Of Trains, Rains, and Potholes

I said it best in shaky handwriting, bumping happily down along half the length of India on a pseudo-sterile blue pleather bunk:

September 16, 2007, 10:37pm

Woke to sick Becca. Early morning taxi down the mountain with golden light. Own baggage to train. Nap, views through thick scarred yellowed windows. Finished ‘Moor’s Last Sigh’ [by Salman Rushdie]. Strange uplifting in absurdity. Recognized road to Anna’s apartment in Delhi. Back to sweaty station. Boarded 21-hour train to Hyderabad. Bad food, ice cream. Hot gross bedtime. Liminal. Under water?

September 17, 2007 (written a few days later)

Train, train, train. Woke up to Myla hip bump. Read [Monstrous Regiment] in bed. Breakfast in bed. Lounged in bed. ‘Got ready’ for day. Sat on bed. Started ‘In Spite of the Gods: the Strange Rise of Modern India.’ Lunch (plus apple and P.B. later) in bed. Beautiful shifting views, blue-tinted bed-side window. Talked the talk with Myla and Shlayma. Hung out of train. Hung out in train. Chandra from NGO met us at Secunderabad station. False start, apartment! Through the rain for food for the masses. Wander in sleepy apartment-home. Hyderabad has clean air – crazy language.

And so it was that seventeen World Partners Fellows left Dev-Dar-above-Mussoorie for a few hours in the still-steamy grime of Delhi, and that six WPF left Delhi for Hyderabad (the other eleven boarding different trains for different journeys). We were met, we were ushered, and in turn we ushered Adam on to Vijiawadda and Leah and Lauren on towards Patta Patnam (?), somewhere past Vizag.

And then there were three: Lily, Myla, and Shlayma (in alphabetical order – or by height). In a fairly nice neighborhood enclave in a fairly spacious, fairly ugly flat. With grey-white marble floors and black detailing. And pink walls (some more peach, some more decidedly pink). And a brown table with brown upholstered chairs and a clear plastic table-cloth dotted with brown flowers that were not meant to be brown in nature. We have two bedrooms, four beds, two toilets (one Indian one Western), two small enclosed balconies (one for Laundry, one for Contemplation), and two glass-covered cabinets cluttered with a fascinatingly horrifying collection of inherited kitsch.

So we sat, the three of us, on our (astonishingly brown) chairs and pretended we had enough energy to figure out what we needed to make the apartment our home. This part of the story is rather fuzzy and worn-out, or perhaps just never recorded in my short-term memory; the weather was pleasant, the neighborhood full of little allies that would possibly all make sense in a month or two. The street we were shown to Go Buy Things on was Big and Busy and Overwhelming. The stores were overpriced (or rather, we were brought to overpriced stores because it is assumed that since we are white, and American, we have lots of money and a strong desire to spend it). The water availability was hopeful but confusing (no hot water; a shower head but that bathroom rarely has running water; constant water supply to the rest of the faucets but refill the tank but don’t overfill the tank so maybe you won’t always have water but usually you will). When we went to bed, our second night in the city, our first night alone in our apartment, we were exhausted and disoriented, but we were Here. And we hoped that being Here would be Enough.

On September 19^th, we woke to tea (boiled for ten minutes in a frying pan on our gas stove) and toast (also frying-pan style); we pulled on our salwar kameez’s (purchased in Delhi, matching scarves pinned awkwardly under the shoulder straps of our bags), and scattered into the streets towards our respective offices. Chandra, who had met the six new AP residents at the train station, knocked on my door precisely fifteen minutes after we should have left, and my first commute began: 45 minutes, 50 rupees, a million roadside shops, and plenty of exhaust. We bumped a vegetable truck, we scraped along the side of over-flowing buses, we cut across oncoming cadres of motorbikes, we stood still in parking-lot traffic, we raced towards billboards with Tollywood stars splashed across them. As tantalizing as all this is, I’ve invented two games to entertain myself during the daily journey from Tarnaka to Musheerabad and back: one, try to elicit a smile from any other woman stuck in traffic (while never making eye contact with men), and two, attempt to memorize the name of every single storefront along both sides of the road. This should take me a while.

My first impression of my NGO’s office was that it is beautiful. Set on the third story of a nice residential apartment complex in a middle-class neighborhood, it has high ceilings with cream molding and softly spinning fans, glass-front cases filled with books, pamphlets, and conference programs on HIV/AIDS, and a small pooja-room (not because anyone in the office seems to be particularly religious, or that the staff is overwhelmingly Hindu, but to make the organization feel more like a family). The NGO has three offices, two in India, and one in New York, which run a wide variety of AIDS Advocacy programs. Two programs are run out of the Hyderabad office: one that focuses on PMTCT (Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission), and one that focuses on care and support of OVC (Orphans and Vulnerable Children) and their families. I work on the OVC project, in a room with three mustaches, and my very own desk. I have documents to read, and data to enter, and soon I will have projects to begin. Life at work is good.

Life at home is very much in transition – hopefully, at this point, a transition to being settled in. We cook each other dinner. We light candles, and found sticky-sweet wine for Shabbat. We hang our laundry on the Laundry Balcony and try to remember to cover our shoulders and knees when we do. We stay up late watching movies in a pile of mango candy wrappers. And last weekend, we took an adventure across the city to the shiny, mall-infested land of Banjara Hills… which is another world, and another story, altogether.

Notes:

1. Our apartment is in Secunderabad. My NGO is in Hyderabad. And they are in the same city. So, what may once have been “twin cities” have clearly merged – as far as I can understand (and I can understand practically no Telugu, which is the heavily dominant language here), they even have one city government. In a vague sense, Secunderabad seems to be north-east of the lake that sits at the center (of what?), while Hyderabad is everywhere else. In a vague sense. In India, names change frequently, and nothing is very well labeled, but everyone gets where they’re going in a fairly reasonable – depending on the weather – amount of time.
2. I have been asked, by AJWS, not to use the name of the NGO at which I will be working for the next nine months in my blog, just in case my blog (and personal opinions) are what comes up when some random person on the planet decides to google the organization. This sounds reasonable to me. I’m also not supposed to use anyone’s last name. Sounds like a plan. We’ll see how confusing this gets, and if I have to make up a secret code, or start inventing fake names.
3. Trains: self-explanatory. Rains: still monsoon season here. Glorious. If you know how much I love rain, because this is serious rain. Potholes: the road back from work is having new pipes laid under it. The cement is torn up, and it’s a semi-construction site, but that doesn’t stop rush-hour traffic. It does, however, cause you to occasionally hit the ceiling of the auto.