Did Delhi just get quieter?

Cadbury's elclairs, the new small change.

It’s now been about two and a half months since I arrived fresh off the plane onto Indian tarmac. If you happen to have been following this blog since the beginning then you may remember such extracts from my first couple of blog entries as, ”I’ve been in Delhi for less than 24hrs and I’m feeling a little shell shocked,” or,” I was a bit less scared of Delhi today than I was yesterday.” So perhaps the most surprising thing in the last month or so is that this city that terrified the living daylights out of me in my first 48hrs/weeks/month has started to feel like home.

The first time I realised this was walking home from work one day and noticing that Delhi seemed quieter. The combined chorus of rickshaw horns, motorcycle engines, bicycle bells, barking dogs, vegetable wallahs’ calls and construction workers was still going at full force, so either I’d finally started to lose my hearing due to over exposure to extreme noise levels or I’d actually started to get used to it. I have become quite proficient in the art of traffic dodging and looking left, right, up, down and behind me before crossing a road. I am accustomed to receiving my small change in the form of Cadburys éclairs (this is a system I will most definitely be implementing when I return to the UK). I am used to having my way home blocked because a wedding tent has been erected where there was a street that morning. I fall asleep to the sound of fireworks and wake up to the sound of out of time drumming and clapping (the 8am morning exercises of the three schools all carefully positioned right outside my window). These are my new daily routines.

I have to admit that there are still some mornings when I occasionally find myself shouting “shhhh!” to no one in particular in hope that the city will quieten down for a moment, but most days it’s hard to imagine a quieter, more orderly life before Delhi.

A little bit lost in translation

How not to make friends in Hindi

For eight weeks now I’ve been greeting our landlady with the standard greeting of, “Namaste Aunty G,” feeling relieved that if the rest of my Hindi fails me I’m at least greeting her in a respectful way.  It wasn’t until tonight I found out that her name isn’t Aunty G at all. In fact when Zoe had said to me on moving into the flat, “you must greet the landlady as Aunty G because it’s respectful,” she had been saying Auntyji. “ji” the prefix to greet someone respectfully.

I was grateful that my mistake was probably easily disguised on this occasion but I was also a little disappointed to be honest. I hadn’t really questioned where the G came from I just thought that her name must begin with G and that it was an endearing term. It also made her seem quite cool, like the landlady of the Delhi hood, which she sort of is as her empire is continuously growing. New tenements keep appearing where there was once a roof terrace and the other day she beamed when we met her on the stairs and said, “my house is very big now!”

A similar incident occurred when I said to a colleague of mine the other week, “it’s a lovely day isn’t it,” and he replied, “yes, lovely, super bad!” It seemed a bit out of place but I thought perhaps he was using western slang to put me at ease. He must of noticed my puzzled frown though and repeated it several times over then gestured for me to repeat until I realised it wasn’t super bad but ‘suprabhat,’ the Hindi for good morning.

To help me along my local vendors have started to speak only in Hindi to me, partly for their own amusement I think, often falling into peals of laughter when I attempt to respond in Hindi, but I believe it’s well meant. This evening when I proudly explained to our vendor’s mother, “Mei Hindi sikh rahi hoon” (“I’m learning Hindi”) she made me repeat it three times over for her son, husband and other customers that had just arrived, each time laughing a little bit harder. I only hope she was laughing at the sight of an English girl attempting to speak Hindi and not because what I was actually saying was something entirely different.