Wherever You Go, There's Daily Life

Spending a semester in India sounds quite exotic, but we’ve already discovered that on a day-to-day basis here in Anand, our life, not surprisingly, follows a pretty ordinary routine. We get up, maybe go for a bike ride around campus before breakfast, eat a standard breakfast in our apartment, and then bike over to my office so, on the days I have classes, I can prepare for class while Bob writes, and on the days I don’t, I can do email or other chores (I still have some work from Hampshire hanging over my head, a sign of how badly I procrastinated on things in the weeks before I left!), while Bob writes. Then three days a week at noon I teach my class, while Bob takes a break in the staff room (where they have a coffee and tea machine that, while it produces only instant coffee and not cappuccino and lattes, at least in his coffee-deprived state helps fill the void). Perhaps because we haven’t gone at the right hour, we haven’t found a lot of other staff hanging out in the staff room, but Bob did strike up an acquaintance with one faculty member he encountered there who teaches micro-finance. Getting to know other people, when mostly so far we talk only to each other, is definitely a plus.

When I get back from class, at about 1:30 (class ends at 1:10, but usually a student or two comes up to talk after class, which I like), we bike back to our apartment for lunch, which is often leftovers from the previous night’s supper. After lunch, we might read for a bit at “home” and then go back to the office for an hour or so, or go into town on an errand, or take a bike ride beyond the campus. The “events” are things like being invited by some students to come to their “mess” (as they call it) to have late afternoon tea and talk, or hanging out at the children’s playground that is right in front of our apartment block with Vivek’s father, who has been visiting since we got here and often goes there with Vivek’s two daughters in the late afternoon, or playing with the girls, Barkha and Annika, or with the boys who are out there flying kites. Pretty exotic, huh???

This lack of excitement gives me a chance to write about some of the ordinary aspects of our lives that are, nonetheless, different from Northampton, so here they are:

Cows: As everybody knows, and as you see in the photo, cows are all over the place in India, hanging out in the streets and eating garbage. I always thought it was because of some religious symbolism they had (and maybe that’s part of it), but we just learned that at least some of the reason turns out to be that it’s simply too expensive for people to feed and house cows that a) are male and can’t give milk, or b) are female but are not good milkers, for whatever reason (since they’re vegetarian, they can’t eat them, either). So these are basically abandoned cows. In the U.S., of course, if people were abandoning cows to the streets, we’d have somebody round them up and slaughter them, but apparently slaughtering cows is just not done here. So they continue to wander.

Masters and servants: As I already mentioned a few entries ago, we have already acquired – for the first time in my life – a servant: a woman who cleans the apartment, does our laundry, and cooks us supper every night. She comes in the mid-morning, when we’re not around, to clean and do laundry, and at 6 p.m. to prepare supper, which she puts on the table for us at 7 before leaving for home. This is quite standard. In addition, there’s a separate guy who comes every day to clean the bathroom (this is apparently so routine that it’s part of the rent – no one even asked if we wanted him or not). And someone else delivers milk whenever we put a coupon indicating we want it outside our door. And someone else comes each morning to pick up our garbage, which we also put outside our door. I already mentioned the guys who sit on the very ample lawns of the campus pulling weeds out of the grass one by one by hand. You get the picture – there’s a lot of labor available. In addition, the whole set-up of the campus community is quite feudal: the apartment blocks (not tall buildings, but two story units the scale of garden apartments) are labeled “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D” units, with D, the “lowest,” being where the non-professional staff live, and C, B, and A for faculty and administrators, who start out at the low end in C, and gradually as they’re promoted from assistant to associate to full professor move up to A. We’re in C, which could either be a reading of our status, or – on the optimistic side – be the only place an empty apartment was available.

Weddings: This is wedding season in Gujurat, and weddings are going on constantly. You know they’re happening because there is loud music and very often loud fireworks every night that we can hear easily from where we live, even though it’s coming from outside the campus walls. Since the weddings take place outside, in special parks that are the equivalent of U.S. catering halls, the music carries easily. I’ve been trying to persuade Bob, so far unsuccessfully, to leave the campus at night and try to sneak in on one of these affairs (which certainly sound like a hell of a lot of fun), but today – to our surprise – as we were doing errands in town, a wedding party suddenly came pouring out of a nearby wedding park, music blaring. I don’t know why this one was happening during the day, but the costumed musicians, the very dressed-up guests, and – most marvelously – the shimmering fairy-tale horse-drawn carriage in which the bride and groom ride (see photos) give you a glimpse of the fantastic romantic quality of the Indian wedding. It puts even the wedding in the movie of “Sex and the City” to shame. Once again, Tova, Ariel, and Rebecca, if you’re reading this blog, consider this – when you’re ready for your wedding, do you want to think about opting for one in India? The jubilation couldn’t possibly be better, and I bet the price is right, too.