Back home again. This last week in Hyderabad did cement this city as our first true home of this trip abroad. We developed somewhat of a routine here, waking up naturally every morning, which means I would wake up first and start reading a couple Indian newspapers on-line and less often the NY Times. Madhavi would finally roll out of bed at like 10AM - I'm teasing her but she'd often stay up later at night reading some wonderful literary masterpiece like "Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai or "My Name is Red" by Orhan Pamluk while I'd pretend to read this terribly written, unrelentingly opaque, randomly purchased South Asian history book for 2 minutes before just konking out, so our schedules were off a bit. By the time we got our acts together and showered, etc., Dad would come home from work for lunch, which consisted of Mom's fantastic cuisine and relaxed family conversation. When this was over, it was 2PM and we'd figure out something to do with our 4 hours of remaining sunlight.
This is when we'd sometimes feel like we should do some medical work or something contributory, and in fact as many of you know this was our plan initially. However, with Madh's whole family here (a rare event) and many planned activities, including the village trips, it was difficult to see how we could do anything useful in so short a time. As we discovered from previous experiences, you really need a few continuous weeks somewhere to make any kind of impact- on the world or even on oneself. Do you notice that I'm trying to justify our occasionally lazy time here in India? This is a peculiarly American phenomenon, I think. The Europeans that we met in China never asked WHY we're travelling, just WHERE and for HOW MANY months or years. Don't worry, though, the above sentiments and concern about the environmental impact of repeated jet travel notwithstanding, we're not having too much of a problem with guilt.
On a couple days I used these daylight hours to visit a nearby poor working class neighborhood. The narrow streets were lined with small concrete homes, which often had a short wall between the street and their tiny courtyards where brightly colored saris hung high on long sloping clothes lines; and interspersed were tiny shops, the kind that are ubiquitous in Asia, Latin America, and Africa but never seen in the West. Of course this is India, so filling in the street scene were cows, goats, dogs (no cats in this country, by the way), and people and more people everywhere. Standing out the most were the young children. They’re mostly too short and too thin due to some degree of malnutrition, so to guess their age just add 3-4 years to their apparent age to a Western eye. But that’s not what you really notice – what you see is radiant energy and expressive joy. They are not weighed down by junk food or video games, and they run around chasing each other playing games that require nothing more than four limbs and healthy vocal cords. What they have in abundance are friends and family – this is in contrast to many urban poor in the U.S. This is not to minimize the scourge of poverty at all, but when poverty is not desperate (like that of the very sad innumerable street beggars) maybe it is not always miserable.
These little excursions are also a photographer’s dream – Indians kids LOVE being photographed and will almost be offended if you’re walking around with a camera and don’t capture them on the little screen. So I shot plenty of pics in this neighborhood – I’ll be going back to distribute prints to them. One time Madhavi came and the kids were particularly wild and exuberant, jumping all over us. A few teenagers among the crowd were playing cricket -
THE ONLY sport of discussion in this country – so I took advantage of my moment of fame to take a couple swings of the bat. The boy bounced the tennis ball my way slowly like I was an old man or something and I crushed it – it would have gone out of the neighborhood if a stupid electrical wire hadn’t impede it’s meteoric trajectory. Fortunately for the kids that meant that they got another shot at this old man. So the boy reared back and hurled a blazing fastball at me – only because I wasn’t expecting it I whiffed and whiffed badly. For some reason Madhavi decided that this was the moment she’d photograph! We spent our other days doing various things like bowling and going to cafes with Madh’s cousins, trying the famous Hyderbadi biryani (not as good as Mom’s version), visiting some local parks. For the latter I of course forced Madh’s cousins to stop one day to buy a Frisbee. So Madh’s cousins Vikram and Vineeth and I tossed the Frisbee around and, predictably, all the kids in the park stopped what they were doing and ran up to watch, chase down errant throws and try their hand at it. It was a blast to just observe their reckless enthusiasm.
So it was a lot of unplanned time spent getting to know family, enjoying the moment, with nothing like sightseeing even on the radar screen. On the 25th we boarded our flight to Delhi. The pace was about to change.
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