Yesterday was very exciting. My host “sister” came home with a brand new car (!) which had already been taken to the temple to be blessed (!). She was bringing around ladoo to celebrate (a really tasty sweet) and stopped by my room to show me the car down in the driveway. I saw it, congratulated her, and she left. Not two minutes later I hear her run back down the hall screaming, “OPEN THE DOOR! QUICK, JUST OPEN THE DOOR! MONKEYS!!”
She barged into my room and slammed the door and put her back up against it. She said there was a pack of 7 or 8 monkeys sitting on the veranda just down the hallway from my room! Apparently Adithi is quite terrified of them, especially because she had the ladoo in her hands and monkeys love to steal food. We snuck down the hallway to have a peek, and there they were! They looked cute enough to me but Adithi insisted they were going to attack so we went back into my room. Just a second later the host mother came up the stairs with a giant stick and started whacking the ground. The monkeys took off at the sound of it before I could get a picture. “Don’t worry, they will come back tomorrow, you will see,” she said. I sure hope so.
A few hours later (after dinner) my light started flickering like a strobe light. I played with the button and got it to stay on. The Megin shouted down the hallway that her light was flickering, and could she come study in my room? I said sure, and as soon as I said it, my light started flickering again. Damn. And just after that, the lights went out. But they didn’t just go out quietly, oh no. They went out, and then the place in the hallway where all the wires poke through the wall (presumably the site of a future circuit-breaker box), which is about 15 feet from my room, started to shoot sparks in a big stream across the hall. (I can hear my dad’s blood pressure rising from here.) I screamed a little (yes I am a wimp sometimes) and the sparks stopped. And then they started again! And I screamed again! And there was the faint smell of burning and we all got very afraid and then it stopped. Fortunately, the whole building is concrete.
So, no power, and it was 11 at night so no one was available to fix it, and the temperature felt like it was still in the 90s. So all the Hindi student girls (not the family) piled into one downstairs room (the downstairs had power) which was air conditioned. We didn’t think to ask for the remote before we went to sleep. And so we froze, all night. I had brought my fleece blanket so I had that and a sheet and I still woke up frozen. The other girls only had sheets and hardly slept a wink for being so cold. You’d think we would have figured out how to turn off the AC but we didn’t. Tomorrow’s headline: four American girls found frozen in Rajasthan. In the middle of a boiling hot desert.
Also in exciting news, I went for a run this morning. It was predictably awkward. The only people who smile at me are old women. They seem happy to see me. The younger women GLARE at me, shooting daggers with their eyes. I’m thinking next time I’m going to wear one of those special thingers to fight the Evil Eye. I see now why everyone has them. The men (predictably) stare at me in really uncomfortable ways, but at least none of them said a word to me. I was just running laps in the park RIGHT next to my house, so it was relatively known and relatively safe. PLUS I was wearing loose-fitting pants (in this heat!) and a loose-fitting tee-shirt. It was good that no one outright harassed me. That’s an improvement over walking down the street. Next time I might try running in a larger park. This one was pretty small–just the size of one block. The other downside to this one is that there’s a community pee-place at the corner of it (on the street, but still.) and one corner of the lap really, really smells bad. Which isn’t fun when I’m out of breath from running.
Just yesterday I was thinking that nothing terribly exciting had happened, and then the monkeys and hallway fireworks show happened. So now I’m thinking that nothing really boring, calm, relaxing, or refreshing has happened. Perhaps I can will those things into my life as well.
