Another Cold Morning

January 23, 2013

Another cold morning. Such a surprise to be shivering in a down jacket. It is very early here. I love to wake up before the sun rises because the city is quiet and I can listen to the crickets as I make coffee and prepare idli sambar (a sort of rice cake that you dip in curry). The other night as I was wandering through the windy streets in the oldest section of the city, I found a place that sells filter coffee. I don't know if I will ever find it again, but it was very exciting! I am sipping it now as I write. I get to school early and sat in the deserted classroom, watching the sun rise. I am warm by the time the girl with the most beautiful smile arrived. I pressed her cold fingers in mine. An hour later, a man in a white uniform comes and passes around steaming hot tea in little plastic cups. The cups bend in the heat and I think of the warnings we hear back home about not leaving plastic water bottles in the sun. If that is risky, this can’t be good. But I sip the sweet, hot liquid thankfully. The sugar stirs me from my morning drowsiness.

I walk home and three young school boys in red and blue plaid shirts and coffee coloured pants walk beside me. They carry metal lunch tins. After five minutes of walking in silence with them beside me smiling and intermittently hitting each other playfully, they ask “what is your name” “are you married” with that beautiful crispness of a careful non-native English speaker. I ask in Marathi, excited to finally find an appropriate moment to use the only sentence I know, tuzha nav kay? They laugh and tell me their names. We talk in English about Canada and snow and one boy asks, “Canada is full of wonderful things?” I tell him that India is equally full of such things. I don’t think he believes me.  “India is a dirty place, nah?...people spit in anyplace and everyplace.” They double over laughing as the smallest boy does an impression of an older man clearing his throat and spitting.  The tallest boy picks up a pebble and throws it at a dog as it approaches us. “Do you have dogs in Canada?” they ask. Yes, I say, “but mostly on leashes.” “Not in the streets,” he nods knowingly, “better,” he says.

I was just talking to some of the girls in my class who had never seen snow. A lot of the Hindi movies depict true love in the Himalayan mountains, so they told me that their parents' wedding videos often had snow-capped mountains in the background. I think that many would judge such a video without this explanation, as tacky, but it is really a kind of aspiration. The rich have, of course, moved on to candid shots with natural backgrounds. The markers of class and caste here in everyday things and little details is fascinating. It is especially apparent in the woman, partly the reason I have decided to take a Woman's Studies class, though of course women's issues are extremely topical here; the incident in Delhi is covered daily in the newspapers and is on everyone's lips. I have so many stories to tell you. Yesterday, an old woman in the street marked my forehead with red paint and blessed me. I walked away and forgot about the bindi. Later I touched my forehead and a group of concerned people gathered around, thinking that I was injured because my hands and head were bright red. Mostly people have been so kind! I have trouble crossing the street here and there is always a kind woman who takes my hand and leads me across. On my road, the women who sell fruit helps me across, dodging the rickshaws and motor-bikes. We laugh together and she always gives me extra mangos.  There is a sweet shop around the corner and I visit is often to buy laddu, amusing the man with kind eyes who works there. People seem delighted by my love of the food, my attempts to gather ingredients and learn to make it at home, the music, the incense, the beautiful colours of their salwar kameezes, and my tragically bad attempts at speaking Marathi.

Most of my classes were meant to have started three weeks ago, but everyone in the English Department so far has been too busy to teach. I have had to get used to this not-knowing, just as I have learned to have candles ready for when the power goes out, to use less soap when hand-washing clothes, to save boiled water in pots for tooth-brushing, to carry ten rupee notes for the rickshaw wallahs, who never have change, to bring my hands to my heart when saying namaskar, to buy the little boy who begs for money on the corner some coconut water instead of handing him rupees and to drink one with him and then ask for the coconut seller to crack them open so that we can scoop out the soft flesh inside, to always expect every act to take all day and enjoy it, to be patient, to, as my Swedish friend Mikael says in a metaphor about how life here is like bike riding through the crazy traffic, ‘go with the flow,’ and, last but not least, I learn to laugh.