Heaven in Civil Lines

This week, I uttered a welcome "hello, you!" to the nicest commute known to Delhi's 9-to-5-ers.

I moved into a gorgeous room on the roof of a tiny hotel in Civil Lines, a neighborhood in the northern part of the city that is home to Delhi University. The room is spacious and clean. There's plenty of furniture -- all wood, nicely polished -- plus a T.V., a fridge, and a gigantic sofa. I get more than one minute of hot water. There's hardly anybody staying at the hotel, so the owners let me stay at a very reduced rate. It's still four times the amount I was paying in Paharganj, but oh boy, is it *ever* worth it. There are two large windows that look out on to green trees and through which you can hear the birds chirping. It basically feels like a resort -- except I LIVE here!

The best part of my new digs is the neighborhood (or lack thereof). In this new incarnation of my life in Delhi, I walk out from the hotel and onto Flag Staff Road: a wide, clean, traffic-free street whose sidewalks are lined with....flowerbeds. My neighbors are a string of gated palaces, the homes of Delhi's rich and famous. There's absolutely nothing and nobody here. It's fantastic.

I'm a short walk away from the neighborhood Metro stop, so I get to ride the amazing "subway" to Connaught Place every morning. It's so clean, cheap, and efficient that it puts even European subways to shame. (Nothing, of course, will ever compare to the glorious grub of the New York City subway, but obviously I'm biased.) The Metro must be the subject of a longer blog post in the future -- it's the strangest mix of everything you ever suspected and never suspected about India.

Of course, once I leave the Metro stop at Connaught Place (er, Rajiv Chowk, sorry) I have to take an auto back to my old stomping grounds in Paharganj. Now that I spend a manageable amount of time there, it's far less bothersome. Circumventing the walk through Main Bazaar is the best thing in my life since sliced bread. Or the Monier-Williams English-Sanskrit dictionary. Whatever.

And in other good news, my friend and co-worker L. is back from her trip to Canada, and I'm going over to her place tonight for dinner -- or, since it's Friday, make that Shabbat dinner. Things are looking up.

Weekend of surprises

"This is my brother-cousin," I told the over-protective man who works the reception desk at the hotel where I live. "He's passing through Delhi on his way to Gwalior." My friend M. looked pleasantly surprised at my introduction, but he played along -- and though I suspect the receptionist was less than convinced, I'm sure he appreciated my effort to look as though I was not, in fact, operating a brothel out of his hotel.

M. came to stay the night -- he had an early train to catch in the morning, and my hotel is a 3-minute walk away from the railway station -- and to introduce me to some friends of his. They're on a study abroad program in Hyderabad, and were playing hooky from school so that they could take themselves on a 10-day trip to the northern part of the country. We were planning to meet them at a concert at the Purana Qila. Just as we were heading out the door, M. got a call from his friend N., who informed us that the concert was quickly becoming more annoying than amusing. We decided to meet for a late dinner at Saravana Bhavan in Connaught Place instead.

As we all gathered, I thought I recognized a familiar face. Was that J., from high school? Could it be? J., whom I remember has having no interest whatsoever in India, now studying in *Hyderabad*?

J. and I had the great, if surreal, opportunity to catch up on more than two years of each other's lives (and, err, indulge in a little gossip about the lives of the people with whom we went to high school). We never really talked much when we went to school together -- we knew each other, and were in a few of the same classes -- but it turns out we have far more in common than I had thought. She's a Religion major at Bates, and wants to focus on Buddhism. She's even studying Sanskrit! All this made for a truly pleasant discovery. It was certainly surprising to discover her in Delhi, of all places: a city where I came to be alone, to escape, to start new projects. At the moment we recognized each other, the cosmos winked.

Following a lively dinner, we piled in rickshaws and drove to the N-block of GK-1 in pursuit of a dance club. (For a second I thought guiltily, strangely, about my students.) Our rickshaw driver decided to drop us off in M-block instead. By the time we finally found N-block, we had walked in a huge circle and decided that all of our futures would really be better spent living in the palatial homes of Greater Kailash, W-block.

Up on the roof in the tropical night air, we sat on luxurious low couches, sipped wine, experimented with the signature Masala Martini. (No comment.) We watched the young and the beautiful (but most of all, the rich) of Delhi sit on *their* couches and drink *their* wine. It was great company, and a gorgeous night. Conversation flitted about like excited parakeets in a cage. By the time M. and I left, I would have been ready for anything: I think a Proper Night Out was just what the doctor (or ayurvedacarya, or astrologer, or guru, whatever) ordered. M. and I collapsed in our beds; I didn't envy him for having to catch a train at 6AM the following morning.

This morning I got a call from N., both of us still in bed, and we planned to meet up in Paharganj and spend a while in the old city today. Last night he had invited me to come along with the Hyderabad group to Chandni Chowk; I countered with an offer to help them navigate the chaat counters at the (original!) Haldiram's there. We chatted for a few good hours -- bombarding each other with tales of travel, India, rickshaw-wallahs, policemen, literary theory (??) -- before accumulating all the members of our group and readying ourselves for a trip to the most famous street in Delhi. I realized how long it had been since I had spent any real amount of time with lots of people my age: were it not for the streets of Paharganj, I could have been back in college, spewing stories and laughter with my roommates. Amazing!

I will, however, add this: that no matter how hard it is to travel by myself around Paharganj, it is even harder to be in a group of seven Americans. Shopkeepers, random people on the street, and (of course) rickshaw-wallahs were EVEN MORE aggressive than usual. I found myself in the strange position of taking visitors around "my" city -- bargaining, giving directions, making plans, ordering food. It was wonderful to play tour guide, and it was wonderful to be with these interesting, intellectually astute, fun-loving, somewhat goofy, often sarcastic, and (quite frankly) good-looking people. I loved it.

It's impossible not to have a blast at Haldiram's, and today was no exception. First there was the rickshaw ride over there: four of us in the back, one on the laps of the other three. Another rickshaw driver really took a liking to the girl who was sitting on our laps, and basically followed us all the way to Old Delhi in his rickshaw making comments to our driver and casting not-so-sly glances back at our fair companion. At one point he was so interested in her that he nearly drove his rickshaw into a public bus. Then *we* almost collided with a public bus. Then we bumped the back of another rickshaw.

"You're all crazy!" Said N. in Hindi to the driver.

He turned around, nodded vigorously, and smiled so widely that we could see his betel-stained molars.

"What a country!" Exclaimed N., "You tell people they're crazy, and they're, like, 'YES! WE ARE!'" N. stuck his thumb in the air and mimicked the driver's expression perfectly.

At Haldiram's, we hawked tables, stuck two together, and piled them with as much chaat as we possibly could: raj katchori, paapri chaat, bhel puri, a double dose of pani puri. To this we added two north Indian thalis, two orders of paneer tikka, two kinds of parantha, and a chole bhature. We were sweating and exhausted by the time the meal finished. It was...unbelievable. There's no real way to describe Haldiram's -- you just have to go there and see, smell, and (best of all) taste for yourself.

Afterwards, we nibbled on sweets downstairs and went our separate ways: me, back to Paharganj (with a positively evil rickshaw driver); everyone else, to the Lal Qila.

I'm incredibly full right now: on chaat, on chat, on this crazy, crazy country.

Friday, fun, yes

After a challenging beginning, this week has turned out to be quite the success -- and not just for me.

One of my best friends from college, I., landed two lead roles in productions at Harvard. At the end of March, he's going to be playing Hector in "The History Boys" (my favorite play!) and then he'll be playing Claudius in "Hamlet" (you know, also good). The news about this absolutely brightened my week.

Another highlight of the week has been hearing about the admissions process for the pilot program of Tajiran-e-Jawan ("Young Entrepreneurs") -- a project put together by my boyfriend, Z., and his friend, M., in Kabul. It was an astounding success, and the real program hasn't even started yet!

As for me, I'm looking forward to going to a contemporary Indian music concert tonight at the Purana Qila with my friend M and some of his buddies from an SIT program in Delhi.

And school has been great this week, but more on that later. I've got to run off and give my older students their first quiz!

The day I stepped in cow dung

Until today, I had actually managed to avoid the large piles of cow poop that lie, goopy and stinky, on the streets of my neighborhood. I was innocently walking into Main Bazaar earlier this evening, reflecting on the unsettling events of the day and trying to put them in the past, when all of a sudden my flip flop slipped and slided in green mush. None of the aforementioned mush reached my feet, and I have the cosmos to thank for that one. So I traipsed cow dung down the remainder of Main Bazaar all the way down to Tooti Chowk, and thought "this is nothing less than what you deserve, Paharganj."

Before I stepped in holy cow feces, this is what I was thinking about:

I'm grateful to have found a slightly less bothersome -- and, for that matter, quicker -- way of walking to my older students' dorm in the mornings. Come time for the return trip, however, the new route is just as bad as the old one. I'm afraid I was harassed, pursued, and entreatied one too many times this morning. When yet another group of three men leered "hi beautiful, how are you today?" (and there *is* a significant difference between when these words are spoken aggressively, and when they are spoken pleasantly), I spat a rather strong expletive back at them. For several precious moments, they were too stunned to react. (I, too, was a little shocked at my behavior.) This bought me some time to walk away, but I hadn't gone very far when the ringleader began to walk beside me. "Why you talk shit," he accused, "why you talk shit to Indian people. You not liking Indian people. This is India. You are in India. No talking shit. No talking shit in India."

Good thing I was too terrified to do anything other than ignore him and speed up my walking as if I hadn't said a thing in the first place: he quickly tired of trying to shame me, and retreated to his pack of adoring followers. I'm just worried about the next time I run into him -- I hope he doesn't remember me.

I wish I had the grace to let these things pass, but sadly, I'm still smarting on two counts. The first involves victimhood -- though I'm not sure if I'm really much of a victim in this situation. The second lies in the particular words that my assailant chose to throw at me. It's not hard to see why.

But something scarier happened when I was on my way home from school in the afternoon. I was walking down the wide street that links Connaught Place with the railway station and saw, ambling toward me, a man who gave me that mythical "uh-oh" feeling. He was dark, dirty, and disheveled, but his walk wasn't like that of a street sweeper or ragpicker: those men and women walk with a great deal of humility; this man swayed and swaggered. His shirt was open all the way down the front, baring his chest. There weren't many people around us as he veered in my direction, and I knew not to even look his way. He still tried to touch me, however, sticking out his foot and making a slow grab for my body. He must have been drunk, and perhaps mentally or emotionally unstable. I sidestepped his reach with as much nonchalance as I could muster, and (for the second time today) quickened my pace and moved into a slow stream of other people walking down the street. Any larger reaction only would have made it worse.

It made me see the morning's incident in a different light. At least the men who leered and jeered at me earlier today knew the consequences of their actions: they understood that no matter how much I provoked them, they couldn't get away with anything more than the most basic of verbal abuses -- not in crowded Paharganj at noontime, anyhow. But the man in the street this afternoon was a different story. In his mind, there was nothing to stop him from physically reaching for me, following me, or doing who-knows-what else. I'm thankful that both his mental and bodily reflexes were too slow to allow him those courses of action.

Ten minutes after that was when I stepped in the cow dung.

I seem to be playing a woeful ballad on this blog lately, and I dislike that. Here's the other side of my one-rupee coin: I love my students. I love them, love them, love them. I love them when they have no idea what I'm talking about, and I love them when they don't have even the slightest intention of paying attention in class. Those daily moments of joy and laughter are worth all the unwelcome advances in the world: I promise you that for every story of yet another bothersome walk in my 'hood, there's a story of a kid's smile, sometimes missing a front tooth or two.

Back in Pune

I'm sitting in the waiting area of Pune's mini-airport, where I am one of two foreigners among a crowd of middle-class Indian businessmen. To me, that's Pune in a nutshell: a small, but perfectly pleasant waiting area frequented by middle-aged men with slight paunches and briefcases, college students sporting tee shirts and dupattas, and the odd whitey. Outside, the sun is shining through the smog. My internet works. There's nothing to complain about.

I was back in Pune this weekend to visit friends, bid my respects to my Sanskrit teachers, and remove a whole bunch of things from my room in my old flat here. When I left Pune two months ago, I took a single black suitcase with me: all my Sanskrit dictionaries and notebooks, some clothes, a yoga mat, a bag of ayurvedic party favors, two pairs of shoes, two shelves of novels, a once-worn sari, and various other items (nail polish remover? empty picture frames?) I had resigned to the dust of my old room, until now.

On Friday, I went out for a gorgeous, fancy lunch with my old roomies, M., G., and S., and their new roommate, D., from France. Unable to part with them so quickly afterward, I returned to our flat later in the evening and spent the rest of the night chatting and gossiping away, sitting around the kitchen table and laughing. I remembered how much of the joy I experienced while living in Pune was born and sustained around that kitchen table. Saturday was a day out with S.: more lunching, more shopping, more sitting around tables and laughing our heads off. On Saturday night, I had a fantastic (and fantastically long) dinner with my father, my Sanskrit teachers, and my Sanskrit classmates. Sunday brought more long lunches, this time Brahmin thalis at the Hotel Shreyas, with the teachers and students. This was followed by more sitting around tables and laughing with M. and S. at a dive on Law College Road. As weekends go, this one was pretty perfect. My dad even got me a bunch of roses for Valentine's Day.

My father and I stayed at a perfectly nice (but characterless) hotel on clogged, popular F.C. Road, but I spent almost all weekend out with the few buddies I picked up during my few months in the city. I never hands-down loved Pune when I was living there, and I still don't: it's the people I knew there who really make the city worth returning to. Over breakfast one morning in the garden of the Vaishali restaurant, also clogged and popular, my dad commented on how nice and pleasant Pune is. It's true: aside from the pollution and traffic, Pune really is an easy place to live. It's incredibly safe, even at night. The rickshaw-wallahs use the meter. The weather is bearable. There are good places to eat, and good apartments to rent. The women wear brightly colored saris and salwar kameez sets.

I tried to explain to my dad what, exactly, I didn't (and don't) like about Pune. The heartless traffic and the crushing pollution are easy offenders -- but Delhi is polluted and smoggy, too, and somehow I don't mind it so much there. Perhaps the very thing I dislike about Pune is something that enchanted me so much when I first started living there: it's just a regular city. The place is filled with students on the one hand, and middle-class Indian families on the other. Both groups, at least in the areas that I frequented, tended to be Hindu. There are flyovers and sweet shops and public buses and shopping malls. The giant banyan trees growing through the concrete are the only clue that Pune has a wild side. It's just a regular city.

I know the place has history and diversity: you'd be hard-pressed to find anyplace in India that doesn't. But to have both of those elements in public space is important to me, and that's one of the reasons I chose to spend the rest of the winter and spring not in Pune, but in Delhi.

Delhi is a Difficult Place, no doubt -- last week's blog rant (see the post "100 and 0") can attest to that -- but it is unbelievably exciting, multifaceted, challenging, mysterious, layered, old. And Delhi is a special place for travelers in a way that Pune isn't: goodness knows I'm an elitist when it comes to tourism (or just an idiot who thinks she can blend in when she's in Delhi, Amman, Paris, whatever), but I've come to appreciate the fact that Delhi has a built-in propensity for foreignness. The city has died and been reborn many, many times at the hands of both "native" and "foreign" rulers. I like living in a place where it might be interesting, but it certainly won't be unusual, to be different. I like living in a city that embraces those differences, throwing them all into the mash and jamble of Delhi's winding alleys and broad boulevards so that they can live together. In that respect, in fact, it's a lot like New York.

Experiencing Delhi's capacity for travelers has become one of the reasons I enjoy Paharganj. Last week I wrote about the clouds in that sky: the large presence of foreign backpackers draws the absolute worst of touts, whistles, peeps, shouts, and all manners of treating normal humans as if they were machines dispensing money, sex, or both. But there is something comforting, too, about living and walking the streets with fellow travelers. I smile when I see *yet another* dreadlocked European backpacker being subjected to the entreaties of *yet another* young Indian man with oiled hair and skin-tight, acid-wash denim bell-bottoms, one hand enthusiastically gesturing at his uncle's bangle store, and one hand (just as enthusiastically) scratching his crotch. I smile, feeling sorry for them both: I'm grateful that I'm not silly enough to wear dreadlocks in a country where they're reserved for paupers and yogis, and I'm grateful that I've been spared the attentions of this particular man in the acid-wash jeans. Those scenes remind me I'm not the only one dealing with cultural misfires every day. They remind me I'm a guest in this country, and that there's no way I could ever blend in. They remind me that sometimes--but just sometimes!--it's okay to be a stupid tourist. They remind me that it's okay to be different.

My plane is about to take off: better shut down my laptop and get on board!

100 and 0

Since the Shatabdi Express rolled into the New Delhi Railway Station from Jaipur on Sunday night, I've been ricocheting from one extreme to another like a volleyed ping-pong ball.

On one side of the table lie a series of quasi-successful classes, both with the older boys (unforgotten homeworks! extra compositions! parts of speech!) and with the younger set ("what is your name?"! "how many ____?"! the days of the week! singulars and plurals!). English is a breathtaking -- and breathtakingly difficult -- language, both to learn and to teach. My students seem to be on board for the scenic (if bumpy) ride, and that's a joy to see.

We have an unusual relationship. I've written about how I'm a big sister as well as a teacher: so much of their growth seems to depend upon adults (or slightly older children, like me) paying attention to them for decent stretches of time. They have several adults already taking care of them, of course -- the dorm supervisor (for the older kids), and a couple of other teachers. Whenever I show up, there are precious few of these grown-ups around. In the mornings I might see a supervisor in the dorm office, or another teacher in the giant hall that serves as a classroom. In the afternoons, I see the kids' head teacher sitting around reading the newspaper, and the (overworked, sweet-tempered) assistant teacher taking a much-needed break. Add boredom into the mix: my three 18-year-olds have nothing to do in the mornings, an early afternoon computer class three days a week, and nothing to do in the late afternoons or on the weekends; the contact point kids, most (if not all) of whom are not living in SBT dorms, have nothing to do after 2PM every single day. Someone smiling and laughing with them makes a huge difference, even if it's at the expense of a "productive" English class.

Which is a good thing, because I really have no idea how to teach English anyway. Readers, please: I welcome suggestions, tips, and book/Website recommendations!

The students' (understandable) need for positive attention often ends up in total clamor, with many little bodies vying for the affections of my eyes, ears, and hands. This is just as true of the older kids as it is of the younger ones, though it manifests itself in a different way. The Three Musketeers fight to hold and read from whatever book we're studying together, while the Connaught Place kids just shout and grab: their antics are distracting, but I can't deny how flattering they are, too. After playing and laughing at the beginning of each class, it's hard for me to draw back and become a Teacher again. I'm still working on how to fuse the two personae.

On the other end of the table lie several memories, big and small, from the past few days. One haunts me in particular: a seven-year-old student in my afternoon group whose face showed the horrific signs of being blinded as a younger child. Although there is a sprawling, blood-red scar where his left eye used to be, R.'s right eye (engorged to twice its size and covered with a heavy gray film) still functiona a little. Unable to learn with the rest of the group because of his disability, R. crawled around my feet and clung to my ankles all afternoon, shouting for my attention. At the end of the class, I gave him 'Goodnight Moon' -- a kids' book I had been reading with the other students -- to look at. He held it up close to his right eye and a sort of peace came over him. I won't forget R.'s confusion (minor desperation, even) about who I was, and what I was doing with his friends in our makeshift classroom. I won't forget his infatuation with 'Goodnight Moon'. I certainly won't forget his face.

Something of a more daily shock (can I even say that? Is it still a "shock" if it happens daily?) is the experience of walking down the street in my neighborhood. For almost my entire life, I have nothing less than * relished * my daily commute. Going to high school in New York City, that meant a love affair with the Subway and the M-86 crosstown bus. In Cambridge, it meant taking twenty minutes to get to a classroom five minutes away. (The town’s ridiculous layout makes this relatively easy to do, often unintentionally.) In Pune, my favorite parts of the day were the bumpy rickshaw rides to and from the Deccan College campus. Paharganj is a different story.

Logistically, walking is not easy to do in this neighborhood: there are no sidewalks. You either cram yourself into the tiny space between the jumble of parked cars and the storefronts, or you walk in traffic. The entire Main Bazaar of Paharganj, for that matter, is under construction -- its ground surface is often nothing more than rocks and mud-sewage-sludge. But what really bothers me are the men.

The journalist Anita Jain writes that there are “around 930 women to every 1,000 men according to recent census data, the vast discrepancy a disturbing result of infanticide and sex-segregated abordion.” (2003, p.50) On the streets of Paharganj, this figure might as well be 50 women for every 1,000 men. It’s entirely possible that I will walk the thirty minutes to work every morning and see no more than ten – TEN – women. Ten. Perhaps I’m more aware of these things than I need to be, but let me tell you anyway: it’s scary. I may be in absolutely no physical danger, but still I feel vulnerable and preyed upon. These men’s stares, low whistles, and whispered comments pick and grate at my dignity, not to mention my sanity. Throughout my entire walk to school, I can’t afford to look up * even once *: meeting a man’s gaze is considered a sexual come-on, and only a prostitute would be so bold as to stare back.

“So-called ‘eve-teasing’ is a common phenomenon in India,” says Jain, “perhaps due to the disconnect created by the realtive visibility of women in the public sphere – as opposed to in certain parts of the Islamic world – even as gender relations are still largely circumscribed. Men see, but they are not allowed to touch, leading to pent-up frustration.” (86) I’m nowhere near as sympathetic to these men. (And, for the record, men on the streets of Syria and Jordan practically ignored me when I was there last summer.) Staring, I more than understand: I’m a foreigner, after all, and white skin is unusual here. Staring is fine. But I’ve witnessed enough Indian men being perfectly polite to me that I cannot tolerate leering and commenting from the others. Media be damned: these young men have no excuse for treating me like a low, dirty, sex object.

Excuse my rant.

And so it’s been a week of highs and lows. A few short hours can take me from the grunge of Paharganj to the luxuries of dinner at the Taj Hotel with a family friend, and from the chaos of the classroom to the peace of curling up in bed with a novel. It’s all part of what makes India so exciting, I guess. It’s part of what makes India, India.

Spa weekend

They don't really bill Jaipur as a calm weekend getaway (and given the hyperactivity of the city's rickshaw-wallahs, it's easy to see why), but that's exactly what the Pink City was for me this weekend. My father is currently living in a gorgeous, quiet hotel with a pool and lounge chairs; I parked there for a three-day weekend and got up only twice. My cold dried up, I slept more than ten hours every night, I fed myself silly. Thank you, Jaipur, spa locale of the future.

On Saturday afternoon I went to meet my friend S. at the Anokhi Cafe. She's studying Hindi in Jaipur and was reading the Hindi version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when I arrived. While we caught up on several months of life and gossip, I slurped Assam tea and gobbled down what might be the world's most delicious carrot cake. (Okay, maybe the carrot cake at Magnolia Bakery is better. Maybe.) We then went to meet her roommate, L., at the Shree Radha-Govinda Dev Temple in the Old City. We were just in time for the evening aarti; as we arrived, the pundit drew back the stage curtain (yes, this is a celebrity performance) to reveal Krishna and Radha. Bells clanged. Light was offered. Water was sprinkled. The scene on the ground, however, was surprisingly quiet -- at least by comparison to those I've seen at other temples. I found myself able to look Krishna and Radha in their big eyes for minutes at a time: a real darshan.

Then we queued up to get prasaad (sweets that have been offered to the deities, blessed by their presence, and returned to the public) at a little counter next to the main shrine. You donate a few rupees and get a bag of laddoos in return: the more you pay, the more you get. There, two interesting things happened. One was that an old woman begged me to cut the line in front of her. In a country that rarely forms line-shaped queues (preferring, I think, to crowd and mob) this was very unusual indeed. "MERE AAGE", she pleaded over and over, "IN FRONT OF ME!"

Yet in total contrast with the old woman's generous sentiments, we actually *were* mobbed as we stepped away from the counter. Fifteen pairs of male hands -- mostly boys, but quite a few grown men as well -- appeared in our faces, begging for the sweets we had just been given. They didn't look like poor men; in fact, some of them were very well-dressed. I had no idea what to do. I saw S and L giving out pieces of their sweets, so I began to distribute mine. This was a bad idea. Fifteen pairs of hands became twenty-five, and the crowd swelled with neediness. It's disturbing to pause, look around, and find yourself surrounded by outstretched palms and dark, staring eyes. I've been coming to India for a long time, and it's never happened to me in *any* context. People can get aggressive in the temple -- usually when pushing forward to have a glimpse of the deity -- but this, I have never seen before. Has anyone ever had a similar experience? Thoughts?

After having darshan of Radha and Krishna, I hopped in an autorickshaw and headed back to the hotel to meet my dad for a late dinner. We joined lots of Indian families (children and babies most certainly included!) eating thalis and dosas at a popular south Indian restaurant at the prime dinner hour of 10PM. The food was delicious, but the real attractions were at the ice cream store next door. At this unusual ice cream store, a hungry customer could have her choice of fantastically named (and dressed) ice cream sundaes: "Pink Strawberry Pina Colada", "Tropical Sailboat", "Virgin Brownie Hot Fudge" and, my personal favorite, "Lemon Kookie Crumb Pizza".

As I sat on the train going back to Delhi late last night, I looked out the window and saw a few dim lights in the distance. It was a graciously familiar sight: I was on Amtrak for a moment there, traveling from Boston and primed to arrive late at night in grimy, glorious Penn Station, bag of textbooks and empty Diet Coke bottle in tow. I would stumble off the train and look around at the fluorescently lit, golden walls of the huge cavern station below 34th Street. I would follow the signs to the One and Nine Subway lines, even though the Nine has long since been discontinued. I would get on the local and rumble uptown to 110th Street, where I would get off, stick my head above ground, and breathe in the smell of darkened Broadway. I'd cross the street, ignore the loud pleas of our corner's resident homeless man ("Can ya help me get a warm meal please?"), and walk to Riverside Drive. Then I'd turn toward my bright lobby, greet F., the doorman, and walk past the spitting mini-fountain to get in the elevator and get out again on the third floor.

That might have been the first real pang of homesickness I've felt so far.

Sniffles and other small woes

I have a cold -- a dripping, sniffling, shivering, sniveling cold -- and I'm out of tissue paper. More accurately, I'm out of toilet paper, which is what I've been using to mop up the liquids pouring out of my nose.

Sorry. Too graphic?

It's almost 5 in the morning, and soon I have to walk down the street to the railway station and catch a train to Jaipur. I'm going to spend the weekend with my dad and some friends there, nursing my cold and recovering from a long week.

Classes have been all over the place for the first several days, mostly because I've been trying to assess my students' existing English capabilities. Every passing hour reveals just how much of the language they lack, and--far more importantly--just how much I lack the skills to teach it. To make myself feel better, I stick with the mantra that the whole gig is ultimately more about friendship and mentorship than about formal education; I wouldn't yet consider delving into "The Cat in the Hat" with my 18-year-olds a wasted morning. (Besides, vocabulary is always more fun to learn when it rhymes -- and when your dignified, Harvard-educated tutor wildly bounces up and down on one leg while reading aloud, all in a poor imitation of the Cat in the Hat.)

As for the younger kids, it's hard enough just to get fifty percent of them to pay attention at once. Their afternoons have almost no structure, so I'll end up with anywhere from five to twelve students actually participating in class, and the rest rotating between praticing "How are you?", playing marbles on the side, or bashing each other over the head. The older boys at the contact point, whose job is to keep the kids in line and generally amuse them while their teachers are reading newspapers on the side of the classroom, love to interfere with the class: they interject their own few sentences of English whenever they can and translate everything I say into Hindi, both of which I find pretty disruptive. (Would you? Or am I reacting too strongly?) In any case, a lot of my energy goes either toward ignoring them, or toward trying to persuade them to be quiet for two minutes at a time. It's a big distraction, especially when I mostly want to spend time with the smiling, enthusiastic, crazy younger set.

And I am realizing more and more just how sketchy my neighborhood is. It's really not the most fun place to live. Oh well -- at least I have my sunny room, not to mention all the kind people who work at the hotel and who have been taking such good care of me.

Off to the railway station, to Jaipur, to cough drops, and -- finally! -- to the weekend.

Day One

Today was my first day at work. I am already exhausted, incredulous at the months ahead and, perhaps most of all, inspired.

I spent the morning chatting with the three older boys who requested an English teacher. At 18, they're not really boys anymore, but they have a marked innocence about them: it could be the product of their broken English, but I think it springs more from the nervous excitement in their faces than anything else. Also, they're all shorter than I am. (This country is great for the self-esteem of the average white girl: she feels beautiful just because she's pale, and statuesque at the mediocre height of 5 feet and 6 inches.) Two of the boys are studying computers as part of a B.A. correspondence course -- video and sound editing in particular. The other has finished twelfth grade, but for some reason (and it's not hard to see the obstacles in his way) has not yet entered a university-level course for further study.

We sat in a circle on the second floor of their dorm building, which does quadruple-duty as a study room, sleeping area, dining hall, and computer lab. Tomorrow, when things get more formal, I suppose we'll migrate to a long desk. We talked about where they were in school, how much English they had studied, why they wanted to learn English ("very important for high society gatherings," said R., the oldest, at which point S., the second-oldest, fervently nodded his head in agreement), and what they wanted to practice. It will take many more days to assess where they really are with the language -- and goodness knows I'm the least experienced tutor they've ever had -- but my heart leaps around a little when I think about working with such dedicated students. They've had far more than their fair share of difficulties in life; their commitment to education and optimism about the future feels disarming.

In the early afternoon, I headed over to the Handuman mandir contact point to meet the kids there. There are up to twenty kids (aged 9-15) who come every day, but their afternoons are pretty unstructured: a class was just finishing as I arrived, and the rest of the afternoon was to be spent playing marbles, cuffing other kids on the head, or in self-study. "Who wants to learn English?" one of the teachers asked after I had walked in. Four hands flew up in the air. Great, I thought, another small group -- this will be a breeze. Boy, was I wrong about that: when the others saw their friends practicing "what is your name?" and "how old are you?" in English, the group instantly grew ten kids larger. Almost all of them knew no English at all. Communication is such an amazing thing, though, because the gigantic language barrier didn't seem to matter. Things moved slowly, and sometimes frustratingly, but everyone had some fun in the end.

Then there were two tenth grade boys studying by themselves off to the side; the staff told me that they had wanted help with English, so I went over to introduce myself. I was greeted with almost total silence. As it turns out, they've been studying English for two years -- but they can hardly speak a word. I took at look at their textbooks, issued by the National Institute of Open Schooling: are first-year English textbooks supposed to use technical grammar terms on page five? Perhaps -- but it certainly explained how all of their energy has been directed on simply learning how to read. As R. said, "I can read, but there is no meaning." Their faces lacked the enthusiasm and smiles of all the other kids I met today. I'm still thinking about why.

I've vowed to come more prepared for everything tomorrow, and so it's time to flip through the coloring books, newspapers, magazines, and comic books that I bought this evening from overpriced stationery stores in Defence Colony Market. For some reason I also bought a stuffed elephant. It didn't seem out of place for the younger group at Hanuman mandir. Perhaps we can name it together (Nellephant?), give it a life story, sew sisters and brothers for it, all in English of course.

So I'm currently accepting any tips and tools of the trade that my readership has to offer! Anyone taught English as a foreign language before? Had experience with kids of these age groups? Worked with "underprivileged" students? Thoughts and comments are welcome.