever understand what that means, because they haven't done their growing up in the States.  But the idea of limitlessness is something that doesn't exist for women, really any young person here. I don't want my daughter to worry about duty, or worrying about whether her in-laws will accept her, I don't want her to come 2nd to her mother-in-law, EVER.  To that end, beyond a longish engagement, there's not much I require from either of my kids as far as marriage and beyond are concerned.

So then, what's left to do?  Live the best you can while you can, we aim to soak everything up, see as much as we can, be with as many relatives as we can.  Enjoy the hell out of India because there is sure a hell of a lot to enjoy.  We've already got a trip to Kerala in the works, though at the end of sweltering March (I don't know what I was thinking)!  And of course when this school year ends we will have our granddaddy of trips, the trip home! Our trip to the States!   In the next few years here hopefully we will get to travel further East, something entirely impossible when India was our final destination.

So, I sit in my Bombay pad in the  Eastern suburbs, sipping my morning tea, wondering what the day will bring.  I did not bypass the front page today, and did read the rapey news.  It's disheartening to see that nothing is changing, people are calling for the resignation of officials...like that will quell the rapes..*sigh*  shakes it off
Haji Ali today!

illustrations of a North Korean concentration camp (from Reddit)

What kind of world is this?  Clearly taking notes from the Japanese pre WW2....Photo Album - Imgur

peppered with them

You never lack for them you know, first times.  India has lots of them, first times.  There's the first time you're stupefied when a full grown adult just cuts the line in front of you like it's the most natural thing in the world to do.  Then there's the thrilling first time you freaking yell at that idiot of a person, that, HELLO? there's a line?  And they either stare at you like you're some sort of idiot too or  they have some shame and get back in line behind you.  Oh yes, sometimes, you get to your payment counter to pay, pull out your credit card and the cashier will take your credit card and walk it up to the register upstairs because that's the only register that will perform such a transaction (BANGS HEAD!) and walk it back down so you can sign! And then of course there's the first time you call your driver to bring your car around and pick you up on the highway because the mall pick up is a traffic snarl.  And so as you're picked up and swept away into the easy air conditioned confines of your car you walk past a small child, no older than your seven year old son, sleeping on the sidewalk, while Mumbai churns around him. 

You deposit your bags on the floor of the car and try not to stare but your driver is honking at the rickshaw he is stuck behind that is stuck behind a bus that is stuck behind the cars that shouldn't have turned before the signal turned green or red or something and so your car is stuck, and your headphones are on and the music is some godawful Hindi movie nonsense mashup and all you can do is stare at that boy and look at what you bought and look at him laying there with the sun in his face and people just going about their day.  That's a freaking kid! Sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk! 

I picked my daughter up at the bus stop.  The other mothers came.  There was the usual banter.  I wonder where his mother is.