update

Good morning everyone, or suprabha if you are joining us from the Indian subcontinent. (if you are, then i apologize in advance for my poor spelling there).
Sunny day here. Sunny and windy and cool.
Every day has a different energy. It is just like surfing. Every day has a different kind of wave with a different character and personality to it. To ride it successfully is to read its every mood and twitch.
For example yesterday: I woke up to a storm. The waves were choppy, rough and tossed you around alot. Then the weather smoothed out and the waves got real glassy and well formed and easy to ride. Effortless it seemed. Sorry, i’m being way too abstract and self indulgent in my writing. And i won’t complain about how hard it is to write about my experience here but.... writing about something .... sometimes, somewhere in the process of putting a description to something, a connectivity with that thing is lost. It sort of takes you out of the experience itself. Does anyone know what i am talking about?
Oops. That’s just the inside of my brain.
Here we are, just living. Simple. Day in, day out. We wake up, we bathe, we brush our teeth, if i am keen i do a little yoga on the floor of our room. Our room is fabulous. It is the most beautiful room in the whole place. It is so bright and airy, its on the top floor and there are no other rooms there. The view of the Ganga is magnificent. I will post pics as soon as I can. Nakul did a wonderful job of making it all nice for us. They just built this house and in fact the doors were just hung in our room the day before i arrived. So we are its first occupants. The walls are painted a delicate lavender purple. The 3 guest rooms below us are still not complete, but the first floor where his mother, brother, sister in law, cousin and niece and nephew live were completed first and they are all moved in. We are a family of 8. Everyone loves the new house and so do I.
I am settling in here. The first two days was jetlag crazy, took 4 days before i wasn’t going to bed before 6pm every night. I think it actually helped that when i arrived in delhi it was midnight and we took a car and drove back to Rishikesh without staying overnight in Delhi. It was a long and densely fogged drive from Delhi to Rishikesh. During which we had to stop on the side of the road and sleep at one point because the fog was so thick and our driver so tired that it was clearly not safe to push on. Normally the drive can be done in 5 or 6 hours i believe, in the summer in midday, but with the limited visibility and our sleepy driver, it was more like ten. The whole trip from Vancouver to Delhi is a laborious one. I have found the only way to stay sane on that journey is to enter some kind of a delirious timeless trance where you let go of any serious attachment to where and when you are. Crossing the dateline always trips me out.
So anyhow, yes, i’m settling in.
After waking, showering, yogaing we go downstairs for chai. Savouring the sweet simplicity of chai. Really its the simple things in life the hot sweet chai sharp with ginger reminds you on a cold January morning in the Himalayas of whats important. Well, not formally the Himalayas per se, the foothills. After chai we have breakfast. Usually, well, almost always fresh hot whole wheat chapati with butter and either some vegetables or today was beans. So yum. The food remains one of my favourite things about it here. Everyday. Every meal, the most sumptuous and healthy Indian dishes. There seems to be no end. I have not seen the same dish twice since I have been here and whenever the onions, garlic, and chili start to fry a part of my brain becomes very, very alert.
One of my most concerning worries about being here is how I can give back, what i can contribute to our family here. They refuse to accept any money for my room, or for my meals. In fact it seems clearly insulting that i would even suggest it, so i have dropped it completely. Instead I have begun to look for ways that I can pitch in. It took me weeks last time to finally convince Ritu to let me wash the dishes. In Canada, you know, the dishes is an easy fool proof task that any monkey can do in an unfamiliar household. I couldn’t understand her resistance to letting me help with this simple thing. And here is one of the subtle nuances and intricacies that has become unveiled to me. And these things take time. Sometimes I don’t understand something at first, and the way is not clear to me, and sometimes it is not until waaaay later that i find out things. People are so considerate not to make you feel bad here, or hurt your feelings. No one will ever say to me “you forgot to turn off the light in the kitchen” (they are very power smart here), they will just continue to turn off the light behind me and never say anything, and never harbour more than a moments resentment. If I leave the hot water heater on in our bathroom, Nakul will not say to me “hey, you forgot to turn off the geyser”, but i noticed that i do not hesitate to remind him if he forgets to hang up his towel or any other similar or unimportant infractions.
So it is that I found out about the dishes one day while Ritu and I were cooking she asked me if i had servants at my house in Canada. I laughed and assured her no, I am the servant. Hahahah. Only movie stars and very rich people can afford servants in Canada. Then she told me that in Delhi at her family’s house they have one servant that does all the washing and cleaning. And it was then that I realized that the reason she was not wanting to let me wash the dishes is that it is considered the most lowly task in the household. Not a task for guests. In india, guests are king. So i am in this process of moving from being a guest to a member of the family. Plus I actually enjoy washing dishes, so once she discovered that i LIKED it, then it was much more easy to let me do it. I think.
So after breakfast, I wash the dishes. Although today I played chess with Gunnu, Nakul’s little nephew before i washed dishes. Then I either hang out in the kitchen with Ritu and cook lunch or I go up to our room and clean, or wash out my clothes, or listen to music, or do some writing. Then we have lunch and i wash the dishes again. After lunch sometimes I got out for a walk or Nakul and i will go into town on the scooter and go shopping and eat paneer dosas or yesterday we came up on the roof. It was sunny, so we took everything out of our room, blankets, rugs, mattresses and set them in the sun to warm and freshen in the sun. It was actually hot i was able to peel off all my layers down to short sleeves and feel sun on my arms. It was nice. We laid out and listened to music, i sewed up a blanket and the kids came and played around us. And today Ritu is gonna come with me into the market and go shopping for some clothes. A little girls day out. Then around 4 or 5 we have chai again. we build a little campfire outside and sit around it until dinnertime. Then we eat, i do the dishes and we go to bed. Its cold at night, so everyone goes to bed early and sleeps late. So that is how the days go, in a nutshell. I am eager to start studying Hindi. The urge to learn is as strong or stronger as it was to learn japanese when i first landed in Okinawa. It happens when you meet people you really really wanna talk to. If my bag with my hindi book in it doesn’t come soon, i think i’m gonna have to go out and buy another one here. I guess the good thing is that i am spending no money here. Zero.
It seems here there is no room for self-absorption or self-importance. Its all for one and one for all. A wonderful place to just get over yourself already.
Here’s an interesting fact: the average middle class Indian family of 8 produces less garbage in a week than an average middle class Canadian family of 4 does in ONE DAY. A fraction of it in fact. Most of it is organice garbage anyways, since what we eat is mostly rice, lentils and vegetables.

So, this is what daily life is looking like.

love all of you from the bottom of my heart,
ang