A Winter in India

Yesterday was a day of high highs and low lows. We had breakfast with Rajiv Shankar on his way from Boston to Calcutta. It was so wonderful to see him, way too short a time for all the stories we needed to swap. He took us to a great place called Pickwicks at The Claridges hotel. Not often you can have fresh lychees and sweet lassi for breakfast.

No sooner were we back to the apartment than we got the bad news that the Abrahamsens, Lee, Bob and Karolyn, were stuck in the snowstorm in Boston and wouldn’t make it to Delhi. We were feeling pretty sorry for ourselves; had so looked forward to seeing each other. And we were feeling sorry for them, to go through all it takes to get here (numerous shots, visa applications, major planning)and then after all that, not be able to come. Drat.

So, today we were at quite a loss of what to do with ourselves. Babar Road ended up providing the entertainment. Dave took the top two photos when we woke up. Top left is the house next door. It is being renovated and the workers have been living in the house while they renovate it, including when the whole front was torn out. This photo is of one of their family cooking breakfast chapattis on the patio in front of the house. Even scrap wood is never thrown away. It was probably 45 degrees this morning. Next, we saw that the dog across the street had debuted her four puppies; two are in the photo at top right. There are lots of dogs everywhere here: lots of dogs that are pets and lots of dogs that are just around. (In Crete there were cats everywhere and I don’t think I have seen a single one here in Delhi.) The pets, including the mother of these puppies, are well cared for, in fact, pampered. The other, non-pet dogs sleep all the time because they are so malnourished.

We had heard pounding during the night, and voila, it turned out that during the night a tent had been erected in front of the house on the other side of ours (middle left photo). People put these tents up for parties all the time. This one not only covered the entire sidewalk, it covered half of the street. This is also very common: public space being taken over for some private function, for someone’s kiosk or barber chair or sewing machine, or, in some parts of town (but not here) for someone’s entire family to live under a sheet. The tent poles were sunk into newly created holes in the street pavement (middle right photo)! Over the next couple of hours the tent was fitted out with the carpets you see piled in the photo, and furniture. Another tent was set up right in front of our house, and this was the cooking and washing tent (lower left photo). Our landlady told us that the occasion was a housewarming puja (blessing) for the house next door, which has also been recently renovated. Many of these old balcony-fronted bungalows (bungalows in the US have an altogether different style, since bungaloo is originally a Hindi word...hmmn think we got it wrong?!) that were the main architecture of Lutyen’s Delhi of 1920 were torn down in the 1980s to make way for high-rise buildings. So a street like Babar Road which is still all this style of home has become tremendously desirable and expensive, as people have realized how nice these old buildings are. The lower right shows the little boy of the workers from the house on the other side, looking out at all of the cars of the guests who have come for the puja. So, as we have seen over and over, the rich and the poor are side-by-side.

So, it has been an interesting day. Doesn't make up for not seeing the Abrahamsens, but interesting none the less.