WWBD?

Saturday, August 21

It's Saturday afternoon, and I'm mostly unpacked and moved into my host home. I probably won't have the internet to post this until Monday morning, but I want to write everything down while my first impression is still fresh. I'll work in kind of an earthquake pattern to describe everything... start from the center and go outward, because that seems like the easiest way to go.

I have my own bedroom. It's actually a little bit bigger than my room at home, I think. It's very white... white walls, white ceiling, white tile floor. There's a bed, a wardrobe, a vanity-type table and a full length mirror, and a Ganesh shrine in here, along with a couple of lawn chairs for seating. I have one window, and a door that opens out onto the balcony, and I have a pretty awesome view into the apartment complex's courtyard. There's a huge, gorgeous fountain, but it's not currently turned on. There's also a community complex building for group activities. My Aai and Baba pointed out Emily's balcony, and I can see it from my balcony. We'll be rickshawing to ACM together every morning, and we'll probably spend a lot of time at each other's apartments.

The second door in my bedroom leads out into the rest of the apartment. Right across the hall from me is the bedroom of my Aji (grandmother) and Bahin (sister). There's a bathroom attached to their room that I'll be sharing with them. My host sister is 26 and works for an American company, so she works a night shift to coincide with American time, and she sleeps through most of the day. Aji is my Baba's mother, and she's quite old. She doesn't know a lot of English, but she's a very sweet lady.

There's a second bathroom in the apartment with an Indian toilet. The kitchen is down the hall from my room, and it has a glass dining table in it. Hopefully, that's where I'll be learning to cook tasty Indian foods! Between the kitchen and the door to the apartment is a living room-type area.

My Aai and Baba both seem extremely nice... Baba is currently making me a cup of special chaha (tea) with basil in it to soothe my cough (I picked up a cold my first couple of days here, and I'm not quite over it yet. I figure as far as viruses I could have acquired, though, I can't really complain about a cold). He speaks very good English, and he doesn't have very much of an accent. He seems to be a fairly quiet person, but very kind. My Aai seems like a very lively person, but she also seems very worn down at the moment. She's spent the week in Mumbai because her mother is unwell, and she only got back today to meet me. She has quite a bit of an accent, and sometimes (especially in the noisy lunchroom) it's hard to understand her. Hopefully, I'll soon be speaking enough Marathi that it won't be a problem.

Aai and Baba just took me for a walk around the apartment complex. I'm pretty sure Emily and I got the most awesome homes of the group. The garden has a stone-paved jogging/walking path through it that's surrounded by beautiful plants... lantana and heather and oleander and tropical plants that I don't recognize. There's a small playground with teeter-totters and a merry-go-round and swingsets and slides (it lacks the oleander plants), and there are bench swings at the edges so family can sit and watch over their kids. There's a gym (which I doubt I'll use), and a swimming pool that's kind of quarantined off out of people's view. It's all very beautiful: a little oasis in the center of the traffic-ridden Pune.

Whoever came up with the idea of garlic chutney is a genius. I mean, I've had chutney before... coriander chutney, coconut chutney, mango chutney, other kinds of chutney. And usually, I think they're pretty okay. When it comes to Indian food, there's pretty much a guarantee that I'll eat it. But seriously, garlic chutney? I'd never had it before dinner tonight, and I didn't think such a thing existed. But then my aai came out with a bowl of pulverized garlic mixed with some spices, and I suddenly developed an entirely new passion for chutney. Where can you go wrong when 95% of a recipe is garlic (unless the other 5% is dead or... well... actually, that's pretty much the only qualifier I can come up with)? I'm sure Pop has some relatively negative answers for this, but I'm pretty much sold on the concept.

So anyway, dinner was good. It was a very light dinner... just the chutney, methi (fenugreek) paratha, dal, and rice. But we had a huge lunch at the hotel when we met our host families, so I'm pretty sure I couldn't have eaten any more food than that if they'd had it. I'm getting a little more comfortable speaking Marathi... I still know virtually nothing of the language, but I can say things like “it's good” and “that's enough” and “i want [insert food item here].” Theoretically, I could also say I wanted non-food items, but frankly, why would I want to do that?

Sunday, August 22

Today was a new experience for everyone. I went with my host family to a housewarming party. Their neighbors moved to a new apartment, so we loaded up and headed across Pune to help them celebrate with all their friends. Right inside in the center of the entry room was a firepit full of ashes. It was a square of bricks laid out on the tile floor where they had burned a fire to honor their fire god, according to my aai. At the edge of the room, there was a cloth spread out on the floor with copper bowls set out on it. In each bowl sat a coconut with a garland of flowers decorating it. Each door was adorned with a spot of red powder like the dots they put on their foreheads.

When it came time for lunch, we went into an empty room and sat in the floor. We were each given a huge banana leaf to serve as a plate. On it went lots of different foods, most of which I still don't know what they were. There was a spiced potato dish, mixed vegetables in a coconut sauce, two types of dal, lemon rice and plain rice, mango chutney, and something really spicy that might have involved green beans. We also got a bowl of sweet rice in coconut milk as a dessert. The food was pretty delicious, and the experience was epic. Once all the food was laid out on the banana leaf, it was a beautiful display. There's just something about putting food on a banana leaf that makes it look better. I wish I had had my camera just to photograph the food. Other than me and my host family, there was only one other person that spoke English, so I pretty much just sat quietly and absorbed. Everyone ate with their hands which is pretty common here, and, lest I should have appeared like even more of a dumb uncultured white girl, I did too. I actually tend to prefer eating with my hands, anyway. Finger food just tastes better. And besides, when in India....

I've decided to add a second mantra to my India trip (along with “Don't pet the monkeys!”), because I'm beginning to feel as if that's just not going to adequately cover every situation I get into here. I mean, when I'm walking down the street and see a cute puppy or goat, “don't pet the monkeys” is adequate. But when I'm sitting in a room full of people with a banana leaf in front of me, it just doesn't suffice (unless of course there's a banana attached to the banana leaf and a monkey eyeing the banana). So, for situations like that, my second mantra: W.W.B.D?: What would Bones Do? For those of you who don't watch/know the T.V. show Bones, you should. It's about a cultural anthropologist who is pretty much brilliant, but she's socially awkward and totally misses even the most obvious of social cues in normal situations. Jolie compares me to her all the time for some reason... like I'm socially awkward or something. Either way, any time some sort of cultural question comes up (“Should I eat this with the spoon they gave me, or should I just do what they do and eat with my hands?” for example), I just think what Bones would do in that situation.

Before we went to the house-warming party, I spent some time with Aji (grandmother) learning a little more Marathi. When my aai was cleaning out a cabinet, she found a book of Marathi children's stories, and I've been using it to learn the letters and pronunciations. Aji came in and helped me with it a little bit, and translated things after I read them. As a side note, Aji is very taken with the stuffed llama ;) I brought here with me, and she comments on him pretty much every time she's in my room.

Thanks to Dr. Nick and my amazing adaptive skills, I now have the ability to type in Marathi on my computer. Kind of. In a very slow, painstaking sort of way that involves looking at a chart of the keyboard because it's not done in the same order as ours. Instead of the j-key typing the Marathi letter that makes a 'j' sound, it types र which makes an 'r' sound. It's rather frustrating. However, with much time and effort, I successfully managed to type out a few sentences:

मी आनी. मी भजी खातो. मला पाणी पाइजे.

Basically it says, “I'm Annie. I eat vegetables. I want water.” I think. Or it could say something about a giraffe. I'm still a bit shaky on the vocab. But the letters look cool.

I keep having dreams that I'm still in America and I've just dreamed everything that's happened in India so far. It's really weird, and gets a little bit confusing. I mean, I'll dream that I wake up and I'm just totally convinced that I'm still in Missouri in my dreams and that I've just had a really vivid dream that involved going to India and learning Marathi and meeting all these new people. And then I wake up, and I have to convince myself that that was the dream and I really am in India.

So far, everything is going well, and I hope it continues to do so.

Curate ut valeatis,

आनी