Four themes from the last week, and a story for each:
1) Fatigue
2) Violent Weather
3) Bureaucracy
4) Uncomfortable - and unexpected - disparities in wealth
FATIGUE
Since I've been here, I've been exhausted. Early on, it was merely jet-lag. I'd fall asleep around midnight, hoping that if I stayed up late enough, 8 hours of restful sleep would be assured. I still woke up at 3 AM. By the third or fourth day, I was able to sleep a bit later - say 5:30 or 6, but my sleep was restless, interrupted by the unfamiliar noises of a new apartment and ill-times phone calls from a certain girlfriend for whom accurately adding 9.5 hours proved difficult. Yesterday, with my sleep still not back to normal, I decided to see a doctor. It sounds more daunting than it was. I'd gotten the name of a doctor from another ex-pat, and was able to book an appointment for the same day. Her offices were at Delhi's elite private hospital - cleaner and more orderly facilities than any American hospital I've ever seen. I filled out one form, was seen by a nurse immediately, and waited no more than 3 minutes after that to see the doctor who, in a similar amount of time, diagnosed me with lyme's disease. The cost of seeing the doctor, having three blood tests performed (just in case), and purchasing two weeks worth of two medications - all without insurance - cost a grand total of: $40 USD. (Any friend or family member wanting to take a medical holiday to India is more than welcome to stay with me while they prepare and recover from: a hip replacement, lasic eye surgery, a heart transplant, chemotherapy - in short, the entire range of Western medical procedures offered at a fraction of the cost with just as much expertise and attention.) The only problem with all of this is that the medicine here only seems to come in gel caps. I can barely swallow Tylenol cut into eighths - gel caps are proving impossible. So far, the best method seems to be to hold them into my mouth until they table is dissolved, and then quickly wash down the pellets of medicine with water before their acrid taste makes me gag and spit the entire mess into the sink. Repeat twice a day for two weeks.
VIOLENT WEATHER
I lived in NYC for three years before coming to India. The noticeable climactic shift in that time has been the increasing intensity of rainstorms, the horrible rains of August 8, 2007, which crippled the city's subway system being the prime example. In Delhi on Friday, it rained much harder. There was literally a foot of rain on the front lawn of the Fulbright house after 30 minutes. Every major highway flooded. Four friends in the midst of apartment hunting had their rickshaw swept away by impromptu streams - they had to drag it to high ground and wade to safety. In the aftermath, thousands of trees were down, most rickshaw and taxi drivers refused to move anywhere, and I decided it was time for me to make the 5km trip from the Fulbright House in Delhi's city centre to my apartment in the south. The first car I called informed a fellow Fulbrighter and I after 30 minutes that their battery had flooded and they wouldn't be able to bring us. The second taxi gave a wait time of one hour. Finally, after more than an hour of waiting, a Fulbright staff member managed to find a willing driver, and offered to drop me off on his way home. Traffic was slow at first, so we decided to take a shortcut - the 5 or 6km Ridge Road - to avoid the major highways. It turns out this was a bad decision. It took us 4 hours to move 8km. Cars were stuck all over the road. Motorcyclists were literally riding through the woods to try to beat the traffic, and a lot of people just decided to walk, which would have been a fine choice had it not been for the long patches of unavoidable mud. And mud in Delhi smells. As though it weren't mud at all...
It's difficult to convey how time is spent moving 2km/hour in a car. First, I napped. Then I read the news on my BlackBerry. When that died, I scowled out the window at other drivers, and felt increasingly angry everytime the same faces would pull up along side of us. The only pleasure was watching MPs and other VIPs, all of whom are inexplicably granted flashing lights in India, try to push through traffic, only to be thwarted by their less-than-accomodating constituents. All the while, the gas needle dipped further and further below empty. But - at long last! - we were free. Only to find that the line for gas was nearly 1km long itself. Unable to suffer any more seated waiting, I went exploring, found a Subway, was intoxicated as always by the smell of their bread, and had a sandwich that should have been far less fulfilling than it was.
In the end, I made it home by 10:30PM (I'd left at 6). News reports the next day faulted Delhi's stormwater management system, which caused me some professional flashbacks. Evidently, the rains were so strong they also collapsed a new international terminal being built at the Delhi airport. In other neighborhoods, sewage bcked up into ground floor apartments. I'm happy to be on the third floor, high enough to avoid human feces, and in a building where collapse wouldn't be so bad.
I'm getting a bit hungry. Back with the remaining two episodes soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment