I was telling you about the house, so I’ll fill your eyes with more pictures.

You are opening the heavy iron gate of the compound. Step into the heaviness of the heat, the kind that leaves the clothes on your body wet with sweat and sticking to your skin. It’s late afternoon, and there’s the crinkled buzz of a P.A. system being brought to life, followed immediately by the Muslim call to prayer from the masjid a hundred yards away.

AaaaaaaaaLaaaaaaaaaaa… It’s a sad and beautiful sound, punctuated by bicycle rickshaw bells, boys yelling at the ghetto cricket match in the Shiv temple yard, and the barking of stray dogs. Like a school of fish, dragonflies shoot past as if they are polishing the sky with rasping wings, and the the paper kites, flown by children from the rooftops, dart like birds of prey after them and each other.

Through the gate and down the tiny mud road of the compound you continue, past the hibiscus bushes covered in red flowers and rebellious vines. Tall green grasses and shrubs grow wild in a small neglected field. A hundred or so monsoons have not been kind to the buildings here. New green growth slides its roots even deeper into the crumbling carved walls of an old abandoned temple shaped like a bell, crouching in between houses that have hardly fared better. Someone is ringing a bell in another temple, to wake up their god. There’s a love song, full of longing. Clouds begin to roll in, laundry is quickly gathered. Someone is cooking food, can you smell it, heavy with spice?

Chris has been playing a lot of sitar every day, and cooking food for me, since I would never eat if he didn’t. I have a one track mind: get the house in order, clean, stock the spices, pull the rocks out of the garden, keep the ants from eating everything. We eat almost every meal outside, since even the tiniest crumb on the floor gathers a tribe of a hundred or more ants for a frolicking church picnic.

The floors of the house are semi-unfinished cement. The walls are white-washed in a fading beige, falling to the floor with the touch of a broom, like a Buffalo snow storm. We have stored most of the furniture (that was in the house when we arrived) in two of the spare rooms. In the larger room beside the bath we have pushed two single beds together and cleaned the shelving for our clothes. Twelve feet above our heads, steel beams hold up slabs of limestone which form the ceiling. Mold and termite tunnels threaten along one wall. There is one window looking out into what once was a porch with pillars, but has now been cemented in. This long “porch” room is where Chris and I spend most of our time, sitting on cushions on the floor. The kitchen is built into the far end, near the bath, and boasts a small fridge that runs on the government supply of electricity lasting from four p.m. until nine in the morning. From 9 a.m until 3 p.m., when the power is cut, an inverter (a battery thing, that stores power and then releases it for up to 4 hours or so) manages to keeps a few lights and fans running during the day if we need them.

On the second night that we slept here, there was a huge power failure and all the surrounding streets went dark. (I remember the panic people went through during the power failures in North America several years ago. But power failures like that happen many times a day here; transformers simply blow up with no warning.) I woke up and the overhead fan was dead. It was 3:30 a.m. With the fan off, my ears were now picking up the disturbing sounds of some kind of political rally gone bad, or a street fight or some over-zealous religious meeting. I lay still. Chris was asleep.

There had been some kind of riot in the centre of town that day and police with “actual guns instead of sticks” had come in to keep the peace. A curfew was in place in that quarter. A lot of rumors were going around that a Hindu had killed a Muslim or the other way around and people were scared that there would be violence. I knew that there was a late night qawwali program taking place over the next three nights to celebrate one of the saints, a few small streets away. Was I hearing some really excited mystical folk Islamic preaching? Then a woman started yelling, and others joined in. After a few minutes i began to wonder if someone was having some kind of spirit manifestation instead. The woman began to moan, then scream. Other voices joined in. I woke Chris up.

By the time i got out of bed, threw on my sari, and told Chris I was going (with or without him) to find out what was going on, the woman’s screams had turned into the kind that made my blood run totally cold. In a sleepy haze of fear we stumbled out of the house and walked along the edge of the compound to get a better idea of what was going on. The woman had stopped screaming. Two of the pundits-in-training that lived in the compound were also doing the same thing. The four of us stood in the blackness and listened. What sounded like a heated domestic fight was now all that we could hear.

Chris started to ask the two fellows some questions and they began to explain that a particular guy living near the compound came home late night after night after spending the days wage on drink. They had been awake for the last two hours, listening to the commotion. Probably the woman had had enough and spoke her mind. Probably all the folks around got into it as well. Very likely, the husband tried to silence her with some beatings.

All I knew is that I had never in my life woken up to anything as brutal as that. I wonder what really happened. I see the tensions of many people of many classes and religons trying to live in a very tight living environment. It blows my mind.

I’ve hardly told you anything yet, about the daily life here, but this is the worst time for power cuts, so least I lose all this writing, I am throwing this up on the site.

till the next time,
m.