Monsoon, garbage, street dogs, verbs

I forgot to say in my last post that Sunday it started monsooning again. My housemates and I were certain that we are the first people ever to create this word, and we were pretty proud of it for about an hour. Anyway, my room has a great big window (one wall is 80% window) and so we sat and watched the monsoon. The skies got dark, so dark that we couldn’t really see for more than a block or two, and the rain came down in torrents. The streets flood relatively quickly, and there was probably 6 inches of water in the street in front of our house very soon after the monsoon started. We watched the people-who-iron-clothes on the sidewalk across from our building frantically pack up clothes, irons, carts, and babies, and run off to who-knows-where right before the storm started. I hope they were dry. Clare, another student here, was walking home from our house in her brand-new bright blue salwar qameez when the storm hit, and the dye ran all over her and turned her blue. So blue, in fact, that her host mother wouldn’t let her help cook dinner because she looked like a smurf. Well, that’s not what the host mother said but that’s how we’re interpreting it.

Shortly after the monsooning ended, we saw a garbage truck rumble by. It was followed by a front-end loader. So THAT’s how they clean up the massive piles of trash. They scoop them up with earth moving equipment. Makes perfect sense now. Yesterday when I walked home someone had thrown out a bunch of fabric scraps in the dumpsters right next to the stinky community pee-place that’s about a block from my house. When I went back to school this morning, every bit of fabric was gone. But not the rest of the trash. There’s a story in there, but I don’t know what it is.

There is a street dog that has taken to sleeping in our hallway. Once you enter the property gates of my building, you can walk up to my hallway without having to go in the house. So I woke up this morning and when I went outside, there was the dog, just hanging out in the hallway. I went a little closer to try to shoo him away. And as I got closer, I could see that he was shaking just a little bit. He did not respond to me at all. Someone here commented that all the street dogs here look broken. It’s true, and sad. Of course, there are plenty of people who look equally hungry and desperate, so why should the dogs be different?

By the way, I try not to really emphasize this, but dammit, HINDI IS HARD. There is this one verb that has about a bajillion different uses, everything from “striking” to “feeling” to “costing” to “spending” to “passing” to “hanging” to “beating.” We noted at least 32 different uses of it yesterday in grammar class, and another one popped up this morning. Also, in Hindi there are compound verbs, so if you want to say that someone did two things, you can sort of say it at once. But there are all sorts of connotations that can be implied by double verbs. Today I am having one of those days where Hindi seems impossible and now I know why. The verbs are all over the place. Undisciplined verbs, that’s my problem. I need to get myself a good linguistic paddle and whip those saucy verbs into shape.

Also, I moved into my new room last night, just down the hall from where I was staying, and let me just say that I’m very VERY happy to be able to unpack a little bit. Plus the curtains are pretty. Hey, this trip is hard enough, I’ll take my solace where I can get it.

First update from India: camels, monkeys, and car horns

I’ve arrived in Jaipur (the pink city) and just an hour ago met my host family. They’re very nice. The husband is a doctor and the wife is a professor. I have an adorable little room at the front of the house with its own separate entryway. They also have internet access, so hopefully my updates will become more frequent! Anyway, it’s on a cute and thankfully quiet street. Most streets here are not quiet. Indians don’t seem to use turn signals, traffic lights, or traffic laws. Instead they honk their horns with vigor, just to let other cars know they are there, which makes for a mightly loud city! As you might imagine the streets are extremely chaotic, with cars, buses, motorcycles, cycle rickshaws, autorickshaws, people, camels, pigs, goats, sheep, cows, and dogs all vying for a place. I have never seen such chaos. I have also never seen chaos function so well. Somehow they all know how to avoid hitting each other (thus far) and traffic generally keeps flowing. The only law that is generally followed is “drive on the left” but even that is frequently disobeyed. It’s also not unusual to have traffic stopped by a truck that is sitting in the middle of the road, jacked up so that it can be repaired.

The people here are very nice, and most are shocked that we Americans speak Hindi. Speaking Hindi makes people much more excited to help us, it seems, though everyone is generally nice to begin with. of course there will always be tricksters and people out to get your money, but in general, people seem good-spirited. It is, however, a bit exhausting being a woman. The calls of “Hey madam!” or “Allo! Allo!” are constant, and any acknowledgment of them only increases their intensity. So when walking down the street the women just ignore them, which is kind of…tiring.

So, it may not be “home sweet home,” but it’s tolerable so far. The chaos is endearing at times and maddening at times. People routinely park all over the sidewalk, as there is no parking on the street. In fact the street kind of blends into the sidewalks. The smells are, of course, intense, and range from delectable (Indian food! Spices! Incense!) to nauseating (open sewers! Rotten garbage! Cow poop!). And cows really do roam freely, which is startling at first but you kind of get used to it.

Also, I saw monkeys! And camels! And an elephant! And a camel train! And this was all on the “highway” from Delhi to Jaipur. There are a lot of camels here, as we’re in the desert (sort of). The monsoon came early this year, so it rains almost every day, which makes for a bit of a mess in the streets. Despite the rain, it’s hot here. I’m sure, because my alarm clock tells the temperature and 75 or 80 degrees feels like a relief.