a portrait of life in bhuj

Now that I have been living in the small-ish city of Bhuj for a couple of weeks, I have begun to develop some basic routines. Routines, I have learned, are very important in not only coming to feel comfortable in a place, but also in coming to feel that in some way – you belong there, and nowhere else for the time being. At this time in my life, feeling this sense of belonging to a place, to a period of time, to my neighbors, is very grounding. It helps in keeping me present. It’s not always easy to be present at this time in my life – I sometimes think I could go anywhere, do anything, I have very few obligations, very few roots fully formed, and everything I need I have with me…and it fits in my backpack.



So, for my own sake, I am making patterns, forming footprints in the same places each morning and afternoon, and sometimes even slipping into an easy redundancy.



I wake relatively early in this morning – a habit I picked up in Dharampur at the advice of a wise old man who said one should never sleep from the hours of 4am-7am, as they are the most beautiful hours of the day. I think there is a lot of truth to what he’s said and I’ve found the mornings to be extremely soothing, cool and quiet. I’ve been developing a yoga practice and do a variety of poses, stretches, and exercises on the roof of my landlord’s house. From there, I can see the whole city and the sun rising over the mountain behind it. While I practice, the landlord’s wife cleans the roof patio, and chuckles at me. When she isn’t watching, I occasionally do some dancing to last summer’s hits, certainly outdated by now back home, but to me still so American. The small bit of cardio I can get in is a great release of energy and I often end up jogging back and forth on my yoga mat. I stop to look around, and realize the woman from the house down the street is staring at me while she hangs her laundry in the line. I smile and wave, and she waves back, startled – but amused.



Most of my neighbors here think I am an absolute riot. They spend a lot of time hanging out on the stoop – a cultural practice of my street which I love – and therefore have witnessed all of my non-Indian quirks which must make me seem quite strange to them. Most dramatic of all was the cockroach genocide – in which a co-worker came to my home to kill all the roaches hiding in the cupboard beneath my sick. He was chasing two or three of them at a time around my kitchen, stomping on them and sweeping them out with a broom and each time I ventured back in to check on his progress, I would inevitably shriek and run back out into the street. Each time, the gang of stoop-ing ladies would howl in laughter.



…I digress. After yoga, I come back downstairs, hand wash my clothes from the day before and bathe. I often sing along to music, too – another habit which I am sure neighbors overhear and get a kick out of. Living alone has made me appreciate the company of music very much, and I have gotten to know my own selection quite intimately in the last couple of weeks. I hang my clothes to dry and have muesli and yogurt for breakfast – the only non-indian food I will consume all day. Each morning, I take a moment to appreciate its simplicity.

I pack my things for the day and head outside to the chakra stand. On my walk, I pass at least 3 or 4 fruit carts and the concept of fresh fruit right outside my door, for such a small price, is still novel enough to me that I almost always buy a piece of fruit. Lately, there have been apples from the Kashmir valley, which are not only delicious but I also read somewhere that apples actually originated from Kashmir, so I feel obliged to buy one.



I arrive to a bustling transportation hub area of the city and am immediately among all kinds of people. Many women come and go from the surrounding villages and I love weaving in and out of them. They wear traditional Kuutchi clothes – long black headscarves, which they wear only on the top of their heads – so their ears stick out on the sides – big and floppy, adorned with giant round gold earrings. I walk past them wearing my Chacos and carrying my Northface backpack and feel so American I want to crawl out of my own skin.



Sometimes I don’t notice how different I look from everyone else – I carry on, walking, shopping, moving, looking through my own eyes, I don’t feel any different really. Other times, I watch myself as if I am in a movie – and feel incredibly self conscious about the fact that I am the only person with white skin for miles and miles, and that despite all my attempts to look Indian, people will still say things to me like, “but you have white skin! You have money!” (shopkeeper, yesterday evening)



I like the interactions that I can have with people because I am different. I like talking about the differences between my culture and theirs, and I even like the excitement that people express at speaking with someone so foreign.

“which country? Which country?!” they shout eagerly as I walk by.

Sometimes, I take a minute to stop and chat. “America,”

and they say, “oh, very good,”

or sometimes, “oh yes yes…my uncle...he is in…how do you say? Hm…which place…oh yes! Chicago! You have been there? Is nice city?”



Many times though, I feel hostile stares, people who make eye-contact with me and don’t return my smile or wave. And I feel their seriousness, and I feel them thinking there’s nothing to smile at, and sometimes I feel some people even thinking that it’s not fair. And it’s not. It’s not fair that I was born where I was born, that I have access to things they cannot even imagine. That I have the luxury to come to their country but leave whenever I want…Many of these things I think about, still before I have even arrived at work.



I ask the different chakra drivers,” Pramukh Swami Nagar?” (the area of town where my office is located.) They usually respond with a slight twitch of the head, which I interpret as “yes,” and hop into the back. If there are already passengers seated in the back, I sit in the truck-sort of area, riding backwards through the city – as if the whole day has happened before and before, again and again, and I am simply rewinding on my way to work.



I arrive around 10:15, not sure if I am a little late or a little early. I still have not figured out if the day officially starts at 10 or 10:30. In any case, I make it my priority to arrive for chai (in Gujarati it’s called cha), which is freshly made and delivered to each person in miniature mugs at approximately 10:37. I sit at a round table in the administration area, which I share with Theresa – another volunteer from Germany, and Veena – a young working mother.



We spend the first hour or so of the day chatting, checking our e-mail and laughing. Veena shares stories about Veer and complains about having to sit in the office all day, “Oh my God,” she will say, “I just can’t sit here in the afternoons. Since having Veer (her son), I am just soo soo sleepy. There is no point in being here if I cannot concentrate.” Sometimes she leaves in the afternoons, offering a variety of excuses – her contacts are bothering her, she needs to go to the beauty parlor and it’s closed in the evenings, she needs to bring Veer here or there and her Mummy to the doctor. She is an incredibly smart woman and she seems to balance work and life incredibly well – dignified and calm in the office, but also silly and light-hearted.



Theresa (who has become one of my best friends here) and I discuss our work for the day – comparing who has a more boring, or tedious assignment, and then continue type-type-typing away on our computers. My project for the last 2 weeks has been to write a report for one of our donors who funds programs related to the preservation and empowerment of those with traditional livelihoods – these people are: dry land farmers, saltpanners (people who make salt in a grueling process…they produce 5% of the world’s salt right here), fisherfolk (who are being displaced by large companies developing in Gujarat’s growing free-trade port areas), and cattle-owners…. and, I could tell you all about their activities in the last 6 months if you’re interested.



While sitting in front of a computer all day isn’t exactly what I signed up for, (nor the best way to “live” India, as per my blog title), sometimes I think I would probably be doing the same thing in the US, if I was an intern, working for an NGO. Now, I just have the added benefit of being in India and living cheaply. You can read more about my office experience in my previous post.



Often, I spend at least a few hours moving around to the office’s different deparments, and meet with different people about what I’ve written in the report about the specific programs they are in charge of. While this task requires a great deal of patience, due to communication and language barriers, I think it is extremely important. I hate the idea of writing inaccurate information, or accidentally portraying people – who are doing such important work – in a way that isn’t how they want to be portrayed. So we sit, and go over each word, and they often have me correct sentences, making changes that are very slight, and often not important, but I think it’s crucial to give them the ownership over the reporting of their work.



Lunch is often a difficult experience. Theresa and I typically receive a daily tiffin, fresh food that arrives to our office at lunch time. We haven’t had much luck finding the right kind of cook for us, though. Most of the time, all of our dishes are cooked with a heaping amount of oil, which curdles to the top of the dish in a thick red pool so that one has to dig around with a spoon to find the vegetables.

Additionally, the food is SO spicy, that the only way to prevent being overtaken by spiciness is to keep eating. So we sit on the floor, legs folded (an Indian technique to promote digestion) with our co-workers, scarfing down food, and when we finally finish, we sit with our backs against the wall, entirely defeated – fanning our mouths. It’s quite a sight. Recently, I have been thinking I will bring a pb and j sandwhich, and will report back on the kind of responses it will surely provoke among office staff.



Afternoons are slow until the second round of chai, which I am also pleasantly surprised by. We work more and finally around 6pm wind down. Theresa and I often stand outside for a few minutes to watch the sun set against the paint-chipped wall, and eventually leave to find a chakra home.



On the walk back to my house, I pass by one new construction site where a large home is being constructed by a team of 15 manual laborers. At the end of the day after all the workers have gone home (back to their villages? To the small slums of Bhuj?) there is one man who remains. He lounges peacefully in what will one day be a window, laying on his side staring out at the street, head propped up with his hand. Every day he lays like that and watches the life of the evening street. I love that he is there every day and imagine he is the proud owner of the house being built, lavishing in the construction of his dream house.



I walk home to my house, check in on my American friends who live next door, drop my things and begin the evening’s activities. At some point, it includes a visit upstairs – to the family of my landlord. They are an amazing four-generation family all living in the same home and the daughter-in-law of the landlord/mother of the children, is one of my closest friends here. I stand with her while she cooks dinner for her family. I watch her make from scratch some of the most intricate, aromatic, gorgeous meals I have ever seen. And she does it so casually, saying the entire time, “Katie, I have no time..”



No time to do all the things she wishes she could do with me, and for herself. She wants to take me shopping, take me to visit her family, take me to the lake and the hill above the city – but everyday, she cooks, cleans, goes to work, comes home, nurses her baby daughter, goes back to work, cooks, cleans, does the dishes, nurses, puts the children to bed and then finally eats her dinner around 10:30. I am of no use to her. Although I have more time than I know what to do with in a small city like Bhuj, I can barely cut an union – ask her about my onion cutting skills - she will tell you, and she will laugh. I offered once to make chipattis (circular flat breads), she named them, “This one is Africa, this one is Asia, this one is India…” laughing at the misshapen excuses for real Indian chippatis.



My friendship with her and my relationship with her family is a highlight for me in Bhuj, and I will write more about it soon.



Sometimes in the evening we go out to dinner, at small restaurants where we eat big meals for the equivalent of just over a dollar. Other times we go out for ice-cream, other nights we gather all the young people in Bhuj at our home and cook dinner, inventing for ourselves a simpler form of Indian food. Some nights, I just read read read, turn on my electric mosquito plug-in and fall asleep to the sound of the fan, the chattering of people who’ve stayed out late to chat, or stray dogs lamenting the darkness of the night.