Hend
My life in
My prediction about my Thanksgiving was accurate. There was no turkey and no football. Unfortunately there wasn’t any chicken or espn.com football scores, either. But it turned out pretty well, nonetheless.
After work that day I went along with some of my coworkers to a town hall style meeting about building violations. This was my chance to see “civil society in action”, as Dr. Paul had put it. A series of events in the city has led to the demolition of a number of residential buildings in Koramangala, the neighborhood where my office is located. Basically a local court was faced with a dilemma after a couple of individuals complained about the building violations of big IT companies on their block. The court responded with a demolition order against all violating properties, which basically applies to 70-90 percent of buildings in this city. But of course the big moneymaking enterprises never got touched, and the city’s property agencies just demolished a bunch of people’s homes. Needless to say, some of the people at this meeting were irate. People were springing to their feet and delivering angry tirades, totally ignoring the microphone passer guy and talking over the panelists. A guy behind me picked up the phone a couple times and started talking in a loud voice as if he were in the hall alone. A lady to my left felt inclined to cap off every person’s comment with her own clever one-liner. It was a lesson in chaos.
Then the Thanksgiving dinner
part. By the time the meeting is over it’s raining, and I rush home to meet
He parks the bike quickly in the hospital lot, basically discarding it more than parking it, and I follow him as he runs in the hospital. I don’t get much time to look around during my first trip to an Indian hospital, as we race up the steps and into room 313. There are two small beds in room 313, half the size of a twin, with just plastic vinyl covers and a blanket. On the first bed is someone who I guess is a young man; he’s totally covered himself with the blanket, curled up in the fetal position as if he’s freezing. A woman who I presume to be his mother is sitting patiently in a plastic chair next to him.
In the other bed sits Anand, cross-legged
with a huge smile, seemingly healthy and obviously happy. The unplugged end of
an IV is taped to his hand, and he says hi to
After we zip back to our block, we find Ravi’s two friends waiting under a bus canopy. We won’t be going anywhere special tonight. Instead, we walk over to an Indian-Chinese food stand right there. This is the type of place I would never go to myself, even though I’m routinely tempted, for fear of certain outcomes (like death). They whip up fried noodles or rice in a huge metal bowl with a bit of cabbage, scallions, tons of eggs, and lots of pepper. In between customers a little boy wipes off the used brown plastic plates with a damp towel and puts them back in the stack. I order the noodles, and they give me a giant heap of food with ketchup on the side. It’s delicious but it’s dry, so I follow the lead of Ravi and his friends and drench it in this ketchupy tomato sauce sitting in a glass bottle (strangely, they eat tons of ketchup here).
We sit under the brightly lit shelter of the bus canopy, each with a plate and a fork and spicy ketchupy noodles. There is a dog and a human being sleeping under the benches, about two or three feet from where I stand, and none of these guys seems to notice. It takes me several minutes to do so myself, actually; this is one of the bad aspects of adjusting to life here, my no longer being shocked or even saddened by things like this. But for the time being I am happy just to be eating something, just to be out of the rain, and just to be in the company of friends whom I would never have met in any other place beside Ul Soor’s Cambridge Road First Cross in Bangalore. Plus: my noodles had egg, and birds lay eggs, and turkeys are birds, so there you go. Please don’t argue.