non sa/non risponde

At the age of eleven, following the adventures of the Dover-based Smith family in my English textbook, I learnt that when English-speaking people pick up the phone, they say “Hello”.

Almost fifteen years after, following my own personal Delhi-based adventures, I learnt that in India when people pick up the phone, they don’t simply say “Hello”.
They play the “Hello” game.

The “Hello” game is quite easy and provides a lot of fun or frustration, depending on which side of it you play. All the game needs is a telephone and two players on opposite sides of the phone line. The game begins as one calls the other needing some sort of service such as a cab, home delivery, shopping, or simply information. He composes the number and the recipient picks up and answers “Hello!”. To that the caller replies explaining which is he reason why he called, and when he has finished the person on the other side says “Hello?”. That is the most intense moment of the hello game, because at that point the person who called normally checks if the reception is working by trying: “Hello?”.

“Hello!”, the recipient would say, in a perfectly clear I-can-hear-you tone, and then the one who called repeats what he needs, now that the line is finally working.

But his problem is not the line, he is simply caught in the middle of the “Hello” game and he doesn’t know. At least not until the end of his second speech, which will be followed by a long silence and he’d have to ask “Hello?”, to check if anyone is still on the other side of the phone.

“Hello!”, yes, of course the person is there.

At that point two things can happen:

The first is that there can be a third, or even fourth, match of the game.
The second is that the doubt of being stuck in the “Hello” game rises in the caller’s mind.

“Do you speak English?”, he’d ask.
“Hello?”
“English?”
“No sir”.

Game over.

Here we are, to probably the favorite and certainly the happiest letter of the alphabet. G for Gai, which is Hindi for, oh yeah, cow.
Coming to India you expect cows to be hanging around in the streets, blocking the traffic and what not, well, that is exactly how it is.
I will begin saying that, thanks to a late but still effective baptism in the countryside culture, I find cows to be the most beautiful animal. They are so big and sweet-eyed, and they carry around their fat and smelly body in a way that makes me smile, especially when they are big milk cows with their udders hanging under their belly. At one point in my life I had, together with one quite bizarre and inventive mind, the plan of buying a cow and putting it in a courtyard. Luckily the courtyard happened to belong to a grandma that, much wiser than us, simply said “you girls must be insane” and closed the issue forever.
Anyway, my passion for our big fat milky friend didn’t really fade, to the point that I followed to the other side of the world the first and only guy who ever promised to buy me a cow. No, in the end I didn’t get one, that “you must be insane” is still in my ears and somehow makes me doubt that getting a cow as a pet would not exactly be the best of the ideas.
What is great, though, is that there’s no need to have a cow all for yourself here, because they are everywhere. One can easily have a close look at them just driving on the back of a scooter as I do: so many times I end up looking one of them right in the giant eyes, being less than a meter far from her!
Today, for instance, I was walking in the streets of Mc Leod Gang when I heard, very loud, one of those prayer chorus that it’s common to hear in town, amplified by the speakers on top of the Namgyam Monastery (where the Dalai Lama lives), where monks pray non-stop in this month of the year. Its intensity was growing as I was walking and I began to wonder if there was another monastery nearby, because the sound of the prayers was really quite loud to be coming from the monastery at the end of town. But, ever so disrespectfully ignorant, I was wrong: it was not the monks’ chorus, but just a huge cow mooing very loudly and walking down the road. Everyone stepped back to let her walk, some scared, some worshiping, some, like me, simply amused. All the cars stopped, and stopped even honking, which is a true rarity.
I live in a country where a big black and white cow causes the same effect that some Hollywood movie star would create somewhere else. Can it really get any better?

This is for the only cow-lover who will follow the cow-lover who followed the guy who promised to buy the cow. And to the world on top of the hill.

Never get too romantic about this place, I am told as I get here. I try to obey and keep my disenchant about this reality. It’s so true: even to my ever-so-cynical eyes India has its charm, and sometimes I really feel on the edge of romance.

But I have a trick that really keeps me from falling down the this-place-is-magic hill . Anytime I am feeling too comfortable I open my eyes and, anywhere I look, I can see it.
The one unbearable thing -worse even than dust - that makes this place just so hard for me to live in: filth.

It takes a very short time in India to understand - very, very clearly - that no animal as the human being can make such a nasty mess of the world around. Filth is so overwhelming that often just makes me want to scream and cry.
The open gutters, the garbage that blocks the sewers and floats around when it rains, the men peeing anywhere, the people squatting on the side of the street, the increasing level of stench to which you have to get used (traffic, human wastes and, if it wasn’t enough animals’ ones): it’s just too much, it surprises me and shocks me every day.
There’s so much trash in the streets that cows, who often hang in the garbage bin and eat straight from there, were found to have up to 50kg of plastic bags in their belly, last year.

But dirt is even more disturbing inside: it’s the protagonist where you work, shop, eat, travel. And what, above that all, is so hard to understand is the way most people deal (or don’t) with it. As if it was normal, natural. It doesn’t seem to bother most of them. They walk barefoot on the dirtiest floor, if it’s inside a temple, they let their kids playing on the road, sit next to the garbage and even - for the poorest of the poor - play in the giant mud puddles that invade the city roads during the rains.

They are immune, or probably just used to it: they simply wash themselves a lot, they are able to wash the filth away. It’s a mental condition: if you feel clean after a bath or a shower, no matter how nasty is the bathroom where you took it, you are safe.
Otherwise, like me, you keep struggling, you keep getting mad at the reality around you, at the way the people seem careless, or naturally adapted.
And feeling a little dirty after every shower here, no matter how clean is the bathroom you took it in.

Electricity here works (or doesn’t, depending on the luck of the day) in a funny way. To begin with, the wires. Wires here aren’t disciplined in any way. They grow wild on the utility poles. When one breaks, it isn’t replaced by a new one: the new one will be put next to it, over it, twisted around it. So where you had one wire now you have to. Then imagine that this has been done over and over because wires break pretty easily: the result is in certain areas of Delhi (on top of all, Chawri Bazaar), you will easily confuse an electricity pole covered with wires with a knotty tree. As a tree it would have roots in the ground; as a tree it would get thicker and thicker with time; as a tree it would have branchs which are the old broken cables. These being a reason or another, it is pretty common to hear, when it rains, the sound of a frying electric cable.

That is the sound of black out. Black-outs have a frequency that varies according to the part of town you live in. In certain areas they are a daily routine, in others they only occur in two specific occasions: storms, which is when you need your lights on to see, and the highest peak of heat, when you depend on air conditioning to survive. That is when you have to pray the god of power supply, and he eventually will do he miracle send electricity back in less than an hour. Rare miracle, that one.

I think the oddness of electric power here can well be symbolized by the local plugs. They are a weird combination of a European socket plus the one that is fit to Indian devices. Each plug has a switch next to it to turn it on: safety first, of course. I have not seen many electric devices with the right plug for the socket, but if you have an European instrument you can sure make it work: you just need to insert a pencil in the grounding hole to allow the plug to enter the hole, ignore the little sparkles you see (that sparkle must be what the switch is really for) and hope for the best.
There are mysterious reasons why sometimes the plugs don’t work with certain things. Most of times, thanks god (of electrical power), they do.
It’s just like India itself: nothing fits quite right, nothing is perfect; but it works, most of times, just fine.

And after a month of happily consuming the electrical resource of the country, you have to pay. The place you go to pay is called ESBS, and it has a few local office, which stick with the whole electric power style very well. A guard lets you in, asking you in English what are you there for, but of course not knowing enough of the language to really understand you answer. The office is one big room with four different counters: the small one at the entrance, with an old lady in saari counting money; the big counter on the left of the room, with a couple of computer and little temple for the gods; the one in front of it, a desk hosting two employees and big old folders full of papers; and finally, in the right part of the room the only one that looks like ticket window, with three men working behind it and glass in front. There’s some thirty people in the office, most of them simply hanging out. So you get to the one that looks like a payment counter and stay in line, for there’s a few person before you. But then of course they have nothing to do there, they’re just talking to the cashier, so it gets to be your turn and you ask the employee if he speaks English. Yes madam, he replies, and you explain him what you have to do. At the ends he points to the old lady counting money to tell you have to go there: he doesn’t speak English. The woman doesn’t either, but she calls someone that comes to the small desk in front of her, so you get there and finally, as he understands what you need to do, he sends you to the last counter, the big and crowded one with the altar and the computers. As you arrive the conversation stops and everyone - employees, customers or supposed to be so - stares at you, both because you are a girl and blond (everyone else in the office, aside from the old lady, is male) and because they are not doing anything anyways. You show your bill - again - to the employee and finally he says yes, you can pay.

You discover they don’t accept credit card, you must pay in cash. Also, you can’t pay just the bill you got, for which you would have cash, you must pay whatever electricity you have consumed until today, even though the new bill isn’t closed yet. If you like, you can even pay more than that and leave some deposit for the next month. But if you don’t have enough cash for that and you must come back another day, for it’s already four and the office will close.

No worries, the employee says with a smile, you still have a few days before they cut the power in your house. That is the one thing they are pretty efficient in doing.

Before coming to live here, even when you came as a tourist, one thing about India you most likely have heard is that there’s a lot of dust.

What you don’t know unless you live here, try to have a house and keep it clean, is ho much dust is the lost of dust everyone speaks about. It’s only when you move here that you find out: India is the mother of Dust.

I really can’t understand why, what causes such an amount of dust to exist specifically in this place:they say it’s the near-by desert, it’s pollution… nothing really seems enough of a reason. It’s just the way it is.
You wipe your house in the morning and you can write on the dust that’s deposited on your furniture much before dinner time. This is a place where you have to clean your air conditioning filter every other day.

Dust is the first thing to welcome you once you land: you smell it in the air, you feel it under your nails, you see it while it gets sticked to your sweaty skin.
Dust stains. It stains your carpets, your pillows, your curtains: it stains them even before you buy them, when they still are in the shop. Dust makes it impossible for you to wear anything white and have it white ever again. Dust effects your sense of touch and your sensibility: everything is felt through a thin layer, no surface is pure.

So you notice it, it irritates you, you try to get rid of it, you clean it and clean it again, your cloths get constantly dirty and you get new ones, you get engaged in a never-ending fight of man against dust. Needless to say, dust always wins. You give up, you eventually tolerate it, but you never get used to it -and you know you never will-.

But dust’s power is much bigger than that. To fully understand it, you have assist to the terrific (both in a good and in a bad way) show of a dust storm. It begins with the sky: it was a sunny day, and all in a sudden everything gets dark. Then the birds fly around desperate, seeking refuge. After a while everything gets really quite, as if even the air was holding its breath. And then the wind arrives, strong. And the dust with it, even stronger. They shut the open windows and break them; they make the garbage fly and stuff falling off the rooftops; they destroy big trees as if they were little bushes.
Then the rains arrives with lightnings and thunders and the whole show goes on while you, inside (and scared), watch and wait until it’s over; when it is, the city is a mess of wrecked trees and broken streets but the air is fresh, and clean to breath.

You stop hating the dust, but only for a moment.

Before coming here, cricket to me would always and only be the game that the Queen of Hearts would play in Alice in Wonderland.

But here cricket is a sport, and actually THE sport. Cricket is to India what soccer is to Italy: cricket players are rich and famous, they date actresses and cute girls from television, they set fashion trends and support charity campaigns.
Where I come from, kids grow up playing soccer in the streets; here they play cricket. And that is sufficient to make of cricket the second most popular game of the world. (After soccer, of course.)

Now, do you know how does cricket work? I know I didn’t.
To be honest I still don’t know, despite having watched several parts of cricket matches on tv.
There are, though, a few things I have observed about it.

To begin with, cricket is a long game, and by long I mean LONG. Long like one game could last for several days. Which - matching perfectly with the after some time philosophy - doesn’t make it surprising that it is India’s national sport.
Cricket is such a long game that New India’s national sport is not cricket anymore, but Twenty20 Cricket. It is basically a shortened version of the original game, of which I have only understood it is made of 20 something (inning? round? points?), to complete which it only takes about 4 hours.

Most Indians seem quite disappointed with this new thing, which is just a minor and less interesting version of the real game, nevertheless they do follow it with interest. In the evening, when the game is on tv, every screen would show it. And everyone who hasn’t access to a screen nor to the alert cricket sms would keep asking updates non-stop.

To my profane eyes, all that is understandable of cricket is that there’s one guy who throws a ball, a guy that should hit it with a wooden wicket and a guy behind him with a glove. I know there are some other players who run around. I know the players don’t have to be that young (they can play very well in their thirties). These elements all combined with the length of the game made me draw a connection between cricket and baseball (another game that I don’t understand, but that I don’t-understand less than cricket).
I happened to draw this connection - which still makes sort of sense to me - talking with an Indian guy. I shouldn’t have dared.

They’re two completely different things, he told me, baseball is just a long boring game.

As I got here, my job position had no label. Actually, it did have a label, the one the bank gave to me when I opened my first post-university account: atypical worker.

Having no clue about how does one look for a job, I had even less of a clue of how does one look for a job in India. After asking around I got the essential information that the good jobs here go for word of mouth. So getting into that mouth had to be my goal.

“You should make some business cards”, my boyfriend told me. Being his obsession for business cards possession one of the things of him I make more fun of, I laughed. “Seriously”, he remarked.
“Yeah, right”, I replied. And laughed again.

A couple of weeks after, here I am, already so smooth in handling my cards to basically everyone.

It is not that my boyfriend convinced me it was a good idea, it’s more that the whole nation showed me it was the only possible idea. Here “let me give you my number” does not exist; everyone says, instead “let me give you my card”.

I found it funny, until I thought that it was terribly inconsistent and particularly disorganized to obsessively coordinate the identity of my blog and my website and not to care about my business cards; I found it weird until, when anyone was handing me the most precise business cards, I had to write down my number on the ripped corner of a page of my notebook (especially after remembering how much I hate ripping corners off the pages of  my notebook).

I found it useless, given the fact that I don’t have the kind of job that would require a business card (and I actually happen to have no job at all); I thought it would be out of place, until one afternoon I went through all the cards you collected in the previous week and I found the one belonging to Kuldeep Kumar, taxi driver.

It is after looking at Kuldeep Kumar full-color little passport picture on the right of the card and to his car’s picture on the left of the card, that I decided it was time to design business cards that would match my website graphic, printing one hundred of them and begin to play according to the local rules.

And it is actually only after you learn how to say seriously “let me give you my card” that people here begin taking you seriously.

Before moving here, my knowledge of eastern religion and philosophy was limited to the following: what I read, a few years ago, in Siddartha (I have only made it through half the book but it represents by far the highest peak of spirituality I ever indulged in); what I saw in a Hare Krishna street parade on the Rialto Bridge in Venice the Sunday before the Carnival; what I heard in elementary school when my teacher was trying to explain to us that there actually were people in the world that did not believe in Jesus Christ.

This to say that you can hardly find anyone that is less literate than me when it comes to knowing anything remotely spiritually connected to this country.

Despite that, last week I found myself with the desire to understand the meaning of the word ashram. Yes, of course I have heard the word ashram before. And no, I never thought I would need to know the meaning.

Yet when I noticed, on one of Delhi’s many flyover highways, the recurrence of a sign indicating the way to Ashram, I finally felt the desire knowing.

That’s how I discovered: first, that an ashram is a Hindu hermitage where sages live in peace and tranquility amidst nature (Wikipedia docet); second, that the Ashram I was reading about in the street sign is not an actual ashram but only a part of the city that is for some reason called like that; and third, that there’s a practice particularly loved by some of the enlightened backpackers that come all the way here to find themselves.

That practice, no kidding, is called ashram-ing. Let’s go ashraming, they’d say, meaning let’s go visit an ashram and stay there for a few days so that when we go back home we can talk about a life-changing experience. How cute.

Searching for proves of the existence of the ashraming thing on the web I find, on the myspace page of Lauren (27, New Jersey) the following comment left by one of her friends: I guess you’re ashraming it up right about now since yer phones not working.

I imagine you can now understand a little why most Indians find western tourist particularly amusing.

Quando ho letto sul quotidiano (online) dell’esistenza di un Ministero della Semplificazione ho pensato che c’era da ridere.

Invece proprio non ce l’ho fatta, a riderci sopra.

I’ve been here for the past two weeks. Two weeks of sort of empty days. Empty, because almost all I have been up to has been watching the painters, the electrician, the plumber and the cleaning guy getting our house together. Sort of, because doing that is a full time job. You sit from 10 am to 6 pm and make sure that the workers actually do work. You stare at them. You make them chai - tea with milk and lot of sugar - thrice a day, otherwise you just stare at them.

The best were the painters. We hired them and three days later than the agreed date two painters arrived. One knew how to paint and the other knew how to speak English. For a day and a half it was the two of them, then three more decided - we never requested more painters - to show up. Which would make the job much faster, you’d think as we thought. Not the case. Most of the times, out of five guys, one would paint, one clean, one hold the ladder of the painter, one give direction and one, finally, simply watching. Quite an amusing view. When there was nothing more to clean the cleaning guy would stop. And then the painting one would stop,because, you know, paint needs to dry before another coat. You could propose them to begin painting another wall, in the mean time, but the english-speaking-guy would reply to your suggestion with one of the local most favorite sentence: after some time. Five minutes, half an hour, a day after, they would actually begun painting another wall.

After some time is more than an excuse for being lazy. It is one of the most popular local sentences and I am under the impression that simple statement unveils a whole philosophy of vague appointments. Appointments with things happening. In a western country you would aim to get stuff under control, to begin with future. You would say I will paint that tomorrow, or the lamp you want will arrive in a week or the person you are looking for will be back tonight at eight. Here they just say anything would happen after some time. Which is, if you think about it, very exact.

And when I ask - I have a lot to learn - how much time I always get the answer I need: one day, one week, three hours. But the answer is delivered by an half-laughing face, the face of someone that just found yet another one of those who want to find out how much time is some time.