Back in the US after a 4 week long vacation in India, I am now well and truly jet-lagged. Surprisingly wasn’t very jet-lagged the first time (after landing in India). Am glad to be back though, because nice as it is to meet parents and siblings, after a while I long to be back “in routine”. There’s my bed, and there’s the car in which I can drive myself (note no chauffeur) anywhere I please (ah ! happiness !), and there’s the kitchen where I can cook stuff (yeah I know – I have to cook – there is no servant), and there’s the TV in front of which I can lounge in my pyjamas in very un-ladylike poses, without the doorbell ringing a dozen times an hour, and without the whole world including the dhobi, the chowkidar, the sabziwallah, the courierwallah, the bartan-wali squishing their way past my front-door. Silence. Pierced only by the incessant chatter of kid’s squabbling. What can I say ? It’s good to be home.
The hot topic in India this time seems to have been the heat. My cousin from Bombay calls up to question my intelligence in dragging the family to Delhi in the peak of summer. She lets me know that Bombay is a good 10 degrees cooler – why even she keeps away from Delhi at this time of the year. Yeah, yeah, says my sister later when I tell her about the conversation, she (the Bombaywali cousin) was born in Switzerland, no ?
Everyone’s busy in India, and I’m glad that my mom has a full social calendar, and dad’s really busy with his work. The younger folk work so hard at their 8 hour (more like 12-16 hour) jobs it’s amazing. Still, it’s good to be busy. After a couple of days of vegetating, and getting used to no-cooking life (the tea arrives magically along with the newspaper, breakfast appears within minutes and a full lunch is served around 2 pm – which leaves the evening tea/snack and the dinner – post-India I am so stuffed – can’t handle 5 meals a day anymore) I long to get out of the house. But it’s pretty hot – even Lajpat Nagar, where I went for the afternoon, is deserted – apparently the real crowd starts when the sun goes down. However I do manage Lajpat Nagar on 2 bottles of chilled Pepsi, a sip lasts me a couple of minutes in the sun.
A number of malls have sprung up, and I was impressed by the fact that the ring road has a lot of fly-overs; it’s almost a freeway – but more on the traffic situtation in my next post . . .
Categories : _travel
