Sunday, December 18, 2016
The shared taxi I was riding in made reasonably good time to the Guwahati airport from Shillong. As a result, I was stuck hanging around the check-in waiting area because there was no one staffing the airline counter, which wouldn’t even open for another few hours. On top of having to wait, it was a bit on the humid side of things in this no-A/C room, the only food available was really greasy food stall fare, and the bathrooms were probably a 4.17 on a cleanliness scale to 10. Even with that, I was happy to be here instead of in Shillong, though that meant pretending that I didn’t have to go to the bathroom for a few hours.
The flight to Delhi was on the uneventful side. The planned reunion with the family was more on the eventful side of things. But more on that in a little bit.
At the Delhi airport, I got my baggage and then looked around for a driver holding a plaque with my
As I tried to negotiate with airport security to let me back in to make a phone call, a nearby snack food vendor overheard me and let me borrow his cell phone. I called my cousin-brother-in-law with my approximate location who then called his driver to let him know that I was at the international terminal and not domestic terminal 7km away. And so I waited, and wandered, and wondered still how they’d find me among a sea of brown people across a ½ km terminal and 3 lanes of traffic. And then miraculously, I saw my dad wandering around looking around everywhere for me except at me in front of him. My brief fear of being stranded at an Indian airport lugging my bags around for 5 hours evaporated.
My parents live in India part-time and in the US most-time. For the better part of a decade, they’ve escaped the winters in the US, shut down their house, and re-centered their daily lives for a few months in a town smack-dab in the middle of India called Nagpur. Since I was here in-country, they flew up to Delhi to meet me and do a few days of sightseeing. And while here, we stayed with my cousin-sister and her husband in Ghaziabad, about an hour away from the Delhi airport.
But hey… let’s tell the whole truth here, ok? My parents actually flew up to do sightseeing with my sister Leenata, her husband Chris, and their three kids. I was just along for the ride. Unfortunately, an extraordinary amount of phone calls, duplicate visa fees, and lots of tears didn’t result in the kids getting their visas in time largely because Cox & Kings (the agency contracted by the Indian government to handle India visas in the US) can’t get their collective sh!t together to do a damn thing right. And so my sister’s family’s entire trip had to be cancelled and they are out somewhere in the neighborhood of $15k in total expenses (including internal India flights and non-refundable excursions) along with shattered hopes and dreams. Well, everything except that last part, though I’m sure my sister may have felt a little bit of that too in her final days of despair. If this were to have happened to me as a single traveler, it probably would have been much simpler to adjust and resolve. But with a family of five, everything becomes more challenging.
As far as the rest of us were concerned, we had spent the past few days debating a few different options and ultimately just decided to continue on with the itinerary as is, albeit without my sister’s family.
Monday, December 19, 2016
After a somewhat comfy sleep on a pull out couch (which wasn’t too shabby as far as pull out couches go), my parents and I loaded up into my cousin-brother-in-law’s car with driver and we headed off for a few hour drive to Agra. And as everyone knows, the only reason to go to Agra is for the Taj Mahal.
Next we headed over to the Taj Mahal, which for some reason is this crazy huge tourist attraction for some reason. My favorite scenes in the world are generally nature-made, like the Iguacu Falls in Brazil/Argentina, or Torres del Paine in Chile, or Milford Sound in New Zealand, or Lake Louise in Canadia. If I came up with a list of my top 25 “wow” spots, they would almost all be natural wonders… but for two exceptions. One exception is the Sydney Opera House. The other is the Taj Mahal.
Most people have heard about the love story that created the Taj Mahal, so I won’t recreate that here, nor will I attempt to vouch for its authenticity either. If you haven’t heard about it, do a quick Google search or check Wikipedia. I’ll wait here for you.
Unfortunately, the blue sky frequency is less in Agra these days – the pollution is a bit of a problem and we could barely see the Taj Mahal from Agra Fort a few kilometers away because of smog. The line to get in was not so long, but the foreigner price was something like 2000 Rs while the local price was about 200 Rs. Naturally, we paid the local price… and then proceeded to get hassled by the entry folks who said we didn’t have the proper IDs. I kept my mouth shut and when the guy asked me “Kaha se hai?”, I responded with “Nagpur” and my parents’ local address when pushed further. Ultimately, I think the guy got tired of badgering us and just decided to move on. My parents can more easily pass as locals, but something about me screams “foreigner” even though it’s crystal clear I’m of Indian heritage. After high-fiving for saving about $25 USD each that would have clearly been wasted on the upkeep of a stunning national treasure, we felt silly and a bit shallow and moved on.
After having our fill of the Taj (we’re on a first name basis), we got back to our driver & car, had a late lunch from an unnecessarily large number of tiffins that my cousin-sister packed for our trip, and then headed back to my cousin’s house. On the way, the driver stopped at a new dessert shop that we were told was putting all of the other dessert shops out of business (I think it was called Shankar Sweets?). They definitely get an A+ in my book because their rasmalai was out of this world. Many Indian sweets have an unnecessary amount of milk or an unnecessary amount of sugar in them. Rasmalai is the perfect blend of these two excesses, thankfully. I’m lactose intolerant, so I carry around Lactaid pills and use them judiciously… and like Elaine and her sponges, when presented with an option to consume dairy, I do a quick mental evaluation to determine whether or not the option is Lactaid-pill-worthy. And Rasmalai, my friends, tops the list of Lactaid-pill-worthitude.
Of course, there’s no real shortage of Lactaid pills in the world, and I get mine from Costco anyway, so they’re pretty darn cheap per pill; net: I’ve got no real excuse. But somehow (much to Julia’s chagrin), I rarely manage to have the pills on me and so my stash tends to reach their expiration date before consumption. But we all know that expiration dates are a hoax to get you to throw stuff away and buy more – it’s one of those evil marketing ploys called “planned obsolescence”. And we don’t want the evil marketers to win, do we? Absolutely not – and so I’m just really taking one for the team with my defiance here. I’m also very lazy and somewhat forgetful, which may play a miniscule part in why I have so many expired pills. Miniscule.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
After another night of sleeping on the pull-out couch, I got to wondering where I’d be sleeping if my sister and her family had actually been able to join us. Indians never allow family to get a room in a hotel room; there’s ALWAYS space. If that means moving the furniture around and rolling out a bunch of comforters on the floor for everyone to sleep side-by-side like a kid’s slumber party, so be it. To tell the truth, I like it that way too. It’s family, you know? Judging by Chris’ and Julia’s reactions to these practices in the past, something tells me that most white American families don’t do this, but please feel free to let me know if I’m mistaken.
So we packed our bags up, loaded them into the car, and the driver hauled us back towards Delhi. We had a flight to catch in the late afternoon, so we bid adieu to my cousin-sister and cousin-brother-in-law and thanked them for their hospitality. I honestly have no idea when I’ll see them again. The last time I travelled to India was early 2008, so we will undoubtedly see many cousins that I haven’t seen in a long while and many that I won’t see again in a long while.
Sometimes, I almost feel like I’m one of Chevy Chase’s family members in National Lampoon’s European Vacation where they visit a family they think are their relatives but turns out they went to the wrong house. In a sense, I almost feel like I’m swooping in and greeting them in a language they barely understand and then just as quickly swooping out, never to be seen from again. Well, at least not until the next time I come to India to lather/rinse/repeat it again. Of course it’s a little bit different since many of our cousins see my parents nearly every year as part of their annual seasonal retreat.
From the Delhi airport, we flew south a few hours to the city in Hyderabad in Karnataka state. This is the closest major airport to my mother’s side of the family and her brother met us there with a friend and a driver to pick us up and drive us 3 hours to the city they live in, Gulbarga. Actually, it seems that the name is being changed to Kalaburagi, much like Bombay became Mumbai and Madras became Chennai. Well, kinda… it seems the name Gulbarga comes from the Urdu language, whereas Kalaburagi is Kannada, the state language. I didn’t actually know that stuff before, but it seems that Google and Wikipedia are exceptional tools of learning in this day and age. In fact, my Dad and I took to jokingly saying “let’s ask Guru Google” whenever something (frequently) came up that we didn’t know.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
I spent the bulk of today getting reacquainted with cousins on this side of the family that I hadn’t seen in 8+ years. On my mom’s side, my siblings and I are more or less the oldest of our generation and most of our first cousins are in their early-late 20s. This trip marked the first time I felt like I could have more of a peer-to-peer style conversation with any of them which felt quite a bit different and really interesting, even though there’s still a good 15 years of age difference.
Each morning here, I was awoken by the sounds of the nearby mosque at dawn. There are no noise ordinances in effect (or enforced, at least) here, so the calls to prayer from the mosque are broadcast over loudspeakers. Since Gulbarga has a massive population of Muslims, there was no escaping it in this town. At least the person singing into the microphone had a somewhat pleasant voice. With the right voice, it can actually lull you to sleep a bit, though I seriously doubt that was the imam’s intent.
My dad and I were getting a bit antsy and bored in the house. The house wasn’t small by any means by Indian standards, but it was on the small size by our Western standards, especially given the number of people staying there. My family in India is a bit on the conservative side, and this side in particular still lives in a nuclear household. By this, I mean that the family lives together – my mother’s three brothers all shared the home of my grandparents with their wives and children. Yes, in the same house. After one of my uncles tragically passed away, his wife and kids separated from the rest of the group so now there were just two brothers + families in this house. This still felt a bit cramped to us given what we were used to. Heck, my home in Cincinnati is bigger and it’s just me + Julia + 2 dogs living there.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t all that much to really see in Gulbarga since it’s not much of a tourist mecca. There’s basically a fort and a few temples and that’s it. So my dad and I decided to go to a relatively new Buddhist temple called Buddha Vihar, which sits on the outskirts of the city. My mom’s family doesn’t own a car, so my two cousin-brothers took my dad and I there on their scooters.
It took about 20 minutes to reach there on scooterback. As we arrived, I noticed a few things: 1. the city had all but faded away… we were pretty far from anything; 2. except some crazy monstrosity of a building that seemed to go on for blocks and was still under construction. This crazy building apparently was a hospital that was likely largely a waste of public funds that a corrupt minister was behind both for votes as well as to skim off the top. But more remarkable about the building was the complete lack of any architectural design integrity. I’m not an architect, but putting massive roman columns with a spattering of Islamic-style domes just doesn’t look right. It was strangely off-putting.
One of my cousin-brothers will be taking over management of the shop before too long so we got into a conversation about inventory, order management, accounting, and so forth – everything here was done by hand and manually. Since it was a small shop, it didn’t make sense to upgrade to a computerized point-of-sale system with integrated back-office functionality given the local old school business model. I didn’t expect to hear differently, but it got me thinking a bit about the evolution of sales, from the 1-off non-branded shop that I was standing in up to the massive megastores that drive commerce in the US. Yes, I'm a big huge nerd.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Other than a quick visit to my mom’s sister’s place 10 minutes away, we didn’t really do much else except hang out with family. Later in the evening, my parents and I boarded a train to go to Pune, a city just outside of Mumbai. We arrived after midnight and one of my cousin-brothers on my dad’s side of the family sent a driver to pick us up and bring us to their apartment for the night.
Friday, December 23, 2016
After a quick breakfast and our morning chai, my dad and I went to take a walk to a nearby neighborhood park. Since we were in a city, I had envisioned a square similar to what we have back home, but instead we arrived at a walled-off park with a stationed guard on patrol. I’m not sure what they were patrolling for, but I presume they were stationed there to keep homeless or poor folks from setting up camp inside the walled-off park.
Inside the park was a central greenspace, surrounded by a two-lane walking track. On the outskirts of the walking track were outdoor exercise stations as well as a children’s play area in one corner. To my surprise, almost all of the exercise stations were being used largely by middle-aged adults who you would not guess spent time exercising at first glance. As India is “Westernizing”, obesity and diabetes is on the uptick since manual labor exercise is increasingly not a part of daily life for the burgeoning middle class. It was nice to see that there were at least some efforts to create parks like these to address the problem.
The rest of the day was basically a crash course in catching up with lots and lots of family members on my dad’s side. Many of my dad’s brothers and sisters had children that were right around our age. When we were growing up and took summer vacations to India, we’d frequently spend several weeks in the small village that my dad grew up in, Aheri. Well, “small” is a relative term and by Indian standards, Aheri was tiny small since there are only around 100,000 residents. In the US, this number of people would be a small city, and certainly significantly larger than the towns in Eastern Kentucky where I grew up (~5,000). In India, it’s literally a blip on the map, to the extent that Aheri usually doesn’t even show up on the map unless you type it in or know exactly where to zoom in. Given that it’s so tiny, most of our cousins that we grew up with left that town after high school and moved to the big city, and a pretty sizable chunk of them ended up here in Pune.
By and large though, the family was getting together just as family does – catching up, joking around, enjoying each other’s company, and whatnot. It was really nice and you could see how close they all were to one another. It’s something my siblings and I missed out on quite a bit growing up where we did, and it’s something that even our next generation is missing out on since of the three of us, my sister is the only one with children. We have cousins around the country and a higher concentration of them in New York / New Jersey, but nowadays we’re lucky if we connect in person with them even once a year. It’s just been a bit different growing up and living in the Midwest.
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Continuing our rapid-fire family tour, my parents and I were driven to the airport in the morning to fly to Nagpur, where my parents have maintained a second home the past few decades. We were picked up by a cousin-brother’s driver and car… a fellow named Amit. Amit looked more like a driver/henchman for a bad guy in a Bollywood movie: he wore dark sunglasses and a knit cap, he had a 5 o’clock shadow of a beard, and possessed a general sneer about him that hinted “I can’t be trusted”. As I learned later, my cousin-brother isn’t exactly enamored with this guy either, but he’s had difficulty finding a reliable driver and has had to settle for what who he can find.
As we drove up to the house, I was floored by the development around the house. The street was full of other businesses and similarly sized modern homes, and the neighborhood looked as though it had existed for generations. There was also a ton of construction going on in Nagpur to build elevated metro lines above the major roadways. The speed at which the country is evolving is incredible. An Indian-American friend of mine visits the country almost every year, and she shared with me that she notices significant improvements each time she comes.
Sunday, December 25, 2016
In any case, the performances were really nice to observe. Many of the children performed with the biggest smiles you could imagine on their faces – they were clearly very happy to be there and were enjoying the camaraderie of their classmates. They also somehow managed to put together some incredibly beautiful dresses and costumes for their performances.
Random Relative: “Hi. Do you remember me?”
Me: “Yes, of course!” (even if I only kinda did)
RR: “You should come visit more often!”
Me: <smile> + <ubiquitous Indian head nod> + “Yes, okay.”
RR: “Will you come to our house?”
Me: <smile> + <ubiquitous Indian head nod> + “Yes, okay.”
RR: “Why aren’t you married?”
Me: <smile> + <ubiquitous Indian head nod> + “Yes, okay.” (i.e. pretend not to understand)
I was generally pretty nervous about having any sort of in-depth conversation with most my relatives, particularly those that were of my parents’ generation. Since my family comes from relatively small villages, they are pretty conservative and can be fairly religious as well. As such, my decisions to date to not get married, not have kids, live in sin with a white girlfriend, and recently leave my well-paying job of 20 years just don’t compute very well. Heck – I have a hard enough time explaining all of that to Indian relatives who live in the US. Add the language barrier and complete lack of cultural context and the conversation would be doomed before it even got started. So my game plan going in was topic avoidance. That being said, I didn’t have any concerns with talking about any of this with my cousins of my generation (or younger) at all, particularly those who lived in larger cities and spoke more fluently in English.
Oh yeah, Merry Christmas and all that. I have to admit that it was extremely nice to NOT be at home amidst all the Christmas hullabaloo and non-stop Christmas songs on the radio and blaring in every store. The commercialism and materialism of what is supposed to be a positive morally-uplifting tradition feels tragic and the polar opposite of WWJD to me. Yeah I know, I’m a big party pooper.
Monday, December 26, 2016
On this fine day fifty years ago, my parents were married in India. They had a semi-arranged marriage, meaning the families introduced both to each other and left the decision up to them after a few meetings. A few months ago when I had purchased my airfare, the plan had been to have a large puja ceremony and celebration to mark the occasion. But as had become the norm with this trip, plans had changed.
The puja itself was mostly conducted with only a handful of guests in the room. Most notable about the puja was the priest who was performing the ceremonies – it wasn’t a he, it was a she. This was probably the first time I had seen a female priest (priestess?) conduct any sort of Hindu ceremony and it was a nice indicator that progress is being made along all sorts of fronts in India.
Following the puja was a catered lunch that was set up by a local restaurant on a large balcony off of my parents’ living room. The food looked amazing and there were lots of family mingling and enjoying each other’s company. At least I think they were enjoying each other’s company… I had come down with a bit of a fever overnight and was largely participating from the more comfortable confines of a warm bed. I was also unfortunately not exactly regular in the waste expulsion department either. Julia and I shared a set of texts about exactly this:
P: My mom says I definitely have a fever. I know I got bitten by a bunch of mosquitoes last night, so I’m fairly certain it’s scurvy.
J: Oh no. Sounds like zika crossed with scurvy?
P: No. Maybe it’s pink eye.
J: The interwebs say you have either chikungunya or dengue.
P: Good to know.
J: Or maybe zika. Don’t get pregnant.
P: I’ll just pull out. No worries.
Meanwhile, my parents got nervous and started asking around on why I could possibly have a fever and ultimately decided that I was showing early signs of malaria and that I need to be positively diagnosed by a qualified medical professional immediately. So in the evening, I was dragged to a local doctor who asked me the basics and determined that I had traveler’s diarrhea and not malaria. At my parents repeated questioning, he conceded that we could always get a blood test to rule out malaria but repeated twice that it was not really needed. So obviously, I had an entirely unnecessary blood test performed against my will to confirm that I wasn’t on my deathbed. Because, you know, I’m apparently all of 9 years old and am clearly utterly incapable of making a single decision on my own.
I’m not bitter. Really.
Scratch that. I am very bitter and my parents won’t hear the end of it any time soon.
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Today was like the 7th Day, a day of rest. The base plan had been to start an overnight safari trip to a nearby tiger reserve, but when my sister’s family didn’t end up making it to India, we decided to just cancel instead. That I was recovering from an illness only made the decision that much easier.
With nothing better to do, I went down to the street to stand and play the role of unwanted supervisor with a complete lack of subject matter expertise. To be fair, there were easily 10 other residents playing similar roles and providing unneeded advice while sneering and complaining, so I wasn’t the only one by a longshot (though I did not sneer nor complain). I shared with my cousin that in the US, the richer areas of town will get street repairs easily twice as frequently as poorer neighborhoods; he shrugged and shared that the same happens here in India, except that the disparity is much greater. I wasn’t surprised.
My cousin also made a passing comment that it’s standard for government contracts that the local minister skims 10-20% right off the bat. Now, I have no idea if that was just chatter or truth, but it’s well known that corruption is extremely widespread in India down to the local levels. It’s not uncommon for the police to hassle people just with the intent of getting a bribe to leave them alone. The current Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has stated that eliminating corruption is one of his primary goals, but this has to be a ridiculously daunting task, especially for a country as large and populous as India. I’d love to fast forward 20 years and read Harvard Business School’s case study on how they ultimately solved the challenge.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Given that we had originally been scheduled to be still on safari today, we again had a wide open schedule. I was feeling much better at this point - the antibiotics prescribed by the doctor were working, as were the electrolyte packets used to make less-tasty slightly-metallic Gatorade for rehydration. A few aunts/uncles from my mom’s side were staying with us the past few days for the celebrations and they took their leave to return to their respective homes this morning, leaving just the three of us.
After a few minutes of waiting, a big burly guy walks into the waiting room and beckons one of us for our massage treatment. I didn’t want this guy inadvertently breaking my father into two pieces, so I stood up and followed him. I also prefer a deeper stronger massage, so I figured it would be better for me anyway. Burly Dude led me to a private room with a massage table and motioned for me to strip down. So I stripped down to my underwear. And then he tied this wimpy gauze-like paper around my waist and then motioned again. I obliged and pulled down my underwear and two seconds later I was the proud owner of a highly see-through speedo-tight gauze loincloth.
The massage itself was not targeted to any specific area or region of the body; instead it was more or less an all-out beat down of every muscle and joint that you may or may not have realized you possessed. Dude cracked my fingers, knuckles and each of my toes. He also got a wee bit more intimate with my hoohah regions than I was comfortable with, but you know… when in Rome. Julia and I had joked over IM the night before about getting a happy ending. When I saw the Burly Dude fetch me from the waiting room, I had thought that my happy ending was not to be. Instead, I think I may have just not gotten the happy ending I had preferred.
After the beat down, I was placed in a steam bath – instead of a steam room, they had a small 1-person steam box in the room that they opened up for me to sit down in and then closed the box with my head sticking out for fresh air. It was kind of like one of those magician’s boxes except without the fake swords. And I wasn’t exactly a beautiful magician’s assistant either.
All in all, though, it was good. My muscles felt more relaxed, my lower back pain had subsided, and I could add another notch to my bedpost. Good times.
Thursday, December 29, 2016
And then we had yet another day of rest.
Since this part of the trip began, my dad had been commenting frequently that he wanted to go eat at this place called Barbeque Nation, an all-you-can-eat style joint. Well, today was his lucky day.
Each table had a little grill set up in the middle. Given this setup, I assumed they would bring out skewers of meat that we would be responsible for cooking to our preference. Nope. They brought out cooked meat on skewers and placed them over the grill to keep them warm. The options were chicken, shrimp, goat, and fish, and all were a bit on the spicy side. In fact, after a few skewers, I had to ask them to bring out some bland ones because the spiciness was getting to my stomach which had only recently been on the fritz.
Much like an Olive Garden or TGI Friday’s back home, this place apparently attracted lots of customers with birthdays. All of the servers gathered around a table on at least 3 different occasions to sing “Happy Birthday”. Of note, they sang it the standard way… like any other human being would sing it. Most restaurants in the US have come up with their own version of “Happy Birthday” because the song is actually copyrighted by a large company (Warner) and they would technically have to pay royalties every time it was sung in public. No, seriously – I didn’t make that up. But clearly, the fine folks at Barbeque Nation in Nagpur, India, could care less about those greedy bastards. So not only did they sing the standard “Happy Birthday” verse, they also sang a second stanza which went “May God Bless You” in lieu of “Happy Birthday to You”.
You’re welcome for sharing that. Rivetingly seat-clutching, I know.
Friday, December 30, 2016
We got up painfully early this morning to pack up our bags and wander outside to wait for an Uber to take us to the airport at something like 5am. It took a good half hour for the Uber to find us, even with the built-in GPS capabilities in the tool. My guess is that speaks to how poorly marked roads are in India. Uber was only introduced in India relatively recently, but it’s quickly become a massive player in the market here. Taxi drivers here seem to prefer it as well since they don’t have to wait so dang long in between fares. That being said, if Uber were to become the dominant player such that most taxis were on the app as well, then supply would return to greatly outstripping demand and taxis would be idling around again waiting for fares. But I guess at least they wouldn’t be driving around looking for fares and wasting petrol in the process. Dunno.
More intriguing about the Uber phenomenon in India is that everyone here pronounces it Indian-style… “ooo-bare”, and they all asked me if Uber has come to the US yet. When I share that it’s an American company and the service has been in the US for over 5 years, the response is generally shock and then they ask why an American company would have such an Indian-sounding name. And then it’s disbelief when I share how you’re actually supposed to pronounce “uber”. I had this conversation with at least 5 different people through this trip.
We arrived to the airport crazy early… so early in fact that we had to wait for an hour before the airline counter even opened up. We were just flying to Mumbai, so I think our stay in the Nagpur airport was probably longer than the flight itself. The Mumbai airport though… wow. It’s beautiful. It’s been 8 years since I’ve flown through here, but man did they make a crazy big upgrade. Trump has mentioned a few times that our US airports need to be upgraded because they are “third world”. He’s wrong, because ours are nowhere near as nice as these.
From the Mumbai airport, we took another Uber to the Indian Arc de Triomphe, locally referred to as the Gate of India. We were trying to get to the ferry dock, but it was a bit of a madhouse. We had to queue up in a crazy long line to funnel through a few TSA-style security checkpoints before we could approach the ferry. There was a bombing a few years back near this area, so that might explain the increased security. Then again, we were leaving the area on the ferry… it was pretty easy to walk up to the Gate of India or nearby hotels and avoid security altogether if bombing were on our minds.
It didn’t take us too long to find our specific ferry, but the crowds were a bit vicious. Our destination was a beach area just south of Mumbai in a region called Alibag. After asking around a lot at the airport, we learned that it was actually easier to get to this region via ferry from the Gate of India instead of taking a bus, taxi, or train, because land transportation would have to travel much further out of the way because Mumbai is situated on a peninsula that juts out into the ocean a bit. But here we were trying to squeeze through a mob, and I had all of my luggage with me to boot.
Fortunately, my mom had the bright idea to check with a rickshaw to see how much they would charge to take us directly to our hotel. The price was not too steep… a few hundred rupees, and probably the best spent few hundred rupees on this trip. It was really quite hot, and the all-natural air conditioning provided by the auto rickshaw was a very welcome sensation.
The food was exquisite though. We got there a little late for lunch, but they prepared something for us anyway and it was divine. We later learned that this little no-name hotel often gets catering requests because they are known for their terrifically good food. The kitchen itself was a bit dinky and not really that much of a kitchen – it was more or less an “area” between the building and part of the parking lot. But I suppose talent is more important than facilities.
The sunset made for some really beautiful scenery, though at the very end the sun disappeared from sight due to the presence of a decent amount of smog & fog along the horizon. Even so, sunrises and sunsets are some of those things that you can never get tired of, so we were happy to be there. But I really wasn’t quite sure what we were going to do here for two more days as we had originally planned. It felt like we had already done and seen everything there was to do around here. Well, short of riding a banana boat.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
We got up early this morning and packed up to leave. Both of my parents agreed that there wasn’t much to do here and figured we could head back north to Thane, a suburb outside of Mumbai, to visit one of my grand-aunts. So we had an early breakfast and crammed into an auto rickshaw for a 20 minute ride to the bus station in Alibag.
At the bus station, I sat on a bench for 15-20 minutes with the bags as my parents alternated walking around asking station employees when and where the next bus to Thane would be arriving. With public buses, seats are not assigned and it’s on a first-come first-serve basis. Since it would be a long ride to Thane, it was kind of important that we got on the bus quickly when it arrived. And since everyone knew this, generally people try to hop on to the bus as quickly as humanly possible – regardless of whether or not the bus is stationary yet or whether or not others are trying to get out of the bus from the same door you are trying to enter. The result is a bit of chaos.
I found that I had a distinct memory attached to most songs. For Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way”, I remembered my friend Adam singing this song to his girlfriend Amye at a talent show our senior year in high school. For George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex”, I remembered the highly anticipated music video coming out on MTV and being immediate must-see-TV for all teenage boys… event though in reality, the video wasn’t all that suggestive or lewd, and definitely not by today’s standards. For The Beatles’ “Yesterday”, I remembered my friend Drew Curtis (same guy who started fark.com and who ran as an independent in the 2015 Kentucky gubernatorial race) at summer camp at WKU in 1987 come up with Weird Al-like replacement lyrics, resulting in a duet at the end-of-camp talent show where we sang “Leprosy… all my parts are falling off of me”. Obscure memories, most certainly, but I cracked more than one smile during the drive while warm icky dust attempted to stick to my face.
In Thane, my great-aunt’s home is right next to the railway station and so it was easy to get a rickshaw to take us there after we got off of the bus. We were famished, so we stopped into a nearby restaurant to grab a bite to eat in their air-conditioned seating section. The place wasn’t overly unique or distinct as far as restaurants in India go, but somehow it looked extremely familiar even though I hadn’t been in this area of India for well over 15 years. My mom confirmed for me that we had eaten here a few times several decades ago.
The mind is a funny thing. Julia yells at me all the time because I will invariably forget something she asked me to do me 3 minutes ago and I’m absolutely terrible about remembering names or faces. Yet I can remember all sorts of brandcodes for industrial perfumes that I managed 10 years ago at P&G’s Avenel facility (like Primavera = 10079545), how to spell obscure words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and random shampoo ingredients like DMDM hydantoin learned while studying bottle labels as a kid searching for utterly useless ways to prolong a hot shower.
She recounted a story for me of when I was a very young child (~3 yrs old) and my siblings and I were staying here at their place while my parents had to go elsewhere for a few days. I had woken up in the middle of the night and asked for some milk to drink. Unfortunately, there was very little left in the kitchen and my great-aunt needed to save it for any guests that might come in the morning for tea (as per tradition). Apparently, she gently explained this to me, and I listened intently and then just said “okay” and went right back to sleep without a fuss. As she shared this story, there were tears in her eyes and I just couldn’t hold her hand or hug her long enough. She then took the opportunity to tell me that I needed to shave my beard, and so I dutifully spent the next few minutes gently rubbing my beard whiskers all over her face as she squealed and yelled at me. Finally she told me in no uncertain terms that Julia is a goddess and I need to put a ring on it. Oh, how I love this lady so – she’ll always be one of my favorites.
My mom’s sister and her husband had also arrived to visit today, unexpectedly as well, so my great-aunt all of a sudden had quite the crowd in her place. But as I mentioned earlier, when it comes to family in India, there are never too many people nor is there ever any question on where people will sleep.
Sunday, January 1, 2017
In the morning, my dad and I took an Uber to the airport. My dad was headed back to their home in Nagpur, and I was flying down to Kochi in Southern India to start my next adventure. But first, we got to spend time and enjoy the beautiful new architecture of the Mumbai airport again. Of particular note was the prevalence of advertisements… actually maybe this is no different than in US airports, but a few of them just stood out for some reason. Specifically, many of the eye-catching advertisements were hawking shiny new cell phones.
I know… I have issues.
Tidbits
- Just because someone is wearing a University of Kentucky sweatshirt in India doesn’t mean that they are from or have lived in or even know what Kentucky is. It could be that they just got a free sweater from unsold merchandise in the States or something like that. In fact, there are lots of people walking around India with shirts sporting some English saying and they clearly have no idea it means. Like this young kid wearing a shirt that says “Don’t you think IF I were wrong I’d know it?”
- It’s very common in India for middle-class families in India to name their homes. This is odd to me, of course, because here in the West, only the arrogant super-rich folk name their homes. In fact, a friend of mine was house-hunting in Dayton about a year ago and she and her husband had some hesitation on putting in an offer on a house they liked, because it had a name: “Rubicon Manor”. I should have advised them to move to India, where they wouldn’t have felt out of place with a named residence. In my vast experience, that’s a perfectly good reason to move to a different country.
- Growing up, my siblings and I always felt a bit strange in India when it came to meal-time because we were expected to just come to the eating area to eat and then leave. We didn’t get our own plates, serve our own food, or clean our own dishes. Instead, the women or older girls of the household were expected to do this while everyone else could just pop in and then leave. Not only that, the women generally didn’t eat at the same time, and instead were serving the rest of the family and/or making fresh roti/papad so the others could eat it piping hot. In the US at least, my mom made sure that all of us pitched in and helped with everything, and it was very rare that she didn’t sit down and eat at the same time. So it was pretty clear that each gender played specific roles in Indian society back then, especially in our conservative family. What surprised me a bit was that even with this trip to visit family decades later, the same was still happening in many of the households. But perhaps it’s only occurring in the same households as it was before and the younger generation isn’t sticking by those norms anymore? I’m not entirely positive.
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