bombay: monsoon

rain, girlhood, contradictions

October 2017

hello

from vidushi,

For the first time in my life, people can pronounce my name. They even know what it means, from the Sanskrit विद (vid), “to know.” Initial hellos have never felt so comfortable.

a solo

My fifth evening in Bombay heralded the heaviest rains of the past decade. Alone in the apartment, I watched the clouds purge thick white heaves of water. The drops on my fingertips reminded me that even a glass-encased box thirty-five stories high could not escape the monsoon.

For dinner, I ate cheerios and reheated okras in bed. The doorbell rang; through the eye-hole I saw the pao wallah, the bread seller. He folded his hands by his belly and rested two bulging bags of bread at his feet. I opened the door and we made eye contact.
“Bread,” he half-asked, half-said.
“No,” I said, and wondered if he had one floor left or thirty-four. “Thank you.”
I shut the door. I wished I hadn’t bought bread at Nature’s Basket earlier that week behind the British expats complaining about the rain.

Papa texted our family group chat from Connecticut — I should have waited and come here with you this place is good it is the sound of not only the beach so much of bike paths and lovely. We all have to come here sometime. He called me to talk about it. I thought about tamed bushes and pebbled sidewalks and felt a sudden tightness in my chest. I hung up mid-sentence and blamed it on the connection.

(well, kind of)

Both to my delight and my dismay, it’s difficult to really be alone in the country of 1.3 billion that includes most of my extended family. As soon as I landed in Delhi, I got a barrage of WhatsApp messages from relatives. My mom’s cousin — whom I hadn’t seen since I was nine — arrived at my hotel within the hour.

“Meri bacchi aa gayi hai,” he told me with a hug. My child has come home.

In Bombay, I moved in with a friend’s parents who opened their home to me before we’d even met. I spent hours on the phone during the first week promising people I’d never heard of that I’d visit them soon. When I got sick for the first time, my network of relatives found out about it within the day.

A few weeks later, when my grandfather was hospitalized with a lung infection, my mom and I rushed to Lucknow. As the news of his illness spread, I entertained five to six well-wishers a day (while he pretended to be asleep.) Old-age homes aren’t a thing here: people’s communities are their insurance.

indian-american

Given some ethnic ambiguity and the right company, I’ve passed as Latin American in Cuba and Mediterranean in Greece. I can play this game, to my surprise, even in India.

If I want to pay 30 rupees instead of 500 to enter a national monument, I ditch my white friends and ask for a ticket in Hindi. Around hotel staff or the city’s French expat scene, I play up my American accent. In my Uber conversations, I pretend I’m a Delhi-ite clueless about Bombay (sometimes I mess up a Hindi phrase and my drivers ask where I’m really from.) In South India — where I don’t speak Tamil and my English is a giveaway — I accept my foreigner tax on auto fares.

girl

“Good luck,” said a friend I ran into at the tennis court the morning before my flight to India. She looked horrified.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” she said. “They stare.”
In Delhi, some Fulbrighters and I ignored the blistering wet-blanket humidity and walked to Humayun’s tomb. Men did, indeed, stare with an unapologetic edge. That night, a helmeted man on a scooter lunged at me as we exited a nightclub.

A month later, in Chennai, my friend and I went for a swim. When we left, we lost a small crowd of men toting cameraphones. That night, a police officer said something to me in Tamil and gestured at me to hop onto his scooter. I started to feel an irrational hatred for Indian men and told him to get lost. He followed me into a cafe and started speaking earnest Tamil to the waitress. She told that he was trying to tell me to put my phone away as a theft precaution.

“The rest of India isn’t safe,” my Bombay Uber drivers tell me, “Here, though, people respect women.”

Bombay is the most liberal city in India; I can wear whatever I want at any hour. But somehow, still, when I go on runs around my enclosed, expat-friendly residential complex in shorts and a Nike top, I feel like a spectacle. Children and dogs run after me and people look for a few milliseconds too many. I struggle not to look away first.

I hate treadmills but I have started going to the gym. I notice women in their forties looking at me with disdain. Maybe it’s my clothes. Maybe they think I can run farther. Maybe it’s in my head.

learning about learning

I came here to help (A) develop a series of tablet-based games for rural schoolchildren to self-learn English, and (B) conduct research for the government panel drafting the country’s new national educational policy.

There are many days where I doubt the impact of my work. The budget for the tablet-based English games has been mismanaged, and progress is painfully slow. Things in India seem to happen in slow time. At times, I lose conviction in the games themselves, too. Since the Madhya Pradesh government funds us, we need to follow the state curriculum, which expects rural schoolchildren to learn English via arcane vocabulary like inkpot and vest. My grandpa tries to reassure me by telling me that he, too, learned English this way in his village school.

The higher-profile policy work feels futile sometimes, too. The more I learn about Indian education, the more useless it seems to draft a new policy which few will read and even fewer will implement. I half-joke that being in India is making me more of a Republican: decentralization and local control seems like the only way to regain educational accountability. My role models for grassroots change are my host parents, who devote almost the majority of their free time to the education of their maid’s four kids. What would India look like if every family took responsibility for their household laborers’ children?

in a place

My host parents in Bombay live in Octavius, a building in Hiranandani Gardens, the city’s most upmarket residential development. Powai, the surrounding neighborhood, is called India’s Silicon Valley. It hosts the Indian Institute of Technology, tech companies, wealthy Indians, and many expats.

Just a handful of kilometers (and hours of traffic) in any direction yield different versions of Bombay. On Marine Drive, I see lines of fishermen and lovers and I can’t help but sing softly about Cuba’s Malecon. At Siddhivinayak Temple, I walk through a stream of devotees to sneak a look at one of India’s most famous Ganesh idols. In Bandra, I pass American fast-food joints and homegrown Indian stores: KFC and Burger King alternate with Aradhana pashmina shawls and the Kelal Mills cloth centre. By Lake Powai, pairs of couples sit kissing on the boundary wall, a repeating reel of romantic escape.

that doesn’t quite make sense

The most clichéd description of India is that it’s a land of contradictions. But, well, it is. Bombay houses both Dharavi, the world’s biggest slum, and Antilla, the world’s most expensive single-family home. Families with more money than I can imagine pay their maids less than minimum wage. The contradictions have come into focus during festival season, which runs from the end of August to the end of October.

First was Ganesh Chaturthi, a ten-day extravaganza celebrating the elephant god. The festival is marked by hundreds of immersions of multi-sized Ganesh idols in water bodies across the city (and protests about the ensuing environmental pollution.) On the fifth day, I noticed traffic slow to a crawl behind a toddler-sized Ganesh statue in the open trunk of an SUV. Ten bedecked men and women marched behind the car, chanting ganapati bappa maurya.

I walked in their wake until we got to a dirty yellow carpet that led to the littered lakefront pavilion. The neighborhood employed professional idol soakers, who took turns plunging Ganesh statues into the greenish water. They were wet and shivering; they pelted each other with newspaper rolls and cursed in the foulest Hindi I knew. While the family performed an aarti, I watched toxic greenish-white paint residue from idols swirl in the water. Security guards threw sticks at two male dogs fighting over a female.

When the group finished their aarti, a woman handed the Ganesh to the oldest idol soaker and started to cry. He pulled his yellow t-shirt over his belly and waded into the sludge. He lifted the idol over his head, shuddered slightly, and sank with into the water. After a few long seconds, he re-emerged and doubled over with a hacking cough. They handed him a small tip, and I looked away.