More Daily Life

We’ve been doing well these last few weeks and days. A few weeks ago we attended a party at our friend Lyola’s. Her husband works in the “Lifestyle” section of the Bangalore newspaper and he’s quite in-the-know about all things social. (He’s also the president of the Karnataka Racing Pigeon Club and owns over 300 homing pigeons.) The humidity of the day finally broke right around the time we were scheduled to leave so we walked in the pouring rain and had to change into Lyola’s clothes up on arrival. Lyola is very small, so I ended up in a pair of her salwar pants, if you haven’t seen them, they’re quite indescribable…there are a million modest pleats around the hips and they taper tightly at the ankles, so much that they are difficult to slip over your feet. Her aunties served us hot chapattis, dal, paneer, and tea, and soon after the friends began to arrive. We had cocktails, listened to music, played with the children and generally had a really good time all the way until dinner was served at 2:30 in the morning. This group of friends has graciously welcomed us into their crowd and we've been hanging out with them every weekend since. It's very exciting to have a social life, and we've had a lot of fun.

We also went sari shopping with Mercy and later took our sarees to our friend Chrstina’s cousin’s for tailoring. To begin measuring we were fitted into skin-tight sari blouses (a top that exposes your entire stomach) and before we knew it we were being wrapped into colorful sarees, bangles were slid on to our arms, and Christina took the bindi off of her forehead and place it between my eyes. (Ambryn and I tried to explain the concept of giving someone the “shirt off your back” and how in India this may be the equivalent.) Then we were paraded down the road to her cousin’s house. In the course of an hour or so we drank two cups of tea and ate butter sandwiches, then were back in our clothes and deposited on the back of two motorcycles, and then into a rickshaw and on our way home.

Here we are with Christina, two of her sisters, and her cousin:

My Easter was decidedly more secular this year than previous years in Tacoma and Holden. (We went into the city on Saturday and I realized I had purchased a pink Easter kurta, my first Easter dress in many years. I hope this makes my mother happy.) There are certainly Christian churches here, but from what I've gathered they fall into dichotomous categories of extremely high and low church. There are Catholic and Anglican churches that are very formal (and "old fashioned") and then all other Christian churches fall into one category of "Protestant" and seem very much into rock bands and accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. We had a good and relaxing morning here at Visthar, said "Happy Easter" to everyone, and made our way to our friend Biju's. He and his wife Lincy prepared us an incredible Keralan fest. I love Kerala food. Here we are with their daughter Airene:

After lunch at Biju's we boarded a bus and headed to our friend Chrstina's for her family's Easter celebration. Their home is very warm and cozy and we were well taken care of by her family.

One last thing: Because of my bus driving experience at Holden, I've been so fascinated by Indian driver's abilities to back into incredibly tight spaces and (most of the time) avoid colliding into stray cows, herds of goats, bullock carts and pedestrians weaving between fast moving cars, bicycles, two-wheelers, and auto-rickshaws (I'm still excluding many categories of traffic). I think often of the days of passing fire engines on the Holden switchbacks during the evacuation, as we narrowly escape sideswiping lorries barreling down the road. I never would have imagined it, but I have been behind the wheel on a couple of occasions here. Our friend Christina drives a sweet little scooter and I told her I wanted a "non-scary" ride around Visthar, but she insisted that I drive it! However, I did find driving it to be scary. I didn't go far. I also drove the Visthar van down the road (within Visthar) a ways, but definitely don't want to take it outside of the gate.