***This was actually written over a week ago...my bad.***
I have now lived in India for 4 weeks, 3 days and 2 hours. What am I doing right now? As I type this overdue post, I lay in a room without air-conditioning at St. Pius College, Bombay. Despite its location in the middle of a city with a population of 18 million, the campus is eerily green and spacious. Sister Thelma lives across the hall and, having been locked into the dorm for the night at 10:30 PM, I have decided to resume blogging before everyone forgets about me and I forget that I once had a blog. I am concerned that the combination of moisture-laden air and the sweat on my legs will ruin my laptop, yet I soldier on.
What’s that you say? What have I done for the past 4.5 weeks, and why am I living in a Catholic dormitory? Here is a brief summary in the form of a chronological list:
-Took an unexpected full-day stopover in Delhi on the way to Mumbai from London. The Delhi airport? Unremarkable.
-Discovered luggage to be lost upon arrival in Mumbai. Loitered about the airport for 48 hours, sweated through my only two pairs of clothes and generally made a spectacle of myself. Left without luggage.
-Traveled to Pune from Mumbai in a taxi arranged by new BFF Vaijanath, who I met at the airport. Was amused at my general ignorance of the region’s geography (mountains? Who knew?).
-Arrived at International Institute of Information Technology in Hinjewadi, Pune. Met 42 other Fellows and discovered over the course of 4 weeks that Hinjewadi is equivalent to the area surrounding a highway underpass in the U.S.
-Shambled through 3 sweaty weeks of summer school, made some friends, learned some stuff.
-Received luggage after 3.5 weeks and 3 trips back to the Mumbai airport (and 2 more rides facilitated by Vaijanath…mah man!) and minus my running shoes, flip-flops and plug converter.
-Left Pune for Mumbai after 4 weeks, leaving about half of the 42 other 1st Institute Fellows. Rode in the nicest bus I have ever had the pleasure to inhabit.
-Moved into a temporary residence at St. Pius, started our fifth and final week of training, and met my co-teacher Anchal who attended the 1st Training Institute and has already been teaching our class for 4 weeks. Currently searching frantically for a flat with my future roommates so that we can resume speaking above a whisper after 10 PM.
I’ve had scant internet access and my laptop’s battery was murdered by a power surge, but I’ll provide pictures (particularly for my parents, who have no idea what I am doing here. Heyyyy Mom!). If you’re lucky there might even be captions.
In the meantime, I would just like to introduce a concept that I have encountered here for the first time. I refer, of course, to the occupancy of every square foot of space in sight by stationary human beings. I am familiar with crowds, and even big, urban ones, despite growing up in Wisconsin. During peak commute times in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, wherever, everyone is swept along by the collective momentum of individuals who are late to work. But never in my life have I seen so many people at once just…chillin’. People be chillin’ on highway dividers and planters, inside abandoned bulldozers, in front of anyplace that sells anything (i.e. every 5 feet), and especially in the few parks in the two cities I’ve visited. The park chillers are my favorite, because they consist of a). the most sexually frustrated couples I have ever seen stealing a fleeting moment of shoulder-to-shoulder contact or b). hundreds and hundreds of young men, either playing cricket or doing absolutely nothing (Where my girls at?! But seriously, I have no idea what happened to all the women). The cause of all this loitering seems to be the lack of actual physical space, as well as a climate that feels like living inside a hot tub. The sedentary crowds are one of those things that—no matter how well prepared you are to get Delhi belly or ride in an auto rickshaw—cannot be reconciled with anything familiar. It also makes it very easy for everyone to stare at me as I walk past at a Harvard pace that I can’t shake (7 rows of cobblestone per stride). I have yet to ride the Mumbai local trains.
Anyways, now you understand why the spacious lawns of St. Pius are so weird. It’s like living in a deserted forest in the middle of Manhattan, times 5.