Another Guest

We've had another guest at the Mohajer house, a man named Chase whom I estimate is twenty-eight. Chase is an American Bahai who just came over from Afghanistan where he was working at an NGO. He was a very friendly out going fellow, and had an endless supply of interesting stories and anecdotes.

The Mohajers seem to have quite a tradition of taking people into their house and after Chase had gone to the Office where he was staying some of us were standing around asking, "So, who is he, why is he here and how long is he planning to stay?" We didn't mean that in a rude way, we just didn't really know.

(I was tempted to title the post "Be Our Guest" but I've already had one complaint of someone getting a song stuck in her head from my post titles)

Malls

Lucknow is a city of about four million and has four malls. I know of at least one more that is under construction. Usually in Canada you go to a mall for the cheaper products. It’s cheaper to eat in the food court than in a restaurant, it’s cheaper to buy clothing at Wal-Mart than in some independent boutique. There are exceptions, but generally if you want shopping to be convenient and cheap you go to the mall rather than wandering around the town.

In India it is the opposite. One burger at the McDonalds in the mall costs fifty-five rupees. In a decent restaurant in the centre of downtown I can by a whole meal for thirty rupees. If I buy at the stalls I could probably eat for ten rupees a meal.

So the food in malls is not cheap, it’s more expensive. The same is true for the clothing. And malls rarely have anything but clothing. In India if you want you can go shop for the fabric you want, then go to a tailor, tell them how you want the neckline, the sleeves, the fit etc. and in two days they’ll give you a hand-tailored outfit. And this is way cheaper than buying clothing in most of the malls. But malls are trendy. It’s a status thing. Only the rich and hip can afford to hang out at the malls, so to the malls they go.

The malls do have a few Wal-Mart type stores. The one we usually use is called Big Bazaar and it sells food, clothing, kitchenware, furniture and toys. These are pretty good for bulk purchases, and its where we do a lot of our food shopping. A while ago we went to Big Bazaar to buy a garbage can for the office and the sales clerk told us that if we never used the garbage can, it would last for two hundred years, guaranteed!

Why do birds suddenly appear?

I have nothing to write about now a days because life is comfortably settled, therefore I will write about bird chasing.

Our office is actually a house, specifically the Mohajer’s house before they moved into their current house. And now it’s our office. In our office there is a section where instead of ceiling there is a metal grate. When it rains the rain comes in, but the floor under the grate is depressed so the water can’t get into the rest of the house and flows down two drains. There is probably some very practical Indian reason why one would build a house like this. Usually we keep the grate covered with a sheet held down by bricks, but in one of the latest monsoons it blew off the grate and a bunch birds got into the office. As I write this there is one bird sitting on the fluorescent light tube behind me. Another is somewhere near Sohayl and they’re both squawking and warbling. I put the sheet back over the grate, but it’s so old and torn that they seem to get in through the holes in it. If life were an Alfred Hitchcock film, you would not want to live in this building.

Rohit and I have a method. There’s an empty bedroom raised about half a story over a tiny garage. In this room there’s a screen door, which leads to nowhere but a cement railing and then a drop, but it’s good for ventilation in the hot little room. I open this screen and then Rohit and I run around the house clapping and herding the birds to the room over the garage. Then I dash in, close the door behind me and clap the bird out of the screen door.

I haven’t had to do this for months, probably because of the monsoons but it looks like its bird chasing season again. Today the reason why I do this was brought home when one of the birds flew into the fan and was killed, blood pooling beneath the little thing.

Not Much to Say

The Internet in the office is not working, so I apoligize if I don't write much for a little while.

I looked at my camera and it seems the people who stole it took around thirty pictures of themselves, and one video of the daughters dancing. It's odd to have photos of the house and everyday life of your robbers. There are also photos of three different camera shops where they obviously tried to sell them.

Well not too much else going on right now.

The Mystery of the Missing Camera

Our story begins at 4:00 AM on Sunday morning, with a word.

“Lua!” Uhg. Your name just doesn’t have the same ring when it wakes you up at 4:00 AM.

That morning we had decided to go on the six and half kilometre walk from our house to Sohayl’s mother’s house. We had to go early to beat the heat, and besides that, India is magnificent at that time.

All my thoughts were on you dear readers, as I scrabbled for my camera. I looked for it in its bag. Odd – it wasn’t there. I looked through my suitcase, and underneath my bed. It was nowhere to be found. I knew I hadn’t misplaced it anywhere else; my camera should have been in its bag.

Now, we flash back to the previous Friday, at the timelier hour of 8:00 AM. I was walking around the office to give our dog Snow White some water, when I heard someone say, “Didi!” Didi is something like “sister”, and its something I’m often called by the children in the streets who shout, “Bye Didi,” as I walk passed.

There were two little girls at the gate. They tried to say something to me in Hindi but I wasn’t able to understand, so I communicated to them that Sohayl would be along in a minute. Sohayl had just gone to drop his kids off at school and arrived shortly. It seemed that the girls’ parents were at work and they had just discovered that their school was closed, or something like that. Since the girls are in a children’s class held at our office they came to us. So we let them into the office and they read picture books and Sohayl bought them some food. I didn’t think much of it, but afterwards Nicole mentioned that although the girls had said they had no food with them, they managed to spill that same non-existent food on her office floor. And apparently they found out that a relative of the girls had been home that day. So something was fishy.

And then on Sunday my camera was fishily missing. There were also some other things missing, including Arestu’s mp3 player, and my webcam. It was pretty clear that we had been robbed.

Today Nicole phoned the mother of the girls up and told her that the angry American who lived with them (That’s me. Canada isn’t very well known.) was going to call the police on them. At lunch time when I was back at the house the mother and her children came to talk to Nicole. Since I was supposed to be an Angry America, and didn’t want to mess up the act I decided to go to the backroom. They talked in Hindi but I could hear the mother of the children crying, and Nicole told me she had given them a bit of a lesson in morals, and a description of the Indian penal system.

I got my camera back, which is the most expensive item. In fact a camera like that would be worth about 13,000 rupees if you converted it directly and you can eat a meal on less than 25 rupees, that’s over 500 meals. Of course they probably couldn’t get that good of a deal on it. Hopefully they’ll find the other items and return them, however they might have already sold them. Apparently one of our cleaning ladies saw the mother bargaining something with a guy at the local photo shop, so either I was lucky to get my camera back because of a failed negotiation, or my webcam has gone far away from me.