India noticings

This is a Hindu temple in Chhattapur, taken from my car window.

As in any new place, there are things that strike you as different. My dearest daughter and friend both gave me journals in which to write these things down. It has been hard. Life has moved too fast, but here, before more time lapses, for you, are what I have noticed.

Electrical outlets in India are designed to prevent you from plugging in any plug that is not grounded. But many plugs are not grounded. So, what do you do? Stick a pencil into the grounding hole and slip the plug in, pull out the pencil. There are pencils and chop sticks all over school to facilitate this circumvention of electrical codes. This says a lot about India. There are rules--and ways to get around the rules.

There are cows. The second week we (my neighbor and fellow teacher, J, and I) were here, our jointly hired driver took us to buy clothes and fabric at Fabindia (amazing array of colors and styles, as well as upholstery and curtain fabric). We got out of the white Ambassador and stepped gingerly around puddles mirroring the red clay they sat on. There was garbage and men were sitting around watching three American women trying to keep from getting our shoes covered in yuck. We step up the clay tile steps and down a narrow passage to come out to an open plaza with Fabindia across the way. We begin to walk forward when, from our left, a cow with a back as high as our shoulders started to pass. It was white with a layer of gray over it and large horns. We waited.

Cows are everywhere. It is not hyperbole. They saunter along and forage through garbage piles with the ragpickers. (Did you know India has the most effective plastic recycling program in the world? It is accomplished by poor people who pick through the garbage.) Sometimes they walk down the road, with no sense that they should be in the right lane if they want to go south, and block traffic. A half dozen were blocking traffic along with revelers on our way home from book club three nights ago.

Free dogs are also everywhere. I am not calling them wild because they are about the most docile dogs I have ever seen. Some lay still for minutes. You think they're dead and then they pop up. They sleep under cars, benches, and sometimes in the middle of streets. I haven't seen one hit or dead yet. They are savvy dogs. There is one on our street that the landlord has named Romeo because he roams up and down the street mating with every female. No true love. I hear them bay at night, though. Supposedly they get much more territorial at night. Need to be wary.

I have also seen boars and a couple of monkeys. The monkeys were sitting at a bus stop one morning as we drove to school. Two policemen stood a few feet down.

The shrubs and frangipani trees are beautifully and regularly manicured, even under freeways. Among them live the poor. Camps, where dirty blankets are propped up by bamboo poles, spring up every where. Wrought iron fences are frequently clothes lines with stretches of vibrant red and saffron saris stretched along them, even in the medians of roads.  Shorts, underwear and t-shirts also dot the rails.

India is a country always on alert. There is a car of policemen armed with semi-automatic rifles stationed at the main gate to school 24 hours a day. Events at school require those not credentialed as staff, students or parents to go through a metal detector. When a school van drives into the lot, it is scanned for bombs, but the children from the slum across the street run through the parking lot unabated day and night. The lot lies outside of the 10-foot wall that surrounds the school.

The Indian people I have met, from the painters who expertly painted my apartment in two days to our drivers and the local staff at school, are gentle and helpful. There are men on the street who make you feel uneasy now and then, but no one has said a cross or lewd word to me. It could be the gray hair, but everyone has been just lovely. I enjoy myself, recognizing that I am a stranger who does not know the mores or expectations and I have to be humble and gentle myself as I negotiate this new world.

Next time I will write about shopping in Delhi--wide range.