Rebirth, of sorts

Without much ceremony and without much guilt, this blog slipped away and died.

This is old news, November in fact. Between long work days already spent on my laptop and no internet access in my (very cozy) bed, my motivation shrank as the days got shorter and colder, and I was okay with that. I journaled, I studied Hindi, I read, I cooked Indian food (and pasta), I watched cheap pirated DVDs from under the covers. I filled my weekends with various pockets of Delhi, from the quiet and remote Tibetan colony of Majnu Ka Tilla to the jam-packed and bustling Lajpat Nagar market. I embraced the idea of exploring both alone (best illustrated by early breakfast expeditions to Chandni Chowk) and with new good friends.

As I walked and Metro-ed and auto-ed across the city, I felt at times as if there was a running commentary in my head, which I would have loved to capture. India is impossible to absorb, colorful and frustrating and diverse and paradoxical. While I’d hoped to share sketches and snippets of it, I didn’t have the time to write what I wanted — coherent specific posts about my daily life that properly captured broader societal themes, at least as I saw them.

Quite unexpectedly, I have a second chance. I’m excited to announce that I’ll be part of the 2014-2015 class of the William J. Clinton Fellowship for Service in India, for which I’ll be working with an NGO for 10 months. And through some twist of fate or sheer coincidence, I’m headed back to Delhi.

I plan to restart this blog. Since I already have a good feel for the city and existing friends (major pluses when living abroad!), I don’t worry now about “immersing myself” in the culture or tackling a local bucket list since I did a pretty good job of that last year. I have lots of unanswered questions about India, and I’m looking forward to talking more, reading more, and writing more, especially with my new organization and the other Fellows.

I’m off to India in September. If the blog dies again, apologies in advance — I’m probably out collecting stories and thoughts to share later, preferably over a cup of chai.

Cooler Climes

This post is a defense of the following statement: “it’s getting cold in Delhi.”

To most of you in New England and northern Europe and even the Mid-Atlantic, please bear with me. Yes, I got acclimatized to 100+ degree temperatures for the entirety of September. Yes, the daily high is still in the 70s.

But the nightly lows are around 50 degrees. There’s no central heating whatsoever. And all the buildings are designed to keep Delhiites cool when it’s 120+ degrees outside, not vice versa.

It will eventually drop to the low 40s or even high 30s at night in January, which — given the nature of Indian infrastructure — means we will be freezing, no matter how high the high. We’ve also seen the onset of Delhi “winter fog,” a pretty little name for the extreme smog that keeps the skies grey and the air grimy. That being said, a few things to love about the fall-like weather:

• no more sweating every time you step outside!
• no more rain or humidity!
• the hot roasted peanuts (moongphuli) and spicy sweet potatoes (shakarkandi) that have appeared on every street corner
• snuggling into sweaters and scarves
• a renewed appreciation for hot chai
• new seasonable vegetables and fruits on the stands (BROCCOLI)

Diwali!

Our balcony on Diwali night

On November 3rd, I happily crossed off the oldest item on my Delhi bucket list: “be in India for Diwali.” The holiday is imbued with meanings — the Festival of Lights, the folkloric homecoming of Rama after his defeat of the demon Ravana, the arrival of the Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth) to bless each household with prosperity — but my strongest association is listening to my mother and aunt reminisce about the sheer excitement of Diwali time in India. After 22 years of hearing about the sweets and the decorations and the all-night fireworks and the visits to the homes of relative after relative, I was finally here to witness it for myself.

In Delhi, the anticipation had been building for a while. Frilly red and gold decorations and clay lamps began popping up at roadside stalls over a month in advance, big name restaurants pulled out special seasonal menus, and bright cellophane-wrapped gift packages were in front of every food stall. Vendors across Delhi armed up for the biggest shopping spree of the year, with people flocking to the markets to buy new clothes and kitchenware and curtains and whatever else could be used to make a fresh start to the next year.

The whole atmosphere felt a bit like Christmas, actually. Sales galore, gifts for children and family and friends, bonuses to maids and employees, swapping sweets with the neighbors and ending up with far too many, and family visits are all hallmarks of the holiday. There is a distinct Indian flavor, of course.  Diwali lasts for five days, with families and communities following slightly different traditions for each and citing different stories to explain their importance.  On the first day, Dhanteras, for example, it is considered auspicious to buy new kitchen utensils and gold or silver jewelry for good luck.

Diwali is a Hindu holiday and is celebrated with religious pujas (rituals) in honor of the goddess Lakshmi. It is said that Lakshmi visits households on the night of Diwali to bless them with wealth for the coming year, so to make sure that she finds each flat, houses are cleaned from top to bottom before being lavishly decorated with flower garlands and rangoli powder designs. Most important of all are the lights — rows and rows of small clay diyas (lamps) filled with oil, strings of LED Christmas lights tumbling down the length of ten-story buildings, and tealights to brighten each dark corner.

Tealights down the office stairs

My experience was a little odd since I didn’t have family in Delhi, but my office had a lovely pre-Diwali puja the previous Wednesday. We changed into saris and salwar kameez, made flower petal rangoli, set up tealights down the stairs, had a short religious puja run by our boss’s family priest, set off sparklers on the balcony, and ate dhokla and jalebi till we popped. It was impossible not to feel the festive vibes over the next few days, even amid a normal work routine. Passing by Central Market, I thought I’d make a quick stop at the local Bikanerwala sweetshop and nearly got bowled over by the crowds trying to buy barfi and laddus and gulab jamun for all their friends and relatives. Even our tiny milk stall across the street had strung up fresh marigold garlands to celebrate.

And of course, for most people, the first thing that Diwali brings to mind is fireworks. For days before and after the main festival day, smoke and flashes and loud bangs echoed in every neighborhood, culminating in a gigantic din on Diwali day that ran from 4 pm to at least 3 am straight. When I say fireworks, I don’t only mean patakis (crackers) and sparklers and Roman candles and fountains and spinning chakras; I mean the enormous 100-ft fireworks that my hometown uses on the Fourth of July. These are happily purchased by any ordinary citizen to set off in the middle of the road, right in front of oncoming cars. A friend I was Skyping that night was convinced I was under military fire for the entirety of our conversation, complete with rifle pops and cannon booms and general fizzles and whistles and clacks and sparkles. By 7 pm, you could see a sulfurous haze floating through the air from the sheer quantity of fireworks set off. Between the environmental pollution and safety hazards, I don’t know how long this particular tradition will be allowed to last, but I’m glad I could see it myself at least once.

Local market with Diwali gifts at the ready

Flower rangoli at office

Rangoli pattern of Lakshmi’s feet

(Mini) Lakshmi Puja at office

Our balcony

Fireworks below…

…and above!

 

Making Change

Like much of the developing world, South Asia is still a cash society. It’s not that cards aren’t used;  they are increasingly common among the upper and middle classes, particularly for online and big-ticket purchases, with an estimated ratio of 350 million debit cards to 19 million credit cards.  However, cash is still the biggest player. Even in the nicer areas of urban South Delhi that I frequent, it’s not unusual for large transactions to take place using wads of notes. In fact, apart from my local ATM card, the last time I used plastic was during an airport layover on my flight to India.

Getting change in India can be an adventure, with two interesting aspects:

1) Fun change: when you buy milk or water or biscuits from a small snack shop or cart, you might get 1-2 rupees change in the form of random candy from their bins. Example of change returned after using a Rs. 50 note to buy a Rs. 18 bottle of water:

There was a second Mango Bite but I ate it….

2) Not so fun change: knowing where to get change for bigger notes can be tricky. Typical bank notes are in denominations of 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, and 1000, with a current exchange rate of roughly 62 rupees to $1. I would argue that in America, the largest commonly used bill is the twenty, which even the Dollar Store clerk can give you change for. Here there are blurry stratifications of stores/restaurants/stalls/vendors based on who can give you what kind of change.

An example: you can buy a paratha on the street or two eggs in a shop for Rs. 10, but you might be refused if you try to pay using a Rs. 100 bill. Buying a similar parantha at a middle-class fast food chain like Haldiram’s might be closer to Rs. 40, but since it’s a bustling restaurant with a steady flow of customers, you can certainly seize the chance to get change for a Rs. 500 note if needed. Upscale places will be able to break any note, but their parathas may cost upward of Rs. 80 — eight times the street price — and would force you to spend a lot more money for the rest of the meal. A Rs. 500 note for groceries? If you’re me, it probably won’t buy you vegetables, fruit, or milk at the corner market carts since you spend much less than Rs. 200 at a time.

Veggiewala

So begins the perpetual struggle to keep enough small change in my wallet. Since I’m on relatively tight budget anyway, I tend to make smaller purchases  — maybe some peanuts from the street vendor, a cycle rickshaw ride, a clearly pirated copy of The Lowland. The problem is that as soon as I manage to get Rs. 10 or 20 or 50 notes, they’re promptly used.  

I’ve learned to pay for any morning auto rides of Rs. 30-40 in exact change, but to use Rs. 100 notes for the same ride in the evening since the drivers now have small change to give. If I want to break Rs. 500 or 1000 notes without spending lots of money, I strategically wait to get change at places like Haldiram’s or Bikanerwala, using big notes to pay even if I already have a few smaller ones to spare. And of course, I’ve now discovered the trick of figuring out which ATMs tend to give small change  (100s and 500s) and which will only dispense 1000s. It’s exciting to get the knack of it, and I am glad to be in fewer and fewer of the awkward and frustrating scenarios in which I don’t have the right denominations on hand. Little tricks = more of a local.

BRB

Sorry for the hiatus, but we’ve been swamped at work, especially since we’re quite literally headed out the door for our company’s annual retreat. This year our retreat is in Amritsar in the state of Punjab, home to the Golden Temple (a major Sikh religious site) and famous sweet lassis. I’ll actually have time to upload a few posts when I get back this weekend, so sit tight for a few days more! Off to catch an overnight train, that quintessential Indian experience…

Durga Puja, Dussehra &Demons

I know I recently wrote about how ‘normal’ my life in Delhi can be, but every now and then it’s undeniably clear that I am no longer in America.  Take two weeks ago, when I watched 40-foot giant demon effigies get set on fire just 10 yards away.

Some background: I’ve always wanted to be in India for “festival season.”  The term speaks to the number of different festivals that occur in quick succession, with the season falling in October or November, varying by the lunar calendar. Most of the holidays are Hindu, and though the scale of specific celebrations changes by state, it’s a time of firecrackers, food and sweets, dancing, melas (fairs), cooler weather, rituals, and a generally colorful spin on life. It’s tempting to think of this yearly highlight as multiple religious festivals, harvest celebrations, the Fourth of July, and county fairs spun into one multi-week period, but the truth is that there is no real Western equivalent.

It’s not unusual for individual holidays to overlap, and the culmination of two of the bigger celebrations — Durga Puja and Dussehra — fall on the same day, the tenth day of the Navaratri period, which this year happened to be Sunday, October 14th. Navaratri generally celebrates “the triumph of good over evil,” and in keeping with this theme, Durga Puja celebrates the victory of the goddess Durga over the demon Mahishasura and Dussehra celebrates Rama’s killing of the demon Raavana (a climax of the epic tale The Ramayana).

To keep it brief, I spent the day running around and trying not miss anything. Two of us headed off by Metro at 7 a.m. to see the Durga Puja pandal at C.R. Park before the crowds took over.  Durga Puja is especially popular among Bengalis, people from the state of West Bengal, who happened to congregate in the neighborhood of C.R. Park when they moved to Delhi. (Think of it as a Little Italy or Chinatown before commercialization really struck.) The neighborhood has a noticeably Bengali vibe on any given day; all the name plates have surnames like Roy and Sen and Banerjee, and the air around the market is distinctly fishy. On Durga Puja, it’s a frenzy. Neighborhood committees around Delhi construct elaborate pandals that house an altar featuring Durga and four other Hindu deities. The main pandal in CR Park was enormous, with a huge tent for food, a stage for evening concerts, and a bizarre castle-themed exterior complete with wooden turrets. Not everything is this large-scale; a tiny one halfway down our street was just a red tent set up underneath some trees with strings of  beautiful lights. C.R. Park was pretty dead that early in the morning, so we returned later to find a packed mela ground.

The centerpiece featuring the goddess Durga at the main C.R. Park pandal

Mela at C.R. Park

A second pandal in C.R. Park

The idols at the second pandal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After poking around the different displays and getting a sense of the Durga Puja vibe, we headed back to Lajpat Nagar (our neighborhood) since we wanted to be within walking distance of the evening effigy burning. Towering papier mache effigies of folklore’s demon king Raavana and his two brothers had been erected all across the city over the previous week, and these are set on fire at twilight on Dussehra. Lajpat Nagar’s neighborhood association had set up their display in their small compound, and I was surprised by how intense even the local celebration was. A mini stage held guests and neighborhood officials, a stream of children and adults who were dressed up as various characters from the Ramayana were paraded in (including cute little boys who were the monkeys), and two men kept up a steady stream loud fireworks. By the time twilight arrived, it was almost a frenzy, not in the least because of the ceaseless chant of “Jai Sri Ram!” to club-like music.

Any respectable American fire marshal would have died of shock. Yes, there was technically most people were underneath a cover, but you could hear the little flecks of fireworks rattle on the tin roof overhead. At one point, a fireworks chakra (wheel) still showering sparks flipped off its hinge and spun away towards the crowd before being caught and set up again. When they finally set the effigies on fire, just 10 yards away from the nearest spectators and much closer to the organizers loafing around the yard, “set on fire” means stuffed full of fireworks and lighting those. The noise was deafening and the atmosphere crazy, but I loved it, especially the sense of community that seemed to unify everyone.

Effigies pre-twilight

Dressed up kids.

Shri Ram

Fireworks

Spinning chakra

Consumed by flames

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My flatmate and I wrapped up the night with a trip to the corner market to buy some cleaning supplies, where we discovered that all the snack shops had set up huge vats of oil and syrup outside and were frying batches of hot jalebis. I always disliked the few jalebis I tried as a kid — bright orange, chewy, and sickly sweet — but these were hot and crisp and fresh, and I am newly obsessed. A sweet end to a sweet day.

Metro Magic

I’ve been pleased by a lot of what I’ve seen in India, but perhaps my expectations were most defied by the Delhi Metro.

View of the Kailash Colony Metro station, in a part of Delhi where the line is above ground.

If you use the New York subway or D.C. metro to get around, put it like this:  India — this crowded, messy, haphazard country — has somehow created a public transport system that is cleaner, quicker, and more reliable than yours. Nothing smells, the cars and platforms are immaculate, the electronic Smart Cards actually give you a fare discount, and the longest wait time yet was 8 minutes on a Sunday morning. You can get from the green suburbs of South Delhi past the central businesses of Connaught Place to the old cramped alleyways of Chandni Chowk in less than half an hour, a small miracle given the Delhi road congestion. It’s also amazing to travel without (1) inhaling exhaust fumes and dust and (2) contributing to the smog yourself!

Perhaps the most magical thing is the women-only car, a sacred space that — you guessed it — only females are allowed to use. Each train has a car at the front or the back reserved for women, whose location marked on the platform with clear pink signs. When they say “women only,” they mean women only. At transfer stations during rush hour, police guards do double time as bouncers and physically block out potential male passengers, and the only man I’ve ever seen get on — a poor unassuming tourist — was quickly shunted out to the next car.

Platform at Lajpat Nagar station

I don’t want to launch into the issue of women’s safety in India since that’s a lengthy conversation, but the thing I enjoy most about commuting by Metro is watching the mixed bag of women that use it every day. It’s a diverse mix of ages and occupations — grandmothers and college-goers, cleaning ladies and businesswomen alike — and speaks to both the ease of Metro commuting and to the fact that it’s the safest public transportation option for women in the city. The pool of young women my age is especially interesting; they wear sleek western clothes, listen to music on smart phones, gossip with friends, read, and do last-minute homework, so reminiscent of similar morning commutes in America.

Moving to an apartment that is just two minutes from the Metro has quite honestly been an empowering and liberating experience, a phrase that I never would have expected to use. During the day it’s always been easy to get around South Delhi by autorickshaw, but I am suddenly much more comfortable with returning home at 8 or even 9 pm. This has in turn encouraged me to start evening Hindi classes and find evening shows and concerts to attend, both of which I scrupulously avoided for my first six weeks here.

Delhi is currently expanding its Metro network, and is scheduled to finish an east-west line by 2015 that will make many commutes far easier and give new chunks of the city access to the trains. As more and more people are able to use the Metro on a regular basis, I’m curious to see how the system will play into the dialogues surrounding female independence and urban environmentalism in India.  Above all, I’m glad that more and more people can and will take advantage of this system that actually highlights the potential of India to do things well, and for this measure, well done, Delhi.

Setting Up Shop

Maybe I’m weird, but during the entirety of my time at college, I regularly daydreamed about my first apartment.  Enjoying the ability to personalize my little dorm room as I desired, I hoped for a place full of light and plants and bookshelves, and with a kitchen spacious enough to handle all of my culinary conquests. I understand that setting up your own apartment is never as easy as it seems, but after subletting three different places during summers in New Haven, I thought I was all set for postgrad life. The only issue: these daydreams didn’t factor in the possibility of myself moving abroad. Add in the fact that I chose to go to India, and it’s an entirely different story.

I won’t get into the complications or drama of apartment hunting here, but we did ultimately settle on a 3-bedroom place in Lajpat Nagar IV, a fairly centrally located neighborhood in South Delhi. A few late nights of meeting the landlords, negotiating terms, and signing a lease later, we were officially “moved in,” but only in the most technical of meanings. I might have spent the first night sleeping on a towel, using a tunic top (kurta) as a coversheet…

In America, you take it for granted that when you move in, utilities like stoves and A/Cs that are already installed will just work. Not so in India. The biggest adjustment was the fact that every single interaction that we needed in order to set up our apartment required individual person-to-person contact. Hindi has a perfect descriptive term, wallah, that denotes a person associated with a particular trade or characteristic. Bring on the slew of wifi wallahs and water purifier wallahs and gas wallahs and A/C wallahs and trash wallahs and general handymen wallahs and stove wallahs and cleaning ladies (yup, they’re not wallahs), with each little job or arrangement typically requiring us to contact 2-3 different people with 2-3 different cell phone numbers.

Identifying and speaking to the correct people was only the start. The actual step of getting these servicemen — who we were paying, let me add — to our house was a feat in and of itself, a product of endlessly repeated phone conversations and time coordination and stacks of complicated forms. This being India, a country that runs on the “Indian Standard Time” mode of perpetual delay, a wallah who swore with gusto that HE WOULD BE HERE, AND NOWHERE ELSE on Monday night was still more likely to not turn up at all. We’re all adjusting to the idea that if we need anything done — even a 30 second task or signature — we’d better be sure to arrange for it at least a week ahead.

Certain things made our time easier. The father of one of my flatmates has been visiting Delhi and knows how the system works; the family friend of another donated a gas cylinder and connector, precluding a dreaded trip to register and put down a security deposit (our alternative being to spend a small fortune to get one off the black market, not an unusual decision here). A week and a half later, we’ve finally figured out how to get rid of our trash and just got hooks installed for a clotheslines on the back balcony, so we’re almost completely set up.

Now that basic necessities are working, I feel like I can relax again for the first time in three weeks. The combination of switching my temporary housing, tripartite apartment hunting, late night lease-signing excursions, and intense days spent setting up house completely threw off my Delhi routine, so I’m glad things are normalized. This was the first weekend in a while when I could explore as usual, and having a functional kitchen for the first time in six weeks is just bliss for someone who likes to cook as much as I do.

I’m back to decorating my cupboards with old postcards — and am always open to adding new ones, hint hint — and while bookshelves will have to wait till I return to America, there’s currently plenty of light and I’m on the lookout for plants. I’m sure I’ll have many more updates to try to describe daily life here, but for now, the view from our new home.

View to from the balcony

Tiny milk & snack stall across the road

Mini parade with drums and dancing

Happy Surprises

I don’t know what I expected when I came to Delhi, but I don’t think I ever quite wrapped my head around the fact that I was coming, that I was here, that I am here. In fact, in the now-comfortable routine of my daily life, it sometimes feels like I was picked up by the collar and dropped in the middle of India’s hustle and bustle; I got up, shook off the dust, and went on my way.

I grew up visiting grandparents in south India, and while it’s never quite the same when you’re living on your own and in a new city, a passing familiarity with the pace of Indian life meant that it took very little for me to settle into this routine. In fact, I find myself mildly astonished at the idea that day-to-day life could consist of anything other than commuting in the shiny Delhi Metro or green-and-yellow autorickshaws, picking up a half-kilo of pears or a cucumber from the multitude of colorful roadside carts, handwashing clothes in a bucket in the bathroom, or eying the clock around 10:30 AM and 3:30 PM in anticipation of a hot cup of chai. Obviously not everything is perfect or intuitive, but despite holding a 9-to-5:30 job in an air conditioned office, I cannot for the life of me imagine working in the States right now.

Perhaps what has surprised me the most in my first month here is how happy I am. I’ve loved Delhi so far, even when I only had myself for company (no longer the case!), and while I keep waiting for the day when I first feel homesick for my family and friends in America, I mostly wish they could be here with me so I could show them around my new city. I know I have several months to go, but with old classmates just arriving and new friends being made, my time here will certainly fly by even faster than before. I’m dealing with it as usual: finding new ways to fill my extra hours (language classes and home cooking coming soon) and adding items to my bucket list as fast as I’m checking them off.

Four Months Later…

….we have permanent (a.k.a. eight month) housing!   Took us a bit of negotiating in multiple ways, but we have a place that is (1) near the metro, (2) near a market, and (3) very cozy. Can’t wait to move in this weekend and set up shop!