Skip to main content

Street Walk

We take in the surroundings, the street food, sights, and smells. As darkness gathers the faces in the crowds grow younger. The youth dominate nights and evenings. In the early morning when the city is just beginning to stir, we walk through old neighborhoods with little parks and squares of green where the elderly are gathered to exercise. One woman in her 70s is twirling in her hoola hoop, two others slightly younger than her are stretching using the branches of a young banyan tree for support. An old man is cleaning his car with what looks like a small brush. He removes the leaves from under the windshield wiper meticulously. 

An hour later, the office going crowds emerge on the streets. The food vendors are open for business as well. We get in line behind a dozen folks at what seems to be a very popular dumpling shop. Everyone gets a couple of dumplings and coffee. The lady serving them is working at a very brisk pace. We don't want to be clueless and touristy, break her flow trying to figure out what the contents of each dumpling are - there are only three kinds. So we get one of each and its the the right choice - they are all uniquely delicious. We sit on a park bench eat our breakfast. On a tree nearby is a big bird with bright blue and white plumage, quite oblivious of the humans around. 

Yesterday, we walked on a street full of stores selling birds - much smaller than this one. The colorful parakeets were not confined to cages. They sat on little branches outside unlike the smaller, quieter birds. There is a rhythm and meaning to what happens in a country and city you have never visited and in many cases are unlikely to return to. These vignettes from my slice of time there will come to define what meaning I ascribed to what I experienced. To me it felt like a very peaceful place where people had their lives very well organized and were flowing through their days quite effortlessly. This may be a great distortion of reality but perception can be reality to outsiders - a very happy, serene and positive one in this case.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more