Up and About

It's doubtless a good sign that I've been unable to get back to writing this for the past few weeks. I have been fairly well (though one is never at one's best in the extreme pre-monsoon heat) and have been studying somewhat diligently. More importantly, I have done a lot more exploring in the last two weeks. Three girls from a Johns Hopkins research program live in my house, and since they have no homework, they are apt to want to go out with a Hindi (Urdu?) speaker for shopping adventures when they're off work. By some interesting twist of early-Eighties naming practices, the three of us who went on the latest adventure were Katy (by which I mean myself), Kate, and Katie. Hilarity ensued for the shopkeepers who asked us about ourselves.

We headed up to Aminabad in the old part of the city in the worst of the day's heat -- it always takes a while to get moving on Sundays. We spent most of the next five hours in a clothing store, not one of these hyper-modern "showrooms" but a proper Indian clothing store, where the clothes are only available unstitched. You can either take them to your tailor or have them made by the house tailor. Furthermore, when you come into one of these stores, there are only a few pieces on display. The remainder is packed away tightly in rows and rows of shelves and cupboards, and usually more is to be found in a mysterious "upstairs" which is really not up stairs at all, but rather up a ladder. The shop boy -- because there is always a shop boy -- scrambles up and throws things down to his superiors who are busy shouting out orders for him to bring cotton things, blue things, fancy things and so forth. In between doing this, the shop boy is to be found frantically refolding all the cloth that has been lovingly spread out in front of the seated customers, and then rejected: too fancy, too blue, wrong kind of cotton. The main salesperson meanwhile keeps up the banter about the reasonable prices and fabulous work, attempts to discern what everyone wants, orders chai for everyone, and if (like we were) the customers are special, snacks or soda are also summoned. We just sit there are piles and piles of cloth are thrown in front of us. If someone makes a slight inclination towards any piece, it is immediately and elaborately unfurled. I love shopping with other people, because the joy of that pile lies partially in selecting those special pieces of cloth that will be transformed from 'kapda' to 'kapde' -- from cloth to clothes. With all those other people, I was able to restrain myself from purchasing yet another suit, and even then, just barely. Shopping vicariously is healthy for my overstuffed wardrobe and understuffed wallet.

Also of note is my recently added extracurricular activity: along with three other girls, I joined a Bollywood dance class, put together by the famous choreographer Shiamak (of 'Taal' and 'Dhoom' fame). It met for the first time tonight, and was completely fun and exhausting without being as humiliating as I thought it would be. I went shopping for dance clothes (loose pants, t-shirt) as I had not exactly planned this beforehand. Thankfully, there are different class sections for kids and adults, although one woman was slightly distressed that she was not in what she had been told would be an exclusively over-40 class. I admired her pluck: she wore a full salwaar kameez and didn't even take off her dupatta -- and she stilll managed to jump around quite a lot. The other girls and I had to practice our moves on the roof when we got home, so that they will be perfect for our next class on Wednesday. I also have to figure out what to do about my singular pair of loose pants, which are yellow, and which I was already wearing when I got caught in a huge downpour today. Needless to say, not only did I show up looking half-drowned, my pants are rather muddy from the deluge. This simply will not do for my extremely fashionable cohort, especially the dance teacher, who is small, springy, and has a small goatee. His name is Dijendra or something, but he made it quite clear that he is to be called exclusively DJ.

Everything else chugs along. Dan came and went, sadly, and I now know where to take all of you to get the best meat in the city. I know a few more words now than I did a month ago, I think. I haven't thought to take pictures, so today's is from my mountain trip. The mangoes are almost gone. They are still around, but nearing the end of the season, most are overripe and not worth eating. The monsoon is starting fitfully. It will rain one day, then we'll have two or three completely dry, hot days. Thus mosquitoes are hardly a problem yet, and I can still easily down five or six litres of water during a day. In the monsoon's soddenness, often it's hard to drink enough water.

I'm now reading Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy," famous for its literal (though not literary) heft. It may be one of the largest novels in the English language, at almost 1500 pages. It kind of reminds of novels like Anna Karenina that are weighty and well-regarded, but still turn out as multi-starring soap operas of gigantic proportions. I'm withholding complete judgement on this book as of yet, except to say that my mother would probably like it. (By that I mean, go read this book, Mama. At least it's long enough to keep you going for more than a couple of days!) So far it's worth reading, but not perfect or even astonishingly good. A point in its favor is that it isn't crushingly depressing, which many other of these astonishingly good Indian English novels are (Fine Balance, Midnight's Children, Inheritance of Loss). It's relegated to pre-bed reading, so I've only gotten about a third of the way through in the past two weeks.

I still have about a page of Urdu to crank through before bed, and then a bit of my wrist-spraining book to read, so it's off to study with me. I'll attempt to keep a more regular writing schedule in the coming weeks, even when I am well (and therefore busy).