A delicious day (and one disturbing night)

Droplets of rain today! At first Eliza and I thought something less pleasant was dripping or splashing onto us, but no, it was rain, wonderful rain. I was hoping for a downpour, but three drops were enough to make me skip. We made a fruit salad with chikoo (my new favourite fruit), pineapple, banana, grapes, pomegranate, and a scoop of mango ice cream, with dried coconut, almonds, and sweet raisins on top. We ate it as we eat all of our joint meals, sitting on the kitchen floor. I closed my eyes. Sometimes I think a day can't get any better and then Eliza lights some incense, throws open the windows and starts to cook. The flat has felt so much warmer since she moved in. It will be hard to see her go.

Beautiful Eliza

My friend Viviana spent the weekend with me. I practised a few lines of Spanish when she called home. Her parents told me that I have three homes now, Canada, California, and Columbia. What kindness! Just like Viviana, spilling over with love. We ate spiced carrot cake and read together at a cafe here on Bhandarkar road called Le Plaisir. Girls dressed in red saris, playing drums came and tapped on the window asking for money. She ran outside, to admire their plated hair. She mimed and smiled and they laughed. 

We went to see an International festival last night. The formalities lasted hours. Viviana and Eliza stepped outside the warm tent for a moment to cool off and decided to explore the tower of an old school building. A security guard let them in after first telling them that it was off-limits. He was perfectly ordinary and helpful. Soon they heard sounds behind them. He had sneaked up the stairs behind them and, in the darkness, had begun to watch porn on his phone. I wonder what he expected them to do. Viviana and I are working on a project for one of our Women's Studies courses about violence and rethinking masculinity in lieu of the Delhi gang-rape. We wish we could interview him because it would be so good to understand what he was thinking.

I realized today that I am becoming less attuned to details. In the rickshaw on the way back from school, everything around me felt so familiar, I almost forgot that seeing three cricket matches, smelling a hundred different smells, nearly colliding with most of the other traffic, being sold boxes of tissue paper and throat lozenges while waiting for the traffic to move, hearing the driver hum a popular Hindi song (one I actually recognize!), and all the while melting in the heat, are not things I would experience on a typical drive at home. 

Having nearly let myself forget to look around, I feared I was losing my sense of wonder. But tonight as I ate my fruit salad and thought about the rain, I felt reassuringly present and joyful. To top off the night, I noticed a bowl of sweets beside Ganesh on the poster Eliza brought me. Following his example, we promptly excused our love of dessert and took another bite of mango ice cream.