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Jun
12
2009

Pam Loses It.

Adorable. Unstoppable. We are pretty much powerless.
.
I yelled at a child today.

She was a beautiful beggar child of about seven, with a baby on her hip. She had followed us down the street for blocks and blocks, as we dodged traffic and stepped over cow dung, climbed over rubble and leapt across open sewers, and all the while she chanted, over and over and over again:

“No mama, no daddy, food, baby…”

I’d been turning as we walked, and saying things like:

“Neh, neh,” or, “No money, I have no money.”

While Phil had been saying:

“Come on, give her a little something. Just look how cute she is.”

This is a game Phil likes to play. He keeps hoping to replicate that moment in a Rajasthani village where, after handing out rupees and candy, I was swarmed by a prehensile knot of rabid nine-year old schoolgirls, pulling at my handbag and scratching at my arms while crying theatrically that one girl had gotten something that another didn’t. Phil witnessed all this from the safe distance of a camel’s hump, and still doesn’t believe I was actually scared.

Right now, Phil and I are in NOIDA decompressing from our own busy weeks, and waiting for our flight back to Bangalore. We have left the hotel, because there are only so many odd movies from the ’90s that one can watch, and unable to choke down more spicy vegetable mush, we are hunting the urban landscape for a KFC.

We come here once every few months for Phil to work at the local Adobe office. NOIDA is a stinking high-tech suburb of Delhi; a mean and ugly place that has only gotten meaner and uglier since a big outsourcing spaceship crashed into it a few years back. The word NOIDA isn’t even a name, but an acronym that stands for “New Okhla Industrial Development Authority.” The city is divided into sectors, numbered for the order in which they were built, rather than the logical order that one might move through them. This neighborhood is a filthy rabbit warren of crime, poverty and sewer gas; this boat hasn’t risen with the new tide of Indian prosperity. Which, I’m starting to suspect, is pure myth.

“No mama, no daddy. No mama, no daddy. Food. Baby.

“Neh. Neh. No money.”

So far, NOIDA is the only area of India where I have felt unsafe: as we weave through the streets the men look at me like I’m an exotic fruit they want to squeeze or take a bite of. Their gawking is only slightly tempered by Phil’s presence, even though Indians regularly mistake him for a WWF wrestler known as The Undertaker. On our last visit here we had to leave a market in a hurry because a mob was forming around us, but not before someone managed to grab my ass, though Phil was standing right next to me. Why, we both wonder, in this culture of propriety and repression, is it okay to unabashedly leer at another man’s wife? Or do white girls have such a bad reputation over here that they assume the tall guy is my pimp?

And then there are the women. Wait… what women? There are no women here. Nothing but men, massive amounts of men in bell-bottom pants that are too tight and pulled up too high, and the embroidery… oh, God, the embroidery! The fact that women are rarely seen here tells me the area is old school Hindu conservative, a place where women are kept home “for their own protection.” To be female in this country is to be someone’s property. A white female walking down a street in India is porn to men, and to beggar children, a mark.

“No mama, no daddy. No mama, no daddy. Food. Baby.”

“Neh. Neh. No money.”

I am lying. I have money. Small bills in fact, convenient for handing out in situations such as these, but today I am not doing it. If I thought for a minute that she could possibly understand, or that her English vocabulary extended beyond “No mama, no daddy, food, baby,” I would try to explain it to her. I want to tell her that I know it isn’t her fault and that I love children and that the fact that this is her childhood breaks my heart. I want to explain that I’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire and I know that she is doing someone else’s bidding.

In these past four months we’ve approached this beggar-child issue in a number of ways, and pretty much all of them have been disastrous. When we’ve given money to one of the grimy little cherubs we’ve been mobbed, surrounded by ten more, their parents and grandparents, all with hands outstretched asking for more, more, more. I’ve given them food off my plate and bracelets off my arms. We laughed when they stole Phil’s Coca-Cola and drank it on the other side of the street. We’ve let them walk us to the market and bought them bags of dhal and rice and oil, only to find they later took it back to the store and got cash. I’ve been scratched and clawed and tormented by their sad chanting.

“No mama, no daddy, food, baby.”

Phil walks slightly faster, and I try to calm myself by pretending I’m a Buddhist. I struggle to exercise compassion, but then… then, she starts mimicking me:

“Please, stop following me !”

“Please stop following me !”

Phil giggles. The big brother in him can’t help it.

“I am not giving you money. Go away !”

“I am not giving you money. Go away !”

The girl giggles, because Phil giggled.

“And you stop laughing !”

“And you stop laughing !”

We run across the street and step into a shop, trying to shake her. She sticks to my heels, and I get angrier and angrier. I know she is just a child, doing only what she has been taught to do. I know that her life is hopelessly brutal and all roads for her are, and will continue to be, blocked. And underneath her skilled, though infuriating behavior, she is a child, an innocent, a human who deserves a clean place to sleep, and food to eat. She deserves an education. And a bath.

“No mama, no daddy. Food. Baby.”

“Leave me the hell alone !” I shout.

“Leave me the hell alone !” she shouts back, then giggles, again.

I am furious with her parents, or whoever has put her up to this. I am appalled that the government of this vast country, that claims to be stepping into the role of international business leader, allows this to go on. It is not this child that I am mad at. I am furious at both the utter hopelessness of India, and my helplessness in the face of it.

Over these past four months my heartstrings have been stretched out from abuse and right now I am tired – I’ve been sick with a wicked cold and food poisoning and I am exhausted from three all-night bus rides in one week. I’ve peed in the middle of the highway in the middle of the night. I’ve listened to people vomiting all around me on a hair-raising fifteen-hour bus journey. Rarely in these past four months have I looked out a window and not seen a man with his willie in hand, peeing. I’m tried of watching people crap in open fields and on roadsides in plain sight. And I am tired of being played by beggar children and I worry about what I’ll become after eight more months of this.

I know there must be an explanation for the pathetic state of this country, but I’m too new here to know whom or what to blame it on; this whole place seems broken eight hundred ways from Tuesday. Still, there is a part of me that loves it here, and when I find a way that I can help, I will; but I could empty out my bank account right now and give to every beggar I see and it wouldn’t make the least dent in any of their lives.

“Please, leave me alone, I can’t help you,” I say.

“Please, leave me alone, I…”

I snap. I turn on my heel and bend down and look her in the eyes, and start raving, a crazy screeching white lady:

“Go away! Leave me alone! Go! Stop following me! LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE !!”

A cascade of unprintable swearwords streams from my mouth and swirls around this dirty little girl like litter. I can’t stop screaming. I fear a mob is going to gather, tear me limb from limb, and I fear that I deserve it. I’m thankful that the girl has no idea what I’m saying, but a local man passing us on the street clearly does, and he whispers something to the girl, something magic in Hindi, that finally makes her go away.

Tears well in my eyes and I am unhinged in a way that only India can do to me.

Even big brother no longer thinks this is funny; Phil grabs my hand and pulls me away.

“Come on, crazy white lady. There’s a KFC right up here.”

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Jun
10
2009

Good morning India. Please be nice to me today.

The phone wakes me out of a sound sleep. I am tangled sweetly with my husband and don’t want to move. He’s been very kind lately, which worries me a bit: maybe my recent outbursts have him concerned for my mental health. I’ve noticed him talking to me in soothing tones, and listening to my crazy white lady rants with unusual patience.

“Pam – electricalmanhere,” Bhaskar barks from the phone.

“Huh?”

“AC, AC, AC, repairmanforAC.”

Our air conditioning has been down for weeks now and every night, despite sleeping under a mosquito net slathered in DEET, I am raped by insects and wake up with welts that I am unconsciously tearing at. I have scabs on my arms like a junkie; it is disgusting and I will probably come down with malaria any minute now. Cold air is the only thing that immobilizes them.

I climb out of bed and pull on a floor length cotton dress because I know there are men downstairs. Indian men, leering Indian men, who will likely talk about their visit to the white people’s house all week long. I come downstairs expecting to open the front door to let the “repairmenforAC” in, but no, they are already inside – looking around at everything on every wall and surface. They look confused and amazed. The young one’s lower jaw is actually drooping like Billy Bob Thornton’s in Sling Blade; and he can’t decide where to settle his eyes, on the white lady’s chest or the swimming pool, so his glance darts between the two.

There is a mound of dogshit on the floor in the pooja room, and three puddles of dogsick in the hallway. We kept Kaiser in last night because he twisted his leg and has been limping. If left outside he patrols all night long, throwing the top half of his body over the fence and barking manically at the packs of stray dogs that roam through the night, and the Nepali night watchman who walks through the street smacking his stick on the ground and blowing his whistle every minute or so. He threw up because somehow in his convalescing state he managed to pull a box of kheer kadam off the shoulder-high shelf and ate a dozen pieces of sticky white sweets. There are chewed up bits of box all over the dining room.

The parade steps around the vomit and follows me upstairs to the roof. I explain that the air conditioner in the bedroom has become a rain machine.

“Water, whoosh. No air. Water only.”

Baskhar translates something to the repairmen, though experience has told me the translation may contain only the minimum of actually accurate information, if I’m lucky.

“Okay?” I say, “They understand, yes?”

It is hard to tell, as they all appear to be just staring at the cold air machine.

“Okee-okee,” Baskhar says, wobbling his head with a gesture I can’t stop reading as no.

Good morning India. Please be nice to me today.

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May
14
2009

South Asian MILFs (Mosquitoes I’d Like to Flatten)

A couple things about mosquito nets: first off, they aren’t nearly as romantic as they look in movies where tropical lovers languish on white sheets veiled by the soft focus of the gently draping white net. And secondly, they work a lot better if the vile insects are trapped on the outside of the net …er, instead of the inside.

Mosquitoes love me ; the feeling is not mutual. Every evening around twilight I begin scratching at a new crop of bites. This is my own fault. A constant battle wages within me: do I put on enough repellent to ward off the blood-thirsty beasts, which means poisoning my bloodstream with DEET; or do I risk the chance that one of these days, one of these mosquitoes might poison my bloodstream with malaria, or something equally as bad. I can never decide which is worse, and in the meantime, do nothing. Last night this approach backfired, as it does nearly every night.

Normally we keep the bedroom as cold as a meat locker; mosquitoes don’t like the cold, but evidently in doing so we have used up all the electricity in the neighborhood. Last night, with no air conditioning, it was too warm to keep the bastards down, and too dark to do a thorough check before climbing into bed.

At 3 a.m. I awaken doing the Saint Vitus Dance. I have bites everywhere: my legs, arms, hands, forehead, toes. I slip my hand out under the net and switch on the light. Half a dozen swollen mosquito bodies cling to the mesh inside the net, barely able to fly. I clap my hands over the first body, it splatters, leaving stigmata on my palms.

“What the hell are you doing?” Phil growls, and pulls the sheet over his head. Mosquitoes don’t like him. I suspect that the nicotine and Cocoa Puffs that sustain him together create a natural repellent.

“They have my blood, and I want it back,” I say, and crush another midnight outlaw. Right now I am a naked, female, Dirty Harry, ready to make four more mosquitoes sorry they were ever hatched. Whack – I destroy another one. He falls to the bed sheet in a drop of blood. My blood.

“That’s disgusting,” Phil complains. “Mosquito carcasses on the bed…!”

“Disgusting? I’ll show you what’s disgusting,” and I display the angry red splotches on my arms and thighs, I pull back my hair and show him my forehead. “THAT’S disgusting. I could have malaria, I could I have bubonic plague, Dengue fever, yellow fever. I could be dying right now!” I slap another one for emphasis, blood sprays across my palm, and even Dirty Harry is grossed out.

Four down. I sit silently and wait for the two survivors to settle on the net. I move stealthily, crawling across the bed like a cat, and swat at the others until they are immobilized and flat.

“If you’re finished with your killing spree can you please turn out the light?” Phil says in a voice that is clearly untroubled by itching.

“Just a sec, I have to wash the evidence off my hands.” Ungracefully, I climb out from under the net, my arms and legs tangling in the fabric. I tiptoe to the bathroom and wash my hands and dot my skin with calamine lotion.

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May
11
2009

Your Cheatin’ Help

I’ve never looked into someone’s eyes and unabashedly said, “You are lying to me,” unless I was sleeping with them and they were sleeping with someone else, or I suspected they were.

Venu, the guy we inherited to clean the pool and feed the dog, is a tricky one. He is small and delicate, with green eyes and a smile that would, somewhere else in the world, get him anything he wanted; and right now he wants 300 rupees. Around six bucks. But instead of just asking for a loan, or a gift, he has made up an elaborate story about buying milk for the dog while we were out of town last month.

“Venu says ma’am owes him 300 rupees,” Bhaskar translates.

I laugh. It is true that we often feed the dog yogurt, for his digestive problems. Yesterday, I accidentally fed the dog milk, thinking it was yogurt, and he spent the morning throwing up all over the lawn. “Kaiser doesn’t drink milk,” I say, “it makes him…” and I act out throwing up because my translator is an unreliable resource.

Bhaskar pretends to speak and understand English as well as the next Indian, but yesterday when he answered the question, “What is this neighborhood called ?” with the words, “Yes ma’am, we’ll go on the weekend,” I became concerned that his daily translations of more important matters might be causing more problems than they are solving.

“How much did he spend ?” I ask.

“300 rupees.”

“Okay, let’s see: one bag of milk costs about twenty rupees, right ? That’s fifteen pints of milk, and we were gone for maybe five days. So that means Venu fed Kaiser one pint of milk, which by the way, makes him VOMIT, three times a day, for five days, and that adds up to – he’s LYING.”

I lost both of them a long time ago and I know it, but I take advantage of the fact that they can’t keep up with me, and just blow off steam. I want to let them both know that I am not just the nice white lady who kisses babies and gives out money – I am also the crazy white lady who has lived in India for long enough to know when she’s being taken advantage of.

“Why is Venu lying to me ?” I ask.

“He is telling lies, ma’am,” Bhaskar shrugs.

Venu stands there trying hard to look innocent. He sticks to his story: “Three hundred rupees. Mil-ik. Kaisher.”

I stick to mine: “You. Lying.”

I douse Venu with badly translated logic; he wobbles his head and chatters emphatically to Bhaskar, who chatters back with words that sound like Count Dracula with a stammer: “Blah blah, blah…” I have no idea what is transpiring between them, and at this point Bhaskar’s explanations are of little help.

“Venu says he tell sir of the necessity to purchase mil-ik for Kaisher.”

It takes a few seconds for the meaning of this sentence to sink in. “I need to talk to sir for a minute,” I say and go upstairs to the air-conditioned cave Phil calls home.

“Did Venu tell you of the necessity to purchase mil-ik for Kaisher ?” I ask. Phil is in his signature position, half sitting, half lying down on the bed, his head and shoulders nestled into pillows with a computer on his lap. He looks over the screen and wobbles his head, “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve never actually understood a word he’s said.”

“You are no help.”

“I’m beddy beddy sorry, ma’am,” Phil chuckles, and goes back to pimping our blog.

I’m torn. I hate being taken advantage of, I also hate the idea of having an unhappy employee who has access to our house and everything in it.

The owners of the house, from whom we inherited this drama, had warned us not to let Venu’s wife into the house, as things tend to disappear in her presence, a rumor which has earned her the name, “Klepto-bride”. Also, last month Venu’s brother, Hari, disappeared with three thousand rupees the maid had given him to deliver to her daughter in their native village. He never arrived, and hasn’t dared show his face back around here.

Apparently the family isn’t as concerned about their karma as their red dotted foreheads imply and the locks on all the cupboards and drawers in the house are starting to make more sense.

I go downstairs; Venu and Bhaskar are still standing in the dining room. I really have no idea where to go from here, so I say the same thing I said to the last cheating bastard who lied to me: “I really don’t want to deal with this right now,” and I walk away.

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May
11
2009

There’s a Place in Hell for People Like Us

It is Saturday morning, and the baby at the construction site next to our house won’t shut up. OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration: he’s not baby, he’s a toddler.

They’re building a three-story shopping center in our quiet, by Indian standards, neighborhood. The site has been a riot of chaos for a month now. Overlords in mirrored glasses overseeing a sari-clad chain gang. On most days the hideous grind of the cement mixer drowns out the crying children. Toddlers. Whatever.

At night, most of the workers go home, but dozens stay and crowd into the pair of cinder-block shacks that were built when the construction first started. I’ve heard that these builders are nomadic families who travel from one project to the next for six months or a year at a time. The children play in the sand piles until they are old enough to carry cement on their heads; apparently around age four. The ten-year-olds cook for the families on open fires, inside the shacks, breathing in black smoke… while my husband and I lay in our canopied bed, in our air-conditioned bedroom, complaining about the crying baby, and trying to forget that it looks like a UNICEF commercial is being filmed next door.

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May
11
2009

Rat. Parkour. Kitchen.

ratatouille
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Last night there was a rat in the kitchen. He didn’t have the long slithering black Manhattan-trash-pile-on-the-hot-summer-night tail that makes me want to scream and pass out; he was more like a giant-sized field mouse. A Beatrix Potter creation with soft brown fur who would have been perfectly at home sitting on a pin cushion reading the newspaper. But still, he was a rat, a five-inch long disease-carrying rat… apparently built on springs.

The rat launches himself from the table, bounces off the back of a chair then flies to the window five feet away, scrambles up the blinds and disappears. By now my screeching has gotten Phil’s attention: “We have rats !” I shout, as he hurries downstairs. “Rats – BIG rats,” I point at the window blind.

Phil grabs a paper bag, I grab a cow whip that the maid laughed at me for buying. I whap at the blind while Phil stands ready to catch the varmint in the bag. I whap again: nothing. I open the blind then let it roll open.

Phil sees a shadow dash into the kitchen on the other side of the room and shouts, “Fucking hell, that’s a huge rat !” We run into the kitchen just in time to see him slip behind the fridge. Phil muscles the fridge away from the wall. The rat darts across the floor to the water cooler. We scream like seven-year old girls.

I smack the water cooler. The rat flies over the microwave to the towel rod below the cupboards. He scampers the length of the cupboards. When he gets to the stove he leaps three feet to the window, and scurries to the top of the blind. Cow whip – check. Bag – check. He peeks at us over the top of the blind, and we’re pretty sure he’s laughing, great peals of silent rat laughter, because this is hilarious. The two of us are doubled over, howling.

After seeing this rat in action, both of us know we haven’t got a chance in hell of catching him. It is impossible not to be impressed. He may be the most efficient being we’ve seen in this country to date, the first creature who appears to know exactly what he’s doing (in this case, evading his captors), and is going about it in the most ergonomically streamlined way possible (see “parkour” in the Wikipedia; or watch the opening sequence of Daniel Craig‘s James Bond movie, “Casino Royale“).

I tap the blind and he launches himself from the top of the window into the sink full of dirty dishes. He bounces from a soup bowl into a saucepan, then tumbles over a tea cup. Our kitchen has become an Indian Tom & Jerry cartoon, a live rat theater production of Ratatouille. He escapes and we can’t stop laughing.

Phil and I look around the kitchen. “Of course we have rats,” he says. “Look at this place.”

Dishes in the sink, trash on the floor, food on the counter. The maid doesn’t really get the whole “clean” thing. She is great at mopping the floors, but seems to be baffled by things like glass counter-tops and emptying trashcans. She’s nearly as bad as I used to be at doing the dishes directly after dinner. Phil and I have trained ourselves not to complain about each other, so we forget to complain about her.

The maid and I need to have a talk.

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