Deeper into India

So, again a long delay followed by a longer post than you would probably care to read. This time the reason we didn’t write sooner is because we were sick for a week (we’re better now despite our fears that we had malaria or some horrible worm) and then we got my test scores for Cambridge and I didn’t make the grade! I fell short by less than 1 point, 64.1 when I needed 65. Anyway, that bummed us out for another day but we’ve bounced back. The score is good enough to get into plenty of schools and we had been thinking of taking a year off to apply for American schools anyway. Now the decision is made for us. Anyone know any good jobs for the interim year, by the way? In other news, Grace had better luck with schools and got accepted into a master’s program in Human Rights at University College London. So we don’t quite know what we’re doing next year.

Without further ado, here’s the continuing story of our trip to India. This was written by Grace over the last week and its being simultaneously typed and edited for excessive cynicism by Matt (with Grace’s permission). Also, sometimes I insert comments (Matt: Like this).


We got up early for Chruch and took an auto to the hotel in the town where we had stayed the first night. My father’s relatives were also staying there when they came for the wedding. They actually live in Visakhapatnam, the city where I was born. It’s on the east coast, a little less than halfway up the subcontinent. The Church we needed to go to was in Vijaywada, a city about an hour’s drive away. We had breakfast and tea together at the hotel and then got into cars and drove to the Church. We got there really late and the service was almost over. We were still exhausted and it was all in Telagu. It was the Church where my parents were married and the pastor was close friends with my father. He brought us up in front of the whole congregation and they all prayed for us. They thought it was a miracle we had come back to this Church. (Matt: The Church was a single story building with a wooden roof and no ornamentation on the outside. Outside there were pews, maybe 10 feet long on each side but inside people sat on the floor. Streamers hung from the ceiling. There was also a tent with plastic chairs out front and that’s where the spillover, us included, sat).

We had lunch with the Pastor and mom talked about what things are like in the States. A not bad rule of thumb when you’re chatting with an Indian person is to remember that Indian people…. have a more fluid relationship with the truth than Westerners. This ranges from relatively innocent, “Yes, we go to Church EVERY Sunday,” to gross exaggeration, “It costs $300,000 to go to Medical School,” to outright lies, “There are no factories in America, machines do everything.” It can also take the form of saying one thing then pretending the next day you’ve never said it. I’ve dealt with these kinds of thing my whole life – I did not know until I came to India that ALL Indians do it.

Speaking also of factories, we knew that education is hugely important in India and is the key to making them no longer a developing state so we saw tons of schools advertised everywhere. Some schools were obviously preppy and begging to be loaded with the children of India’s newly arisen yuppie class – one was called the “Little Genius Talent School.” Some schools are clearly more practical and down to earth. In Vijaywada we saw the Krishna Veterinary School and Bacon Factory.

(Matt: A quick note about education: in India discipline and hard work seem to be core values. It’s different in the States. I think in the States many people dream of the “easy” route to success: becoming a famous actor, musician or sports hero. To be sure, success in those fields must require tons of hard work but I think plenty of people dream of a lucky break.

I don’t see any such dreams here. No one wants to move to Mumbai and bus tables till they are “discovered” and become a Bollywood star. Everyone wants to be either a) a doctor or b) an Engineer (preferably in software of computers). Nobody imagines for an instat they will find success without hard work, or, if they do they don’t tell us. In India exceptional hard work and discipline are the norm. If you saw kids as disciplined in the States, kids who seem confused by the concept of “free time,” and when pressed, say they study when they have no other obligations, you would call them exceptional. Here you would call them ordinary, or, more charitably, “good kids.”)

After lunch we stayed in Vijaywada to visit someone – I still don’t understand how they are related to us. But they lived on a hill with a view of the mountains and gave us to drink lots of a cola called “Thums Up.” We had noticed coke was rare and Thums Up seemed to be the cola of choice. In our guidebook we read that a lot of Indians were mad at Coca-Cola because they found pesticides in some and Coca-Cola insisted it was still safe. Also apparently Coca-Cola takes too much water from a water-scarce area, and then also pollutes the remaining water supply. Oops. So it made sense that Coke would fall out of favor in India. But then we learned that Coke had done what any smart and ruthless multinational corporation would do: they bottled the same drink but gave it the new name and label -Thums Up.

Afterwards we were going to visit some more relative outside Vijaywada and spent two hours driving on dirty, busy roads to a tiny village called Nuzvid. By then is was so late in the day that the visit was turned into an impromptu overnight. This kind of thing is no sweat in India – Bernice and Yesu had earlier spontaneously extended a short visit with relatives by three or four days. But Matt and I had been in old clothes, without showers or even toothebrushes for nearly two days and we were fairly grumpy (Matt: especially Grace) about the whole thing. The relatives insisted that we shower before eating dinner and they gave us new clothes to change into. The bathroom was find by Indian standards but by my standards pretty bad. There was no shampoo, only a bar of soap. Have you ever tried to wash you dirty, greasy, sweaty hair with a bar of soap? Don’t! It doesn’t work. By then I was very, very grumpy and hating the world. But the relatives were very nice and I began to realize I would have to accept the things I could not change, as the prayer goes. This is India, and this is the way things. Then we watched Scary Movie 4 on HBO.

(Matt: India will surprise you like that. People will shower by filling a bucket with water and then pouring it over their head, but they will also have a brand new TV with HBO and three other movie channels. They might lose power six random times a day and be forced to cook over an open fire, but they also probably have a better cell phone than you.)

(Matt: Also there was a torrential rain that night which made passing the time easy. There was an overhang of roof we sat under and watched the trees blow and the lightning streak across the sky.)

The next morning we were supposed to leave at 10. Of course we didn’t even start moving until 12. (Matt: We later learned Indian time is a lot more flexible than Western time: 4 o’clock means, 4:30-4:40). Indian people have this crazy habit of drawing things out to absurd lengths supposedly in order to increase the ease and comfort of their companions. They will argue for 20 minutes about who should sit down and eat first, who should sit in this chair, whether or not to cut up a mango. (Matt: Here’s an example –

Person A: Please sit down.
Person B: No no no you sit down, please
Person A: No thank you, please be seated
Person B: No I’m fine standing. You need to sit, please have a seat.
Person A: No standing doesn’t bother me. Please, sit down. Sit here.
(someone, probably one of A or B’s children, brings in a second chair. They both sit down. Person C walks in. They both stand up.)
Person C: No, please, keep sitting.
Person A: Sit here, sit here.
Person B: Take rest, sit here...)

It can be infuriating but by then I had decided to stop translating it all to matt and just be an Indian child – seen but not hear, eat when told, scamper off and play while the adults chat.

Finally we left Nuzvid and drove two and a half hours back to my Uncle’s house. When we got there, there was a visitor and a friend of my uncles’; they said she was the family gynecologist (bit weird, eh?). She had been working 17 years in that area and she had her own practice now where she was the OB-GYN and her husband was her anaestheologist. She said she was performing a hysterectomy in the morning but we should come visit her and stay at her house whenever we wanted.

In the afternoon the boy cousins wanted to play cricket. So I said I’d join them. They were thoroughly shocked and incredulous. I bowled first and bowled Matt out three times in one over. For those unfamiliar with the rules of Cricket, that’s really good. For a while my Uncles played too and I think they enjoyed it even more than the kids.

While we were playing cricket, a random guy walked up and asked my Uncle something and my Uncle said to Matt, “He wants a picture of you.” Matt said okay and the guy literally came up with his camera phone, put it up to Matt’s face and took his photo. That’s all he wanted. Later Matt decided this was too creepy and declined to take pictures with people who requested or allow people to take pictures of him. Not for lack of interest either, he got many requests wherever we went. Andhra Pradesh is simply not a place Western tourists come. It’s too poor and there’s nothing to see.

Later that afternoon we were sitting on the upstairs balcony when Uncle K approached us and said he would like to tell us some things. For the next two hours he spoke at us about: the proper roles of husband and wife; how to manage your factory workers; the truth of the nihilistic worldview. Hmmmmmmmmm. Afterwards Uncle K and his friend dropped us off at the hotel.

The next morning we were supposed to be ready at 9:30 to take photos with everyone but the photo shoot never materialized. Most of the adults spent the day in Vijaywada and the kids stayed at the house and watched Evil Dead on DVD. These kids love horror movies. Eventually the electricity went out and the remaining adults said Matt and I should go back to our disgusting hotel since it was air conditioned. So we went in an auto and Bernice wanted to come with us. When we got there the AC was broken anyway.

We watched movies on HBO. Bernice took a shower once the AC came back on because she said it wasn’t worth taking a shower earlier just to come out into no AC and start sweating before you’re even dry. Later in the day Matt was in the same bathroom where he saw a horrible sight. A bunch of ants were carrying a dead gecko off towards their house in a hole in the wall. Bernice took a look and said it was disgusting; Matt said it looked like the gecko we saw the night before crawling on our wall. Still, Bernice was glad to have a shower with my shampoo because she said she hadn’t had ay shampoo to use in awhile. When the electricity went out, it got very hot without the AC. But soon a massive rain and thunderstorm rolled in, and it cooled things down a bit. We were picked up and taken back to the house at around 7. We sat on the roof of the house in the dark with the kids and enjoyed a slight breeze. Before dinner, Uncle K told matt to bring his hotel keys and come with him, it would only take 10 minutes. Almost two hours later they came back and Matt told me they had gone to one my Uncle’s friend’s house and had dinner.

Later we got a ride back to the hotel and caught some parts of Underclassman starring Nick Cannon on HBO.

The next morning we vacated the hotel to move back into the house permanently. Two of my Uncles were leaving so there would be more room. The day was spent lazing about, trying to keep cool when the AC went out. Then my Uncle K, who was remaining came back from taking my other Uncles to Vijaywada and announced we were going to Tirupathi in the morning (as in, 4 AM). Tirupathi is a Hindu pilgrimage sight and it gets more visitors per year than Rome, Mecca or Jerusalem. Now we were going too. We packed that night. It was a three day trip to Matt and I packed for five days.