India That Magical Place

Spending time in spoilt-brats-ville, puja prayers and karaoke machines, giant snails and mini apples, a pillow bearing terrorist, minor panic in the sky and the fat man who got stuck while trying to help. Did I mention that it’s certainly not dull in the land of the holy cow!

I’m going to start with the fat man. This incident I’m telling second hand as I wasn’t there, but I’m just so completely blown away by it. Kath and her friend were shopping on CG road, there was a piece of paper on the pavement- nothing even remotely unusual about this, in India there’s rubbish everywhere ( I was collecting rubbish off the beach and my friends told me to take it easy, “Hey Fiona, even in 50 million of your lifetimes you won’t be able to clean India up!”- seems a little drastic, though it is a country of close to 2 billion people). So back to this particular piece of paper- Kath stepped around it and Shibha walked over it completely disappearing down a hole. Luckily for Shibha she only fell for about 5 feet before hitting water, the hole was full of water, so deep that despite falling some distance Shibha didn’t even touch the bottom- even more amazingly the water was clean, apparently crystal clear. Kath was left screaming for help. This is when I can say that the Indian habit of staring came in handy, all eyes were on Kath so when this happened there was an instant crowd all trying to help. Now, the fat man, he was so eager to help that he tried to climb down the hole, only to get stuck and thus needed to be rescued himself. I have this vision of Shibha floating back to the surface to be greeted by two chubby legs kicking in the air. The fat man was pulled from the hole and then Shibha was pulled from the water with only a graze on her leg. So random, surreal.

The next story I would like to tell is related to driving, I’ve already spoken of my admiration for the Indian driver, it seems that the obtaining of a drivers license is a curious thing. I’m told in some cases you need not even go and do the test, you just make a call and man comes to your house, you fill in some paper work, hand over a photo and then bud-a-bing-bud-a-bang a drivers license is delivered to your door the very next day. My favorite story was told to me by Abir while I was visiting in Pune. He explained to me while he was at the register being interviewed the official pointed out the window towards a small blue car and said “So can you drive that car?”, “Sure!” replied Abir. “Ok, off you go… Take that car for a drive”. So off Abir went to drive the little blue car. The gentleman in the passenger seat was not the communicative type. The test which followed involved Abir asking leading questions:-
“Should I go left?”
“Sure.”
“Should I turn right at the next intersection?”
“Sure.”
“Should I do a reverse park?”
“If you want!”
The whole experience was a little disconcerting for Abir and when they arrived back, Abir inquired why the man wasn’t carrying a clipboard and didn’t appear to be marking him during the drive. “Oh, I’m not an instructor, this is my car. In fact I’m here to do my drivers test.”. Abir went inside and confronted the official about it:-
“Hey, that man’s not even an instructor!”
“Yes, but did you drive the car?”
“Yes!”
Happy ending, he was given his license and sent on his merry way. Only in India one could say!

Traveling in the luggage compartment.

So I busted the hell out of NID for a little holiday- destination Pune. The train was apparently full, and I say apparently because I’m never quite sure whether I’m being told the truth (often I’ve been told crazy things when people try to rip me off, also with the language barrier sometimes things are confused and I’ve been left misinformed). The bus it was, a 17 hour trip, not that I minded, I enjoy traveling by bus, if you have a sleeper you can stretch out, I packed a good book, a pillow, a blanket and I couldn’t be happier. There were seats as per a normal bus and then there were little ladders so that you could climb up into the sleeper compartments which were directly above the seats, the compartments had solid sliding doors, were quite poky and because you traveled with your luggage it gave the distinct impression of traveling in the luggage compartment. Oddly comforting, it reminded me of when I was little, I used to gather all my bedding and sleep on the top shelf of my built-in wardrobe. Arriving in Pune I had to solve the problem of contacting Abir, mobile phone systems are weird here and they don’t work out of state unless you have roaming which I was not organised enough to get, and I had to work out where to disembark the bus, Pune was a lot bigger than I anticipated. So I poked my head out of my cosy little compartment and tried to get the attention of the man sitting under me, it took awhile but eventually he noticed me peering down at him, he nearly jumped out of his skin and I had attracted all the attention of the men sitting beneath me. No one was able to help me as I had no idea of Abir’s address so I jumped off at the next stop and let myself be hijacked by the first auto driver. We found a phone, I had him talk to Abir and a drop off point was organised, me being the drop off goods. Hooray I had made it and I was welcomed into the bosom of Abir’s family.

Oh happy Pune- such fun times were had, I indulged in my fair share of silliness (actually there’s plenty more where that came from), I smiled, I laughed, I cooked, I played with kids, I explored the city and I even attempted to drive a scooter- basically it’s the best time I have had so far… I so enjoy imposing myself on other people’s families. I met Abir’s family, his friends, hung out with like minded people, it was interesting the conversations were stimulating- because NID is like a boarding school I’ve notice a lot of the conversations revolve around bitching and gossiping about other people and it just gets so tedious. Abir’s house was unlike any other Indian house I’ve been in so far, I could have been hanging out at a friend’s house back in Melbourne. His parents are architects so the lay out of the apartments ( Abir’s is down stairs and his sister and her family live up stairs, he doesn’t have a kitchen so all meals are eaten up stairs) is very open, thus letting in a lot of light and making maximum use of the space. Though in the kitchen it was a dead give away as to the Indian-ness of the house. The fridge a wonderland of dairy products stored in stainless steel vessels of varying shapes and sizes, fresh milk is delivered daily to the house where it is boiled, cooled, cream is separated from the milk, butter, curd and buttermilk are then made. I was more than a little fascinated by this process. A house cleaner comes for a couple of hours everyday in the morning 7-9ish and then he is off to his other job which he finishes late in the evening. This man is in his early 20’s he works seven days a week, keeps a little money for himself, and sends the rest home. He is saving for his sister’s dowry hopefully he will earn 3 lac (300,000 rupees a lot of money for a poor man). The theory is, he earns the money for his sister and then when he marries he’ll receive that sort of money for his marriage. I find this strange. The culture of household helpers/servants is a curious thing. Awanti (Abir’s sister) was explaining to me that she’s had a few lectures from her grandma because she doesn’t know how to treat ‘servants’, apparently you’re to treat them mean to keep them keen, if you are nice to them they are likely to stab you in the back and steal from you, it’s the old school servant culture. Get with the new school I say, Awanti is on friendly terms with her cleaner and often gives him paid days off. Haha I am side tracking. So I spent just over a week hanging with Abir in his hood, he is a sculptor and had a few works to finish off before heading to Australia, I got to help him out the best I could. My job involved using a blow touch to heat up the copper sculpture to rid the metal of any moisture and then it was all about waxing- wax on, wax off, it was extremely satisfying helping out. Time flew, that’s the cruel thing about time, it speeds up when you are having fun and alas it was time to leave Pune.

*Realtime interlude- I’ve turned the music up so load I can feel the base through desk and the computer… Hmmmmm I love it! I’m playing DJ and picking music for Quinny (aka Kath) it’s a beautiful thing.

Terrorist with a pillow

Kath had come to join me for my last couple of days in Pune and then we were both headed to Bangalore or as I like to say spoilt-brats-ville. I held a sense of foreboding about the Bangalore leg of the journey. We were to visit the girl whom I suspect took my money, but my tickets there were already a done deal paid for and sealed with a smile. We left Pune in the wee hours of the morning to catch the plane. My favorite traveling attire is comfortable tracksuit pants and casual t-shirt (very casual). This was my first domestic flight in India and I was totally amused by the biz-zillion security checks you had to pass through before boarding the plane, the amusement lasted until they wouldn’t let me on the plane. “What do you mean I can’t go on the plane because my pillow hasn’t been security stamped”. I had three people barking at me about the lack of security stamp on my pillow. “What do you think- I smuggled the pillow through security under my shirt? Of course it’s been security checked. How about I just shove it in this bag?” I said holding up a bag the pillow would easily fit in. A no go, no boarding the plane until the pillow had a stamp. It was too early in the morning for this- it would have been funny, but they were just so rude about it and treated me like some kind of criminal. I am 90% of the time a mild mannered person and since arriving in India I’ve been wondering if I’d be able to stand up for myself if I was in a situation where I was being unjustly treated, constantly people are a little rude and try to rip you off but I generally find you can defuse the situation by being friendly and standing your ground- works much better for me than getting angry. At 6am on the 16th of August 2007 I was being dragged around on the slippery tarmac, through the drizzling rain, back into Pune airport terminal with a flight attendant barking orders at me-it happened, niceness was not working for me, I snapped and spoke very sharply to the man. I’d been momentarily possessed by my mother, her tone of voice completely, as a kid you knew you were in Major (and that’s Major spelt with a capital M) trouble when that ‘tone’ was used. I had silenced the flight attendant, he was as sweet as pie after that. I was relieved, no one was going to walk over me- God bless my mother! The guard who stamped the pillow found the whole thing funny, finally someone who found the situation absurd. The rest of the flight was uneventful. On arriving in Bangalore we took an auto to meet our friend Prathima, who unbeknownst to us was attending an official parade for independence day. Prathima’s dad is an IAS officer (aka a very high ranking official in India) so she was seated in the official tent. We were dropped off at gate 2, the official entrance. Though we weren’t allowed to stay there for long, the police moved us on. Each time we stood still to try and make a call to Prathima we were moved along- this happened at least 5 times (the terrorist with a pillow strikes again!). What I found amusing is how they yelled “HELLO!” and then shook their hands at us. The right people were spoken too and we were allowed in- our bags were stored in a police car, all sorted. By this stage I was mortified by my choice of traveling attire- the tracksuit pants and my very ‘casual’ t-shirt, we were surrounded by these gorgeous women in exquisite saris. As a foreigner you can get away with anything. The parade was interesting, marches, a series of traditional Indian dances and a very random motorcycle troop performing crazy stunts.