Air-Cooled Indian fashion

I'd read about a place - beyond the fish market and off backpacker routes, where the fancy Indian designers kept shops. and company turned inwards and away from the street outside. I donned my best cleanest and brought my fan-cooled India to the air-cooled world of The Courtyard.

A journey from the lowest, lower east-side bodega to Bergdorf's main floor, multiplied by the India quotient.

The shop assistants appeared collectively convinced that I couldn't afford a barrette: eyed me, returned to conversations.

Which allowed berth and time to rifle the bejewelled pouffs that, dwell - state-side - in stores in states I don't get my wardrobe in. Then there were relvant things as well - I bought two (A Abraham + Thakore, a gray/lilac silk blouse with buttons up the back and PRATAP label, a shruggy thing which may wear me till I get the upper hand.

C - not really equipped to fashion-report

Enough about me

I'm back a week now and my days of utter solipsism have encountered some lovely interlopers:

like Rus my still-new fiancee,
friends like visiting Cin, Ian and baby Henry,
New York,
my shop,
life.

If you're into it (I appear to be), solo travel on the relative-cheap is invigorating - each day dawning with the new-driven-stimulus of primordial to-do's:
feed, clothe appropriately, push oneself out in to the world (vs. hibernating in a crappy hotel room, drinking banana lassis and watching BBC) and, as extra credit, enjoy the journey.

Life then is reduced to its barest-bones of you and your suitcase - and not a very big one - which is pretty cool, for a spell.

But at some point you do realize that you're writing yourself in a circle of writing, up to the moment itself.
That you can't - not on this trip, not ever (not no one) - capture all of India in your blog/diary/camera and bring it home.
And that someone, very far away and a day behind, is waiting for you to come home and emails and a few phone calls won't bridge it.

And you're ready to be there, share, let down the high guards and look after someone other than yourself for a while, and be looked after too.

More reports and photos to come, a lot more on the shopping front especially. But on home turf now so not quite so many.

Love to all

C

Home again, home again

And it's good.

Though not so very good the night of - endless flight, endless circling of Newark then endless immigration line as a 747's worth of passengers were fed beneath the stamp of one immigration official - but good coming out the other end with Rus there, the taxi ride to the upper west, unpacking treasures (my estimation) and stories with glasses of wine...

Amazingly easy settling right back in, as if iffy bathrooms and my own mile-high defenses were never there. The head-space and personal space begin to breathe again, find they can stretch in various directions and encounter no obstacles.

I'm back and, with jet lag tapering and friends including Cin, Ian and new baby Henry here (upstate) for the weekend - got good stuff ahead.

More Indian tales and photos as I go, but also home tales too.

Love to all

C-on-the-Hudson

From the menu

From The (my) Hotel Metro Palace's Room Service menu:

Chicken Salad Hawaiian - Cooked chicken strips pineapple and celery twined in mayonnaise. Rs. 80 ($2)

Then the pairings section - many things the chef pairs with coffee (one with minestrone) including:

Fish Tartletts accompanied with Coffee - Shredded fish touched with garlic mayonnaise, filled into crisp shells. Rs. 145 ($3.50)

In a country a-flood in divine cuisine...

C - eating out

Closing

And it's good.

Though not so very good the night of - endless flight, endless circling of Newark then endless immigration line as a 747's worth of passengers were fed beneath the stamp of one immigration official - but good coming out the other end with Rus there, the taxi ride to the upper west, unpacking treasures (my estimation) and stories with glasses of wine...

Amazingly easy settling right back in, as if iffy bathrooms and my own mile-high defenses were never there. The head-space and personal space begin to breathe again, find they can stretch in various directions and encounter no obstacles.

I'm back and, with jet lag tapering and friends including Cin, Ian and new baby Henry here (upstate) for the weekend - got good stuff ahead.

More Indian tales and photos as I go, but also home tales too.

Love to all

C-on-the-Hudson

Fragility Index

Fragility Index: Back to low.

Fragility index spiked off the charts yesterday: brought to near-tears that there wasn't coffee beyond domesic airport security, or internet. I must have had DELICATE writ large when I enquired about the logistics of crossing back out - the woman manning the security desk offered to send her boy to fetch me what I wanted.

But I'm safely in Bombay - my back/neck are unclenching, I've worn a skirt for the first time in India, and am re-introducing myself to my knees and ankles.

My whole being was tensed on the defensive for these past week. Good and necessary - handy as a woman on her own - but I can feel my body now unwinding.

My hotel's (3x price of last) is decent, I've done what i came to do (that's another report, all good), I completed the circle and
even if my stomach goes south ,
or I lose all my rupees,
or I don't source/buy another thing,
I will almost inevitably be able to get myself to the airport, onto a plane where I'm guaranteed a fine bathroom, and home to R with a trip I can call successful.

C - almost home, but enjoying Bombay in the meantime

Tiny tastes, Manali

Briefly, and expensively, on-line at the Taj Hotel's business center...so up go the photos.

A few little bits of Manali...

C (air-conditioned)

Linds Dad and Bombay

I can't believe I had this photo in my computer - scanned in ages ago.

But that's Lindsey, and dad and me in Chor Bazaar, Bombay 1979.

I'll be there again tomorrow.

C - in Linds and my birthtown, our history all around

Closing the circle

Tomorrow: Bombay, and the trip winds down to Tuesday's departure.

I'll leave Delhi a little whooped but laden.

C - off to pack

Bengalaroo (to you)

"Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way."
from Istanbul (not Constantinople), They Might be Giants

Lots afoot in India today.

In my neck of the woods, not good stuff. Strikes have closed down all but Delhi's autorickshaws and those annoying fellows who follow you trying to give directions. (Here called touts.) I can do NOTHING WHATSOEVER until the traders are appeased and return to work. They're in day 3 now - striking against government's orders to close down illegal shops - which would seem to me a good thing but I don't want to toe-into Indian political waters here and so shall wait.
(A better informed traveler, one who watched TV say, might have known not to travel 16 hours to a city basically in lock-down. She might have stayed in the hills...)

But the bouncier news is from the south where Bangalore, to honor its state of Karnataka's 50 years of independence and stake some claim to their fast-westernized city, have gone with the vernacular original: Bengalooru .
Which, I learned, is derived from Bendakalooru, meaning a town of boiled beans. (The Boston of India.)

C - frustrated and not feeling one with the workers today

Friends with delhi

Delhi almost beat me yesterday.

City-wide strike +
my middling-to-crappy hotel +
various messily wrong stabs at trying to walk from my hotel's (crummy) neighborhood to Connaught Place (including asking directions of a police man who then summoned a rickshaw and tried to convince the rickshaw-wallah to charge me double, pay the policeman his Rs. 50 cut on the spot, then take me to what I now undertsand was around the corner.) =
me ready to high-tail it, pride in shreds, to more familiar Bombay.

Was quite sure it was me - that I simply wasn't made of Delhi stuff and it was personal for Delhi to run me out of town.

Today, thank all gods, dawned far better. Strike over I had a thorough round of shopping, organized a car far-afield buyingtomorrow, made peace with my hotel's neighborhood (can now navigate on foot), on very many smiles terms with hotel's front desk staff and got my hands on a map of the city.

So - Delhi 1/CTP 1.

C - looking up at a gecko watching the florescent tube for his dinner, and sign that reads: please dont open porn sites.
Fromacafe we are.

Hotels in my budget

I thought I'd stay a step ahead by booking my Delhi hotel on-line. I also thought it said "wireless". And I thought that, for $17 a night, I might straddle the line between really crummy and not so bad if you squint.

I was right, except about the internet - they seemed stunned I'd ask.

But I know now what my budget level ($10-$20) gets:
Your tv's remote - its buttons worn to unmarked stubs - will be delivered, along with a small towel, a matchbook size bit of soap, and a roll of toilet paper, only after you've checked into your room.
There will not be any actual tourist info at the front desk, even at the counter marked "Tourist Info" - you'll be directed to a "sister concern" around the corner (where I am now, waiting for their tourist info person).
The room service menu will have dribbles on it.
The decor: all marble - everywhere. Smudgy white-ish marble is the linoleum of India.
The bathroom will not inspire you to wash.
The hotel's halls and lobby will be filled with men who seem to be on the hotel payroll but whose jobs are unclear - security? elevator operator? bell boy?
Your room will be so very dismal that - on the upside - even sleepless from another bus-ride, you'll still go straight out into the Delhi streets rather than stay in it.

So - ultimately, cheap hotels are a tourist's friend.
Mine too.

C - again in Delhi