Winter Passing

I’m a little astounded by how much time has passed since I last posted. I started to realize the large gaps in my posts back in November, before the Mumbai attacks, before my canceled trip with my dad, before my trip with my sister, and before my conference in Israel. Now, all of that has passed, and with it, most of the “winter.” The days in Bombay are already starting to heat up again. The evenings are still comfortable, but the morning sun cooks me on slow simmer as I walk to work. The air seems to buzz a little, reminding me – oddly enough – of summers in Albany: bright, hazy, and filled with the combined sounds of children and construction in the streets.

Being back to Bombay after a week or ten days in Israel is a bit surreal. Only a few months of living in India, and it’s almost as though this is how it’s always been, though always with an underriding sense of discomfort, a feeling of my being out-of-place, stared at, and staring. But any other reality is jarring, too. Walking through the streets in Jerusalem, I blend in, I feel at home (despite never having lived there), I understand when people speak, I have friends and family I can call and see within a short period of time. I forget about India quickly. The feeling of being the firangi dissapates.

And then I’m back, and the smells and sounds and heat are familiar, unchanged. I’m back to old patterns: late mornings sleeping in; lazy days at work, hoping for something to happen, researching and preparing for classes, trying to find the right words and the right ways to make change; late nights at the gym, ordering dinner, playing with the cat, watching DVDs of American TV, reading until I fall asleep. Then I hit repeat and I do it over again until the weekends.

It’s funny because I could do those very same things, have those exact routines, back in the U.S. Only I don’t think I find them boring here. Would they be at home? Even the problems that I could think of as “only in India” situations could happen anywhere. For example, when I first returned to Bombay, the Internet wasn’t working. It turns out that my boss forgot to renew the subscription, so that problem was briefly fixed. Now it fades in and out as it likes. While I tend to address this issue as one of India’s ridiculousnesses, I have friends dealing with the same problem in the U.S. Inconsistent Internet isn’t only in India (though India may have perfected it!).

Then,  it seems that someone stole the door handle to my apartment. One morning it was there, and then that evening, it wasn’t. Nonetheless, I went to the gym, convinced I’d be able to get in, just by having the key to a different lock. Long story short, I managed to lock myself out. A friend rescued me and helped me jimmy into my apartment. He took off the inside handle and that handle’s lock so that I wouldn’t get locked out again, and now there are two big holes in my door where the handles and lock used to
be. Despite having nagged people at work to fix it for the past week and a half, the holes remain. It doesn’t seem like the most safe thing to have those there in lieu of a door handle and lock, but what else can I do but wait?

Then there’s the fact that Sarah and I got lost in Mumbai again. We were invited to a mehendi ceremony (which precedes an Indian wedding), and we got dressed up and into a cab, with a general idea of where we were headed. An hour later, we still hadn’t reached our destination – the neighborhood we thought we knew was covered in construction work, with cars packed tightly together next to cows, handcarts, wallah stands, people, rubble, stray dogs, garbage and debris, and construction workers with sledgehammers and drills. After sitting for another half an hour without budging, Sarah and I decided to ask the driver to bring us home, and we wedged ourselves out of the mess and had the cab driver take us back to our apartment. Two hours of driving and waiting, almost 200 Rs. on the meter, and we were back where we started.

So, that’s life back to normal in Bombay. The days pass mostly the same, and the weekends I spend with my friends or at the apartment and gym. I went to an Indian mall for the first time since I moved here. I shopped at Aldo and Nine West, Mango and Adidas, but it felt a little strange, out of place and time (or is that me, here in India?). I went to see “Slumdog Millionaire” last night – an intense, and at times an appalling, movie to watch and deal with, especially while living in India.

What else is new? I’ll have off tomorrow for Republic Day, but then the week will pick up its pace because a JDC mission is coming through India, and Bombay, to see what work we do here and to encourage donations to the organization worldwide. In mid-February, Sarah and I are holding a madrich-training institute for some of the youth, to teach them how to be Jewish leaders, to plan programs and activities for people of all ages, and to have the creativity, charisma, enthusiasm, and energy for it. Right after that, my dad will hopefully be visiting, and by mid-March, my mom will be here for her trip. A close friend of mine from college, and maybe another from my high school youth group, will likely visit during April.

When I look at the calendar like this, the months pass by quickly, and before I know it, it will be time to leave. My mind, of course, is filled with thoughts of what I will do next. Should I be preparing right now to find a job? Should I be writing grad school applications? Should I be studying for and taking the GREs (as will one of the youth that I mentor at the JCC)? Should I be planning a backpacking trip?

All I can do for now is take things one day at a time, continuing to hope and work for the opportunity to make a lasting impact in this community, and putting my busy, overwhelming, crowded webs of thoughts on the backburner. For now.