Wednesdays probably aren't a good day for me to blog. I start the day sitting in a rickshaw, wondering how a city, a country could let itself get to this point: overflowing dumpsters blocking a whole lane of traffic, kids squatting next to the dumpster doing their morning routine, a man using a tree branch as a crutch....Sometimes I can enjoy the novelty of it all. Today it just made me feel depressed.
It used to be that home was a haven from all of this. But India is encroaching on us. Every day I fall asleep and awake to the sounds of cat sex. Apparently our back yard is a cat brothel of sorts. Frisky males gather to stand on our wall and call for a mate. Have you heard this sound? It's a cross between a meow and a moan, repeated over and over until the call is answered. That's when the real fun begins. I once listened to the sound of feline intercourse all afternoon before finding out what is was. A phone call set things straight:
Me: Do you hear that sound? The neighborhood kids are torturing a cat. It's been going on all day.
Dad: It's probably the cat having sex.
Me: What? No. The cat is out there yowling, like it's really in pain.
Dad: Yeah. That's how cats sound when they're having sex.
Me: Oh.
27 years old, married, and still learning the birds and the bees from my parents.
Brad and I have been feeling a lot better about India since coming back after Christmas, but there are still days when I sit for a while, mentally calculating the time it would take to pack up and get to the airport. On really bad days I don't even pack, just make a clean break for it. I think about how quickly and easily I could settle back in to life at home, where any day I might find myself in an aisle in the middle of a clean, sterile-smelling grocery store, with everything I could ever want right at my fingertips.
I always put this fantasy to rest by reminding myself that home isn't perfect either, that if I went out the back door of that grocery store, I'd bump right into an overflowing dumpster, interrupting a pair of yowling cats.
But it won't help much, thinking about home and its imperfections, when I take to the streets in a rickshaw again this afternoon. I live in a place where nothing is clean, everywhere is crowded, and sounds and smells are an actual, physical assault.
If I dig down, deep, past this terrible mood, I can find two bright spots:
1. tomorrow the driver is back, everything will be the same, but I will be safely insulated in steel and glass
2. kittens!
