Five year olds setting off fireworks, rush hour at the candy shops and me all alone. Anine’s gone for her well deserved vocations in Rajastan, then Delhi and Agra. I couldn’t say I’m too lonely but two is a company..
I went to our institutions alone this week and Annine was certainly a missing asset in our activities. However, the blind school worked out nicely for me: we learned to speak about our families, houses and any other imaginable personal information. In other words, we played Facebook, whereas I learned the equivalent words in Hindi. I started taking this language seriously, especially after installing a pirated, but no less valuable Rosetta Stone!
Yet, Ghuruvar (Thursday) left a mark in my mind. I woke up early that day, did yoga and was about to take a shower, when I discovered the water boiler was turned off. It’s an open secret, that our master loves saving electricity and sneaking around our stuff, but this time I’d waken up 1 hour earlier to set get warm water, and after exercise – enjoy a warm shower. What else could a man need in the morning?
I took a cold shower. Some say it strengthens the immune system.
Afterwards I boiled eggs (protein protein!) and ate coco nut.I had to prepare some activities for the drug de-addiction center, remember the Pete’s balls? Working with these interesting and sometimes unpredicatable guys alone ought to have been a challenge. But after a several lifts I discovered the center was closed, so I ate the Diwali cake and drank Diwali Chay. Now I had to get back to Kalheli, which is around 5 km up North. Who thought I might come there with the Kawasaki Ninja 250, kindly offered by a local Hindu biker. Bikes are abundant here in India, but I’ve never seen a real street fighter before, and riding it felt like home. Except the helmet part which was missing
Guess what? Kalheli went Diwali too, so after eating a mouthful of candies I headed home. I new automobile stopped, and behind the steering wheel there sat a ..lady. Her license plates were from Himachal, so I proudly proclaimed she was the first woman ever to drive in India! My words cannot be interpreted as sexist, women simply don’t show aptitude for driving, at least according to the male drivers. But what a reversal of furtune it was when I discovered she was the most stereotypical driver ever: she drove steaily at 20km/h, shifting the wrong gear from time to time (she used only 2 of them anyways) and “breaking” when moving from stop-go. What a comedy and tragedy at the same time. I hope no one got into her way.
When I hit the Kullu by pass, I saw a man coming from the Sharab (alcohol) shop with two Kingfishers. He was making himself conmfortable when I approached the vehicle and asked for a lift. So we drove and didn’t speak. The first time I was ashamed to speak with the driver. For a handful of reasons, my clothes were dusty and I smelled of traffic. Then after 10 minutes he tld me in perfect English, “I don’t live in Kullu. I just like driving on the by-pass, there is not traffic.” I replied there surely wasn’t any.
He halted the vehicle and gave me a bottle of “the strongest beer in India” (4%!!!). There we sat and drunk beer. And the valley was generous with its red-orange-gray-green shades. We would lift our rights hands simultaneously for a gulp, as we gulped day became night.
I got off from his car, wished happy Diwali and went straight to the street restaurant to fill my slightly intoxicated stomach. Some people could speak for hours and you would bear no memeory of them. But this gulping and relaxing man truly made my day.
In the evening I felt lonely and boiled some eggs.
By the way, the movie “Planes. Trains. Automobiles.” Wasn’t that bad either, Steve Martin’s and X Candy’s conversations were comic and missing-my-belowed-ones-like. I loved Martin’s monologue, when he gets fed up with Candy’s “big mouth”:
"You're no saint. You got a free cab, you got a free room and someone who will listen to your boring stories. I mean didn't you notice on the plane, when you starting talking, eventually I started reading the vomit bag?"
The roof
Our master's house is a typical of its kind, but in order to understand why we pay so much for the rent, lets take a walk up stairs, on top of the roof. As I have mentioned before, houses are built floor-by-floor, with the supporting poles giving birth to a new floor and so on.
Our roof gets sunshine from 9 am till 3pm, so if I ever felt cold or in a bad mood - I come upstairs. If I look to the West - I see "the blue school", South - akhara bazaar (market), East - residential buildings, and North - a glimpse of the river Beas.
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