Under construction

My world in India is still for the most part restricted to Besant Nagar, the southern “suburb” of Chennai that I call home. And by suburb I don’t mean Starbucks (none) or street-lit roads (ummm…some have lights, but somehow a post-apocalyptic darkness descends every night after six). What I do mean is that the roads are smaller and the area feels more like a neighborhood, less like a city. That feeling of small towns being conglomerated into a big city, similar to how Portland feels with the same “suburb” spin of being in India, pervades Chennai; the drivers drive as if they live in a village of 8,000 not a city of 8 million, roads never go from point A to B without hitting the rest of the alphabet first, shops are tiny and infrastructure is erected on a need-to-know basis and none of the surrounding structures need to know. Point being, with most of what I know being in this immediate vicinity, really in this house and at the office (and the fifteen minute walk between them) that’s where the blog topics shall remain. And I hope that doesn’t disappoint anyone, and it shouldn’t, because there’s still plenty of things to write about.

Such as local infrastructure, specifically that of the structure I live in. A little history: last year, when three other Tara interns lived here, the first floor, the floor of this apartment, flooded. The landlady, Udaya, resolved to fix the problem. Udaya’s mother lives upstairs and Udaya and her son have been staying there with her since construction began over three months ago. It’s not safe to construct things in India without constantly watching (…and yelling at) the workers; otherwise they will somehow do things in a less legitimate way than they already are. Also you need to watch your construction materials, or else something like several hundred bricks might disappear during the night, and that night might have been two nights ago. So I wake up most mornings, weekday or end, to the pleasant sounds of hammers hacking or welders whacking or yellers yapping. I leave the house anticipating the daily surprise of what these sounds are working towards; could be an elevated gate, could be a space-age silver truss, could be a tall brick wall, could just be watering the garden. In the long run, anywhere from 2 weeks to eternity, Udaya plans to solve the riddle of the monsoon flooding by elevating the entire yard nearly two feet so the street water won’t run in from the street. As far as I can tell, she managed to consult no one and consider no other plans in reaching this conclusion, and no one is really sure where the idea came from other than deep inside her inner psyche, from which some other pretty strange things have emerged since our acquaintance. By raising the earth our residence will effectively be lowered two more feet below ground. Already being two feet underground I’m not so certain about Udaya’s master plan and am really banking on a poor monsoon season. Monsoon season pretty much corresponds with the thing we call autumn back in the states, so if I want a new pair of goulashes for my birthday then we’ll know which way the water flowed.