I can truly say that there is nothing that could have prepared me for this heat. The air feels (and sometimes smells) like you are walking on the ventilation grates over the subway in New York in the middle of the day in the middle of the summer. Nothing can cool you down outside. Even the wind blows hot air in your face and does little to cool the ample sweat pouring from every pore in your body. Though the humidity is not as bad as I thought it would be, standing outside for even five minutes, whether in the sun or the shade, makes you desperate to get out of the heat. Walking even a few blocks leaves you exhausted and thirsty as hell; it gives you a serious appreciation for the street sweepers, outdoor vendors, rickshaw drivers, security guards and everyone else who makes their living outside, let alone the countless women, men and children who live on the street. The monsoon season will thankfully begin in a few weeks, before which I will have to relegate myself to being a hot, sweaty mess every time I set foot outside.
The past week has entailed meeting after meeting, a time consuming orientation that involved lots of practical training in teaching English, briefings on Indian education, and plenty of advice on how to not get assaulted/robbed/taken advantage of/into any trouble. By the weekend we were so eager to be done with being talked at and desperate to begin getting set up in the city, that we had completely forgotten the fact that two thirds of the group would be heading elsewhere in India. We suddenly found ourselves saying goodbye to people we had just met and become attached to in this foreign world.
The good news is that the four of us girls left in Delhi have chosen a very nice place to live, in a neighborhood called Malviya Nagar in South Delhi. The two boys will be living in a two bedroom, as one of them is a Mormon and isn't about to share a residence with females. The girls I live with are lovely: Hannah went to NYU and is from a suburb of Atlanta, Patricia is from Bellingham, Washington and went to Whitman, and Tangiah is from South Orange, New Jersey and just graduated from Spelman. I am sharing a room with Patricia, which is fine, as I had such a positive experience sharing a room last year and in general don't need much alone time. Our sharing a room allowed all four of us to pay significantly less rent (about $250/month) and to live in a very well-maintained apartment that ETAs have lived in for the past three years, when the English teaching fellowship began in India. It is fully furnished, with dishes and cooking utensils, a microwave, a purifier to make tap water safe to drink, and even a small library of books left behind by former fellows. Hannah commented that it feels like there were guardian angels that were looking out for us before we came! My sheets feel like sandpaper and I still haven't figured out which switch is for which light/fan/water motor/water heater/outlet/panic button, but there is air conditioning(!) and clean, hot showers and a lovely home in a lovely neighborhood.
One problem I have encountered in Delhi is that apart from the major roads, none of the streets really have names. Home addresses are according to blocks, as in our house, which is number 11, N-Block, Malviya Nagar. As a result, people, including cab drivers and the auto wallas have absolutely no way of knowing the ins and outs of every single neighborhood in Delhi. I should also explain that auto wallas are the guys who drive auto rickshaws, also called indian helicopters, which are the ubiquitous green and yellow three wheeled scooters with a bench in the back and a canopy. To ride in an auto is to entrust the walla with your life, in as literal a sense as possible. In any case, getting home in an auto requires you to know very specifically how to get home. Because we are so new here and had been driven to our home exclusively by drivers hired by the program center, we had a vague idea of where we live but not a specific knowledge of how to get there. As we made our way home in an auto from a big market in a neighborhood called Lajpat Nagar, we ended up driving in circles through the neighborhood, the driver stopping every 30 feet to ask for directions to get to N-block. I'm pretty sure Indians are like Argentines in that if they don't know exactly where you want to get to, they will make up directions rather than admit the defeat of not knowing. After nearly an hour of driving around, the driver announced that there was a "mechanical problem" with his auto and he could not drive us anymore. I will never know whether he just said that to get us out of his hair or whether he did end up stranded with auto trouble in the bowels of Malviya Nagar, but either way, we were out 90 rupees and walking on foot. I would swear sometimes that some guardian angel is looking out for me here, because I honestly can't say how we found out way home within minutes, or how the four of us managed through the dark at the end of a long day and avoided getting hit by one of the many maniac drivers in this country. Arriving home, sweaty, dusty and exhausted, the only thing I could feel was gratitude for successfully surviving this city one more day, and for the glorious air conditioning that flooded my skin with relief when we finally got home.
