Thanksgiving and trying times

It is grey and dripping outside, like I feel. Or I don't know what I feel. The world is crazy this week and we struggle for normalcy and meaning.

Bombay is under fire, on fire. We refresh our browsers compulsively, glued to the up-to-the-minute reports on the attacks of Shining India's most shining city. 195 dead when the shooting stopped and no more sense for 3 days of watching, reading and talking about it.

Chennai is under water. Chennai's skies are not falling, but are leaking all the tears of Bombay this week, drowning our streets and homes in a rising tide of sewage-tinged stagnation, unhealthy and floating with everything that littered the streets the days before. Traffic grinds to a sputtering halt, harshly represented by the dozens of stranded motorcyclists pushing their choked and flooded bikes through water past their knees. Offices close and we closet inside, not wanting to wade out.


Bangkok is under protest, both airports closed. We've been following it closely, for our own selfish reasons, and I've got my fingers crossed it will simmer down and the airport re-opens before our upcoming Christmas plans.

The world seems in chaos, panicked. We ignore the financial crisis back home in North America and its echoes here for more immediate issues and needs. Everyone has their stories. Friends miss their flight stuck in traffic and waste deep water seeping into the car for 4 hours trying to get to the airport. Commuters literally see people swimming - swimming! - outside their car, making batter time than they are. The whole southern suburbs are completely submerged. People are sick. I've got a cough that won't seem to fully go away. Worried phone calls flood in and swirl like the rain: are we in Bombay? Are we all accounted for? Are the Thai airports going to be open for Christmas? Our laundry just won't dry. The auto prices have jacked 100%, assuming you can get one at all. The power's out and now what do we do. Oh good, there, it's back.

It all is enough to paralyze and hide under the covers. And for a day or 2, we mostly do.

But then we carry on. We wade to the store to get much needed groceries. We mix cocktails of numbness, fatalism and stubbornness, and go to dinner at hotel chains the world witnessed on fire this week. Foregners were targets in Bombay. But we are not in Bombay. We need to live too. And then we turn even those off for a few precious hours and sit down as friends for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner - turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce (the trickiest to get), the works. We celebrate cherished friends leaving and new ones arriving. We laugh and drink foreign liquor we've squirreled away from duty-free runs. We eat home-made pumpkin pie even though our stomachs are already full of turkey and our blood already 1/4 gravy.

And we find our own magic moments in the situation. We wade home through rivers that were once streets at the peaceful and haze-softened midnight hours. We dance on the rooftop in the deluge. We call our loved ones on the phone or Skype and write lots of letters and posts. We hold tightly to each other. We watch bad movies, which will always be wonderfully, consistently kitch no matter how the world spins. We make a meal, 7 people in the kitchen, and it's damn good. We shrink the world to the personal, the viceral, the understandable.

And the world spins. Today Chennai is safe and not under threat. It is drying out and coming back to life. Bombay is finally quiet, able to grieve and rebuild. Thailand gets worse, but rumours are whispered of it being over by the King's birthday on the 5th. And me, my days are largely unaffected. The office re-open tomorrow, friends come and go in a maddening cycle and I don't know what I feel. I feel inspired and lonely both. Not sure if any of the week's events heightens that or just uncovers.

Life in Chennai #16: Rain, rain, come again

We’ve been having rain. Actual water falling from the sky (that isn’t coming from a bucket off someone’s balcony). I’m excited.

Now my friends in Vancouver, who are en masse reporting giddiness on their Facebook profiles for their current sunny spell, are surely dumbstruck and sputtering about such a comment. It is raining. And you’re happy about it? Yup.

It isn’t so weird really. We haven’t had much rain yet this calendar year. I certainly have had no complaints that the weather forecast nearly every day has been sunny and lovely, but the rain, beyond just being a nice change of pace, does bring some benefit.

First of all and most importantly, it has knocked the temperature down 10 degrees from a month ago, which is positively wonderful. As I reported, I was getting used to the heat, but the ability of sleeping without a fan and its constant white noise, with a nice cool breeze through the window and rhythmic patter of rain on the trees and roof is a rare luxury. I’ve had to start sleeping with a top sheet again, which is novel.

So after a bit of a dig, I’ve pulled my rain shell from my pack, gone back to closed-toed shoes for the week and enjoyed being wet from the outside for once.

Of course with the rain, comes puddles, giant, street-spanning puddles and traffic is slowed and jostled even more than usual. I didn’t miss that from last year’s monsoon season. With less street space, especially along the pedestrian sides, walking the streets to lunch and elsewhere becomes a fresh new extreme sport again. I didn’t really miss that either although I’m more steely about rubbing shoulders with moving traffic since Nov.

The only real negative is that the mosquitoes are also back with all the lovely new standing water to breed in, but they're still small and slow-moving so are easy to kill so far. I guess I’ll have to go back to using the plug-in repellent.

Mostly we’ve been having the occasional afternoon thunderstorms, but this week a big system moved in and stuck and we’ve actually had rain all day and night, quite rare for here where most parts of South Asia are used to getting their rain in short, drenching buckets. My colleagues all commented on its unusualness. So it’s all about a change of scenery. For Vancouver, it is much deserved sun after a long, wet winter, but for us, a little water from the sky is a nice cool break, as long as it doesn’t last more than a week!

So rain, rain, go away and come again another day. :-)

Life in Chennai #2: Seasons change

Winter has arrived here in Chennai. Temperatures have dropped and as in Canada, it is time to don your toque against the chill of 28 degrees. I’m actually being serious. The night watchmen at my building, and he is not alone, now comes to work wearing a thin fleece balaclava. And let me be clear this is 28 degrees C above zero, not below zero like Calgary & Vancouver were getting last week. Some things defy understanding, but I fully assume the night watchmen will be happily comfortable come July’s 45 degrees in the shade when I’m lying with my head in the refrigerator in order to get any sleep. In the mean time perhaps I should offer him my down jacket...

With the coming of winter, the rains have ended and the streets have dried up. I’m hoping they will invest in repairing some of the monster potholes and washboard pavement as most of the autos have only marginal shocks at best. Honestly, it is worse than the Squamish Main gravel after the spring thaw. Without the rains to keep the smog at bay, the pollution index has steadily climbed. I really dislike seeing the dirt that comes out when I blow my nose in the evenings. I’ve been spoiled in Vancouver. I am thinking it isn’t much worse (currently at least) than Toronto in the summer, but it has been too long since I lived in the city to know if this is a fair comparison and I also have never commuted down the Don Valley Parkway in an open-air glorified 3-wheeled golf cart that is likely the direct source for any local particulates I am breathing in. So perhaps it isn’t. Either way, spending an hour and a half in smoggy traffic each day isn’t the most beautiful part of the experience.

But smog or no, there is colour everywhere and it is never boring to watch the world pass by. And right now, India is travelled past me at 30 km/h from the back of an open-air auto-rickshaw. It is a gritty view, like a bad home movie: full of bumps, hard to hear and slight dingy.

The view today is new and unknown. My auto driver appears to know an alternate route around the worst of the traffic, a windy and creative route full of switchbacks and twists through narrow alleys, market streets and illegal scoots up one-way streets. It is just as well – the main roads are congested, polluted and coated in a smothering veneer of advertising large and small. I’m not convinced this route is actually faster, but I’m happy for the diversion and trust that we’ll pop out somewhere I recognize eventually.

Generally, I have found the drivers to be trustworthy, getting me to my destination eventually, if sometimes circuitously, and only occasionally trying to renegotiate the fare once we arrive. They will fully try to milk you with an outrageous opening bid for the fare, especially if you don’t know how much it should be (and the tourist areas are worse for this), but the locals get the same treatment and if you’re willing to do as the locals do and let a few autos go if they are unwilling to negotiate a reasonable fare, then you generally do fine.

So by women garbed in bright yellow, green or purple, by slums and by glass-clad office towers, by shops that spill out onto the road and by people going about their morning routine, I jostle and chatter along and soak in where I am.