My Family Moves to India

More tips from the trenches.

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I have a friend with five sons. I once asked her what life with five boys was like, and she replied that her life was the same with five boys as it was when she had no children: there were good days, and bad days.

India is also like that, only with masala (spice) added. There are good days and bad days. Here's a synopsis of my week thus far:

Sunday I taught music and Christianity to 70 children, most from various local orphanages and boarding schools. I got home entirely worn out and slept the day away, much to the exasperation of my husband.

Monday I took the kids to school, came home, and unpacked the last box. Only took me 8 months! I also cleaned off my desk, which resulted in a stack of to-do paperwork about 4 inches high. Life as an expatriate does NOT result in less paperwork.....our visa renewals are due, we had to renew L's passport, reimbursements, bills.....whew. I sense a rainy day of paper-pushing coming up.

Tuesday (today) I started Tamil lessons, and that was fascinating. I learned how to form yes/no questions, all about Tamil verbs (18), and that there are only 7 colors in the Tamil language. That last bit really surprised me, because the colors here are so intense and varied. There is not even a word for "brown" (the phrase used is "mud-colored"). Red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, and purple - that's all you get. They use adjectives to modify these strong hues into pink, light blue, etc.

Another really interesting thing about Tamil, to me, was how closely the grammatical rules follow Japanese. The verb at the end of the sentence is sooooo familiar. The short vowels are pronounced exactly like the Japanese vowels, although there are two dipthongs, which are not present in Japanese. As far as I know the alphabet has no relation to Japanese, but I like to think that the symbols are a little less strange to me because I have memorized the first two Japanese alphabets (Katakana and Hiragana). At least in Tamil the stroke order doesn't seem to matter.

Arul was so thrilled that I was learning Tamil that he promptly bombarded me with Tamil phrases such as "Right now let's go home", and "Go to your house and come back tomorrow". (Those are very rough translations.) I had to finally plead an overflowing brain to get him to stop.....methinks he would rather not converse in English all day.

After my Tamil lesson, I did my dreaded chore - taking the kitten (yes, another kitten) and the puppy to the vet. I don't enjoy this because Ginger (our dog) gets car sick and vomits the entire ride. She has to ride in the only pet crate we own. I had never ridden with Stella, the kitten, before, so I didn't realize how much she also loathes car rides. She yowled and tried to climb on my head the entire drive. Needless to say, they dislike the vet also. The entire ordeal was a surprise to me, because all of my other pets loved car rides and had no issues going to the vet. Perhaps because they always got a treat? At any rate, the surest way to catch our Rottie when she got loose was to open the car door - she would promptly come bounding over, hoping for a ride.

Ah well. Indian dog and cat, I guess.

At any rate, both now have some of their shots and we are doing the worming and defleaing medicines. I purchased my flea medication from the US as there is not much available here. Nothing for cats that I've been able to find, although I've seen some older dog brands (Frontline) in Bangalore and at my vet's. Fleas are not top priority here, but I can't stand them.

The kitten was a surprise - Arul brought it for J one day last week out of the blue. It happened to be in the middle of my mega Thanksgiving dinner cooking marathon, so I just gave it a look and asked Sudhakar to let it live with him for a couple of days. I didn't have time to de-flea and de-worm it before it came into the house, nor did I want it in the house and exposed to the feline distemper before I could get it inoculated. It's a cute cat - a small, 3-month-old female with calico spots. It likes humans and hasn't really moved from the driver's house. I'm hoping that the vaccination will take and it can safely come in the house next week. Fingers crossed.

And the house? Well, it continues to have breakdowns. In the last week the master bathroom's hot water heater has developed a leak, two AC units have broken down, and one more has started leaking into the sitting room. But, we have water and electric, so I'm not too stressed. Some day, I promise myself, I WILL have a house that works....but not in India.

Speaking of not in India - I note that there are violent riots in Paris today. I guess even in the most beautiful, civilized city in the world mobs rule. The grass is never greener.

This week I've been on a big cleaning and organizing streak. We still are not completely unpacked from the move; still don't have all the electronics set up; and still don't have curtains up . This might be in part because I've been spending a lot of time on the car that won't start, the cell phone that went nutso and quit working, and the very slow (as in useless) internet. Also, yesterday, one of the ACs went down (and it's still 36 Celsius here!) Welcome to life in India - constant breakdown is status quo.

In an effort to feel in control of something, I decided to forge ahead on these issues. Also, school starts in two weeks and I want to have time once it starts to focus on it. (Plus I'll be spending half my life in the car, dropping off kids, then.) So, I finished unpacking and organizing the downstairs yesterday, and tackled some parts of the upstairs. I still need to unpack the files and get the kid's computer and VCR/DVD/TV setup organized. We elected to bring both of our American TVs - one has a gadget hooked up to it that allows it to receive and understand Indian TV signals; the other, we are just going to use for the kids to watch American DVDs and VHS tapes.

As far as curtains, today I will make another trip to the curtain maker's (!) - it's an hour each way, so I'm not excited. Neither are the kids. But this time we will be placing the final order for about 1/3 of the house. I chose a new shop to try to get things done faster. My other curtain lady did an excellent job on the rods, but now her shop is calling me all the time saying that their tailor is in the hospital....not good. She was slow enough on the rods; I had hoped for curtains from her before Christmas. sigh. We shall see. At any rate, a personal visit might move things along.

One of the few things that came on time was the cane furniture - they delivered it exactly three days after I ordered it, just as they said they would. Probably because when you have a showroom/office/factory the size of a walk-in closet, it cuts into your profit margin to have a large four-peice seating set cluttering the place up. In fact, I'd bet no one could even get into the store with my set finished.

While I organized, the maids cleaned, and my driver fixed things. Yesterday he put up four curtain rods for me (small ones that I had brought back from the US in my suitcases); fixed a lamp; and he's also spent a ton of time getting the car fixed. Today he's going to put together Levi's mini-trampoline and take a look at the leaking AC unit, plus maybe start on putting together the swing we brought over. He's got his own honey-do list - thank goodness I don't have to rely on S entirely, because he works so much we'd be moving home before things got done.

Today I also need to stop at the local school and see if my maid is lying or not about tuition. She wants me to pay her children's tuition for school - a common request - and one that I've done for other servants. I try to check to see if they are lying about the amount, though, and I also pay it directly to the school - otherwise the maid/cook/whomever just shows up with a new cell phone or sari. Because education and children are so important to me, I have decided that if possible (and if they aren't lying about it), I will pay tuition. And if the money is misused, then hey - I did my best to make the world a better place.

Lastly, I've got to fire the gardener. I had him take out the bin of broken glass yesterday, with the instruction that he was to sell it, not throw it over the wall. Of course he threw it over the wall. So he goes. (Remember, this is the gardener who dug the hole to China, despite repeated requests, in various languages, for him to stop digging.) He's either a little stupid or a lot stubborn.

Speaking of garbage - L worked off his debt to R (see previous post) by cleaning up the beach with me this morning. The beach next to our property usually isn't too bad, by Indian standards - but recently a bunch of flip-flops showed up. They washed up for miles, odd shoes, some nibbled on by fish, some broken, many perfectly whole, but all odd. For some reason, they bother me more than the plastic fishing floats or the peices of net. Walking along the beach looking at them, it feels like someone is missing.....so we cleaned up the section bounded by our property lines. We picked up 8 garbage bags full of non-bio-degradable trash. Two of the guards, curious, came out and wound up helping - one pointed out that the trash would be back in a month (after telling me that a heavy rain would wash it all back in the ocean - to which I replied "Not the shoes".) I told him that was fine, we'd have a clean beach for a month. The other just cheerfully picked up garbage - he even went so far as to pick up the neighbor's pile of dirty diapers. BIG brownie points for him.....DEFINITELY a keeper! They probably have no idea how many brownie points they get with me when they pick up trash.....