Sublimity…

For the last two months, I’ve been a vagabond here in India, wandering from place to place staying in hotels, dorms and friends’ houses, and though I’ve had a great time (lots of adventures), I was starting to get sick of moving around all the time, and not having a place where I can spread my stuff out, hang posters on the walls, and generally call “home” in this country so far from “home”. However, I’m now happy (I think) to report that I do have a home. Given that we’re going to be spending so much time in the field for the next several months while doing microplanning in the 5 villages we select (about 15-20 days each), one of our first jobs here when we got back to Mayali was to find a permanent place to rent. The hotel’s here are dirt cheap by western standards, but Rs. 150 per night for a 3 bed room is apparently outrageous for Indian standards (and given the level of quality/cleanliness, it is expensive even for my standards) and given that the rest of my team members have to pay for living expenses out of their salary (even while in the field), they wanted to find something nicer and cheaper. Unfortunately, my impression of Mayali as a small, grungy, miserly place held true, and despite a fair bit of looking around, we didn’t find any “good” options for long term living. So with few (2) choices, we settled for the best we could get, which ended up being two separate rooms in two separate (but adjacent) large buildings just below the bazaar. The smaller one (for the 2 women) is a 10′ x 10′ concrete box, though they do have two doors and a window, but for water and bathroom they have to go downstairs to shared facilities. Initially, the plan was to have us three guys take an identical room right next to the girls’, but given that there was barely enough room for three beds let alone anything else, I (with Sunil backing me up) put my foot down and said I needed something a little bigger. The only option was a room in the adjacent building that was still in the process of being finished (though very close to done) and given it’s condition (and characteristics) it wasn’t really what we wanted, but it was all we could get so we took it. So my new home is a 10′ x 20′ concrete box, with bright pink whitewashed walls (you can still smell the “paint”, and any time you touch a wall, some of the pink chalk comes off on you) with one light and one power outlet. The window and door are on the short side, and at the back is the small attached “bathroom”, though it’s basically a 5′ x 10′ room added on with a squat toilet in the back corner and a tap on the wall in the opposite corner. There’s one floor drain in the middle of the bathroom and thankfully the floor does slope in towards it enough to drain the water, but it’s certainly not what I would call a bathroom. Two solid wooden beds came with our room, but that was it (and nothing in the smaller room) so we had to furnish the rest ourselves. The rest of the team had been living in house at their previous field site and so had all the fundamentals required for living on their own (folding cots with mattresses and blankets) which they managed to bring here, but I had to buy a mattress and pillow from the bazaar which when combined with the bedspread I brought (just in case), my sleeping bag and one of the provided beds has given me a place to sleep. The only other things I have are my clothes, piled on top of my backpack in a corner (trying to keep them off the dirty floor that’s often wet with water from the bathroom floor) so there’s still a lot to do, but after 3 days here, I’m starting to get used to it. Two days ago, we got the final major piece to complete our setup – a kitchen. As with lodging, we’d been eating at one of the local dhabas (I won’t describe it, all I’ll say is given a choice I’d never have eaten in a place like that, but we had no choice) where the food was decent, but usually bland and completely lacking in variety, the freshness/cleanliness was questionable at best (surprised I haven’t gotten sick again), and the cost (Rs. 15 for breakfast and Rs 25 for supper) seemed expensive to the rest of the team. There are several dhabas here in Mayali but they’re all similar (or worse), so we decided that we’d be better off cooking for ourselves. Rs. 1200 later, we had all the cooking & eating utensils needed (pressure cooker, chai pot, dhal pot, roti rolling pin, board and skillet, one knife, a couple ladles, 5 cups, bowls and plates – no “silverware”, everything including rice and dhal is finger food here). The final piece was a heat source for cooking on, which was covered by a small LPG (Liquid Propane Gas or something like that) tank with a single burner built on top that was provided by our local partner organization. So we had all the stuff we needed – except a place to put it. Again with very few options, it didn’t take long to figure out the solution (though it’s not ideal), and that’s why I’m now writing this, sitting on my bed in one corner of my room, listening to the pressure cooker venting in the other corner of the room. Since we don’t have any tables or shelves, our “kitchen” is the floor in the back corner of our room (though we did scam a board which we covered with plastic and now use to put clean dishes on so they’re not quite on the floor proper). Squatting on a somewhat dirty, wet floor doesn’t seem like the ideal way to cook for me, and washing dishes on the bathroom floor isn’t ideal either to say the least, but the sad fact is that even these conditions are better than what we found at the dhabas (our floor is likely cleaner than his table, and here we at least use soap and a scrubber when washing the pots/dishes), so overall it is a step up. And now, after three homecooked meals, I’ve got to say that they are a lot tastier than what we were having before. However, trying to cook for 5 on a single burner with two pots (though really we only use the pressure cooker for food) limits the variety of dishes we can make – especially in the morning when we’ve got less time, so the food situation still isn’t perfect. Rotis and parathas are both time intensive foods (not only do you have to make the dough/stuffing but you have to roll and cook each one individually) so unfortunately it seems like we’re going to be eating a lot of rice, and the lack of pots means that getting both dhal & subjee along with the rice is almost nil, so I’m trying to prepare myself for a long haul eating rice and dhal twice a day (though with extra time in the evenings, roti are possible so I’m keeping my fingers crossed). Unfortunately, breakfast (likely my favorite, and certainly most important meal) seems to be the most probable candidate for constant rice & dhal (not my idea of a nice breakfast, even if it’s well made) due to time limits, but the fact that even making only that (and the required chai) took 2.5 hrs yesterday means there is some hope for alternatives (though Bimla doesn’t eat eggs and milk is hard to get here in quantity so there aren’t too many other options) so we’ll see what happens. I will admit that the possibility of constant rice and dhal brings back some unpleasant memories from 10 years ago, but Bimla (and Supna as well) in typical Indian fashion seem to be excellent cooks, and Bendari seems like he could hold his own, so this time, despite the fact that Sunil and I are both novices, I think we’ll eat a lot better than Vikram’s never changing rice and dhal. And best of all, I think I’m going to get the authentic Indian cooking lessons I’ve been quietly hoping for, last night I had my first stab at it and started right at the hardest but most exciting – rotis. Though Supna did most of it (and all the hard parts), watching the rotis puff up on the flame was quite satisfying. Before I’m done here I’m going to make sure I can do it all on my own, and then Mummy & Papa, I’ll show you how it’s really done!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 5:35 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.