Train to Mumbai and an almost marriage proposal

     "What is your favourite Indian sweet?"

     "Um. Gulab jamun."

     "What shape is the gulab jamun?"

     "Round?!" 

     "Yes, very good!"

      The group of colleagues sharing my berth on the train to Mumbai have carried out their routine checks and established where I’m from, length of time spent in India and learnt that I speak some Hindi. Delighted but still suspicious and as we've got twenty hours to kill they proceed with their questions in a mixture of rapid Hindi and English. The gulab jamun response has satisfied them to a degree but this is just the start and we run through the whole list of popular themes; what is my favourite Indian dish and how is it prepared, why am I not married and when will I be getting married, will my parents select my husband for me and why do so many couples in the UK get divorced (they consider the answer to the second question to be linked to the first), would I consider an Indian husband? 

     "Sure, why not?" More high pitched shrieks and laughter follow along with a list of suggestions as to suitable potential matches including, curiously, one Aunty’s already married son. 

    "This way I can be spending six months with his wife in Mumbai and six months with you in London isn’t it?" I laughed but she looked back at me expectantly. 

     And then of course came the inevitable test of my willingness to fully submit myself to these situations.

     "Do you know any Hindi songs?" I already know where this is going because I’ve been here before and like every time I want to say no but I know that this would be pointless. Before I came to India the only time you would have found me singing solo in public is in a karaoke bar and that too with loud backing music. Since being in India I’ve become fairly accustomed to being asked to sing, say a few words, recite a poem and even dance on demand, solo, in public view. So I give in.

     "Um, yes?"

     "Which songs?" I list a few and mention a few favourites.

     "Sing one for us! Yes, sing!" Eight faces peer at me expectantly, phone cameras and videos at the ready. So I start singing the few lines I know off by heart from one of my favourite Hindi songs to my new friends and others pausing in the train corridor to listen as the whole thing is immortalised on video to be replayed for the entertainment of their friends and family members when they reach home and as evidence of the gori they met on the train that sings Hindi songs and has a weakness for gulab jamuns.

Dusty laptop

This isn’t my story but I wanted to share it as it made me laugh so much at the time and is a perfect example of the kind of small cultural differences between countries that make the experience of living in a foreign country simultaneously baffling and hilarious.

I was on the way back from a meeting with two colleagues today in an auto and we were talking in very general terms about certain cultural differences between India, the UK and the US. One colleague has an Indian friend currently studying in an American University and her friend had called her up yesterday and was telling my colleague how much she missed home. She said that one of the things that she found so frustrating about living in the US was the different rules and systems to those in India and she gave an example saying that she missed the fact that in Indian towns and cities you would see people’s clothes hanging on the line and laid out across the roofs and terraces of the houses and apartments. In the city in the US where she lives there are strict rules about where you are allowed to hang out your clothes to dry and even stricter rules about where you park your cars, leave your rubbish and the length to which your grass is allowed to grow (not more than 6 inches in case you were interested).

In India when any electrical item breaks or goes wrong it would be absolutely inconceivable to simply go to the shop and replace the broken item with a new one as there will always be a shop or a man, or a man with a shop (a table outside the front of his home with a sign saying ‘repairs’) within a 10 meter radius of wherever you are standing that can fix said item. When my colleague’s friend in the US’s laptop broke she took it to the nearest computer shop and asked if they could repair it. She thought that it had broken because some dust had gotten into the laptop and that all that needed to be done was for the laptop to be unscrewed and the dust to be cleaned out. The shop attendant confirmed that this was what needed to be done but said that unfortunately he would not be able to perform the required task as he did not have the authority or the right to unscrew the laptop. The laptop remained unfixed and my colleague’s friend was yet again confounded by what seemed to her to be a totally ridiculous rule and explained in frustration to my colleague, ‘It’s so ridiculous! They don’t even have the right to screw in America!’

Singing in the rain

On Friday evening the rain finally arrived. One second the sun was beating down and the next it had disappeared behind a sheet of dark grey cloud and the wind swept in from nowhere whipping up great clouds of dust and dirt. And then the rain came. Great buckets of it falling in huge, fat, wet drops, washing away the dust and the dirt from the streets and replacing the hot dry air with clean fresh air. The temperature plummeted from 43 degrees to an incredible 28 degrees in the space of a few hours. It’s the strangest feeling to go from forgetting what it feels like not to be hot and sweaty to suddenly feeling a slight shiver go through you from the cold (28 degrees, my new benchmark for cold!).

Delhi is many things to me but it’s rare that I’d describe it as a beautiful city in its totality but after the first rain it really did seem as though I were seeing the city again for the first time. The day after the rain the sky was the deepest, brightest blue I think I’ve ever experienced here and with the dust washed away the city’s true colours are revealed underneath, the lines of buildings appear sharper and everything is pulled into focus again. The sweet, sticky smell of summer is replaced by the smell of rain water, wet leaves and damp earth and after weeks of breathing in hot, dusty air you feel light headed with excitement at being able to breath in lungfulls of clean, cool air. There’s a palpable sense of relief and excitement that ripples across the city.

I know that in the UK there were days when I just wished I lived somewhere else where it didn’t rain quite so much – much like everyone at home is probably feeling right now after the 191^st day of rain this year – but I hope that when I am back home on one of those rainy days that I’ll at least remember on occasions how much I appreciated the rain out here and how lucky we are to have so much of it.

Neighbourhood watch

I live in a flat on my own in south Delhi. It’s a great little flat. Badly patched up concrete walls, a large crack in the ceiling that emerged after last year’s earthquake, huge open vents where the dust floods through leaving my belongings constantly covered in a thin film of brown dirt. It’s basic, and that’s being kind, but it’s mine. It sits at treetop level and is my escape from the chaos of cycle rickshaws, barking dogs, vegetable carts, autos and motorcycles circling around below. And one of the best things about it recently is my growing local lookout squad.

It’s a pretty unusual thing out here to live on your own and even more unusual for a girl to live on her own. It’s a topic that sparks no end of curiosity amongst my colleagues and Indian friends. ‘But what do you do?’ is a question I get asked fairly frequently accompanied by a look of utter concern. I think their firm belief is that I spend the hours outside of work quietly pacing up and down my terrace until it’s time to go back to the office. So, if these people who know me and know something about what I do outside of work hours when I’m not pacing the terrace are curious, then it’s not surprising that my neighbours and local shopkeepers are doubly interested and have my every movement under observation.

It’s fair to say that when I first moved here I was treated with the utmost suspicion. I could tell this not by what people would ask but what they wouldn’t ask. My milk would be handed to me over the counter with an accusing look that said, ‘what are you going to be doing with that milk?’ I would smile back pleasantly with a responding look that said, ‘I’m going to put it in my tea thank you very much.’ This continued for a while but after a bit of time people began to accept my presence in the neighbourhood and would ask me questions in Hindi or English about where I was from, what I was doing here, am I married and if not why not, how many children do I have, what do I cook at home and talking me through how to cook various Indian dishes. When I went home to the UK a month ago I was quite taken aback when I got to the supermarket checkout and was greeted by a smiling checkout assistant enthusiastically addressing me with, ‘Hi! How are you?’ No suspicion or monitoring of the items in my shopping basket. But the minute I responded and started to give a blow by blow account of my day and describe my excitement at the 2 for 1 offer on shampoos I realised she had already stopped listening and was greeting the next customer.  The question had been asked out of politeness, not genuine interest or nosiness, and it was not expected that I should respond.

Although sometimes I wish it was possible to be a little more anonymous, mostly I love that my neighbourhood watch team take such a keen interest in my daily activities. Slowly but surely they’ve gotten to know enough about me through their questions and through observing my purchases to feel like they can trust me and take me under their wing. Now when I go to buy my milk and another customer gives me a look of suspicion and asks the Aunty in the shop who I am and where I’m from I can hear her telling them about me in Hindi but in a way that says, ‘back off, she’s ours.’ My toilet paper guy keeps a mental record of any male friend he’s seen me with, ‘The man I am seeing you with the other day, tall, dark hair. He is your husband? Where he is from?’ And when the Indian grandmas try to pull rank in the queue for the vegetable cart (I’m all about respecting your elders but not when there’s ten of them physically elbowing you out of the way) my vegetable guy gives them a telling off.  It might sometimes be bordering on intrusive but these interventions are well meant and I for one am comforted to know that I have my own local protection squad, it makes the hours spent pacing up and down the terrace a lot less solitary.

Sleeping melon

It’s really hot in Delhi at the moment. 46 degrees kind of hot. That same self-combusting sort of heat I talked about last year plus a few degrees as last year it only hit 42. When it gets this hot your single minded mission becomes to find ways to cool down. Showering in your clothes before you go to bed, sprinkling water over the room with the ceiling fans on, I’d already tried a number of remedies to minimal effect. Last week a friend told me that she’d been told that holding or more specifically hugging a watermelon to your body was supposed to help cool you down. She told me this as an amusing anecdote; I laughed but at the same time thought to myself, ‘I wonder?’ Earlier in the week, desperate and sleep deprived I decided to buy a watermelon on my way home. I got home, put it in the fridge and forgot about it for a few hours whilst I went to meet a friend. Later that night as I got into bed hugging my watermelon I felt and no doubt looked truly ridiculous. For the first five minutes I couldn’t sleep because I was laughing out loud at the image of myself in bed hugging a watermelon. But it worked. I slept more soundly than I have done in days. And what was at first a ridiculous act in a desperate moment has now become part of my daily routine. Every morning I replace the watermelon in the fridge and in the evenings carry it to bed with me. Yes I feel ridiculous but I sleep so much more soundly at night. 

Now that I’ve started in this vain I should mention that I also solved the mystery of the onion in the pocket the other day. It turns out that keeping an onion on your person does not in fact on its own keep you cool (no, I hadn’t been trying this method as well). The reason is that apparently laying crushed onion on the skin is a remedy for heat stroke. So, carrying an onion with you at all times during the hot weather ensures that if you are struck down by heat stroke and somewhere where there are no onions (admittedly an unlikely scenario in India) then you will have one on your person that you can use as a remedy.

A six month absence from this blog and on my return I choose to write about hugging watermelons. I don’t suppose you really expected anything less though. I apologise readers of three for the longer than usual absence from this blog but I intend to get back to blogging once again. 

In transit

One of the best and strangest things about travelling and living abroad is going home. I returned home to England for Christmas and New Year and it was the first time I’d been back in a year. Within twenty four hours of arriving home I was in a London pub with friends, surrounded by other British people drinking their pints and generally being British. At first I felt a bit as though I’d strayed into a theme park of Britain as it was such a stereotypical scene and so familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. Another twenty four hours later I left the pub…just kidding, another twenty four hours later of being at home and India seemed like it had almost never happened, as though it had been some crazy dream.

My reason for writing this slightly abstract post is I wanted to try and put down how it feels to me leading this slightly strange double-life. How quickly you can revert from one situation to another and for both to seem completely normal, with perhaps just a few minor details out of place. For instance, I was at first a little spooked out by just how quiet the roads are in England, in fact how quiet it is in general compared to Delhi. I also quite enjoyed the freedom my foreigner status gave me at times, such as daring to look around me in the London Tube (metro) carriage and look people in the eye. It might sound ridiculous but this is something that Londoners simply don’t do and there is something quite freeing about not observing certain rituals which have always seemed absurd to me anyway.

I found I got a bit stuck when people at home asked me, “So, how’s India?” A year living of living in Delhi and travelling and the best I could mostly come up with was, “Great thanks!” As though I’d just popped to the shops to get some milk. The thing is I find it a bit difficult to strike a middle balance between saying the bare minimum for fear of being a bore and being a bore and going through a blow by blow account of my daily life in India. After all, that’s what this blog is for! So apologies friends and family if I was a bore at any point, at least I didn’t subject you to any slide shows. This time.

Right now I’m sat in Riyadh Airport on a ten hour stopover (the economy way to fly) and yet again it almost feels like home was just some lovely dream. I was so confused a few hours ago that I forgot I was going back to Delhi and was thinking about what I’d do when I got back to the UK tomorrow where I’ve just left.  I blame the fact that I’ve already been travelling for 12 hours on very little sleep (Em/Nikki - it could have ended like my train journey to Stevenage only on international proportions). It’s a strange airport as in addition to being in the middle of the desert with no apparent activity outside of it - you don’t see the runway until you’ve touched down on it - there are large numbers of transit passengers also here on long stopovers so there’s a mini international airport community doing laps of the very small airport looking at the food they can’t buy (if you happen to be here in transit see if you can get your hands on some Saudi riyals) and looking increasingly bleary eyed as the transit hours tick by.

A couple of days ago the memories of my life in India started to come back and I began to mentally prepare myself for my return. It feels very different from when I left England for India this time last year as this time round I know what I’m letting myself in for. This is both a good and bad thing. As before I hate leaving my friends and family behind and constantly think I must be mad to do so but there’s always that other part of me that’s excited to be going back and misses India. It was the strangest feeling when I was leaving Delhi before Christmas as although I was stupidly excited about going home I also felt a little unsettled about leaving my bizarre Delhi world. It seems that at some point during the year it has become my new ‘normal.’ Despite my heart sinking slightly at the thought of my body being put through another year of extreme heat, humidity and potential hair loss (it’s only just grown back to its former lustre which wasn’t particularly lustrous in the first place), India and Delhi in particular seems to have well and truly gotten under my skin in a way I don’t really fully understand but am learning to embrace.