by Sharell Cook
The apartment started looking bright and cheery, and just seeing all my books on the shelves was comforting. I began noticing and appreciating the little things: a sparrow on the window ledge, the way the apartment lit up in the midday sun, the quiet from not being located on a main road, the groovy chandelier and the smooth feeling of the Indian granite benches in the kitchen. Back home, I would have overlooked these little things in pursuit of the bigger, perfect picture.
The thought of meeting Aryan's family terrified me, but it wasn't something that I could avoid for long. They'd graciously given me time to settle in but were very eager to meet. I was petrified! I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to say or do, and I so badly wanted them to like me. There were no western customs and manners to fall back on in such a situation, plus there was the further complication of Aryan's parents not speaking English. Aryan's idea of moral support was to warn me that his dad was scary, didn't talk much and that he probably wouldn't even say anything to me.
I was alarmed, but greatly curious about the people who had made Aryan the loving man who had captured my heart.
I dressed in a salwaar kameez for the occasion. Aryan's eldest sister, Maliha, and her husband came in their car to take us to the family apartment. Maliha was tiny with huge, sparkly brown eyes. I felt like an odd, white giant standing next to her. Despite Aryan's reassurances that she spoke English, Maliha addressed me in Hindi. I struggled to find any words in reply. We were both as unsure and as nervous as each other. Her English had failed her, just as my Hindi had failed me.
I sat trembling with unease in the car, wondering what was in store. Even though it took well over an hour to travel to central Mumbai where Aryan's parents lived, I wished the journey would never end.
‘Baitho,’ Aryan's mum invited me to sit after we arrived. She was much taller than I expected, and wore her long dark hair tied back in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her delicately woven Orissa-style sari, in shades of blue, purple and pink, caught my eye.
‘Yeh sari sundar hai (This sari is beautiful),’ I complimented her.
She smiled and laughed happily. Aryan's dad also greeted me and smiled. He was diminutive, but with a body made strong from work. Could this really be the scary man Aryan referred to? I found it hard to believe. He definitely didn't act that way towards me. Perhaps Aryan felt the adversity between father and son that came from his inappropriate career choice and failure to live up to family expectations.
The fact that I spoke minimal Hindi saved me from the direct inquisition I would have otherwise encountered. When meeting the parents for the first time in India, it's usual for all manner of questions to be asked. Instead, much to my relief, Aryan's mum brought out the family photo albums. The pictures of the latest family wedding were so bright and colourful, capturing the joy of the occasion perfectly.
Aryan's second eldest sister, Amita, who was tall like his mother, displayed none of the shyness I was feeling. She chatted animatedly with me in perfect English about what was going on.
Later, we sat together on the floor in the living room to eat, while Aryan's mum waited on us. It was a delicious home-cooked dinner of chicken curry, rice and daal. We ate with our fingers. I couldn't help wishing that Aryan's mum would join us. But as is common in India, she only had her meal once everyone else was satisfied. It was her honour to make sure everyone was well fed and content. After dessert, Aryan's dad spoke to me.
‘Aur kuch chahiye? (You want something more?)’
The question was unexpected. I froze.
‘No, no, nahin chahiye. Main khatam ho chuki (It's not needed, I've already finished),’ I stammered.
‘It went great. You handled everything so well. Even my dad was smiling, and he hardly ever smiles. And see, my mum is taller than my dad, just like us,’ Aryan said afterwards.
Comfortingly, Aryan's family reminded me of an Indian version of my own. Being from the country, my parents were genuine, simple and creative. Aryan clearly got his sunny nature and lack of pretension from his family. It was obvious how much love he'd received as a child and how secure that had made him feel.
Yet, he was very different from them. They were very traditional where he wasn't. I could see why he'd resisted his mother's attempts to arrange his marriage. His life experiences were worlds apart from a good, middle-class Indian girl of the same caste, especially one from the village. What would they have in common?
The day that Aryan's mum announced she was coming to see our apartment threw me into a major panic. As is the Indian way, she only informed us a couple of hours before she intended to arrive. Aryan wasn't even going to be there as he had some important errands to attend to.
‘Can't you tell her to come another day? I'm not ready to be alone with your family,’ I pleaded with him.
I felt so unprepared. I knew she wanted to find out how well I'd made the apartment into a home, and more importantly, how well I was looking after her son.
‘It's impossible to tell family not to visit, especially parents,’ Aryan insisted. There was no option but to deal with it as best as I could. I was terrified. All my fears about not being good enough and not being Indian surfaced. And how was I going to talk to her? My unreliable Hindi deteriorated rapidly when I was nervous.
I quickly tidied the apartment as much as possible before the knock on the door. My heart skipped a beat and I took a deep breath before opening the door. Aryan's mum was standing there with Maliha.
‘Andar aaiye (Please come inside),’ I said. A broad smile, which didn't reflect my inner turmoil, was plastered on my face.
‘Machi (Fish),’ his mum said, handing me a container. She'd kindly brought me some fish, marinated in her special homemade masala (spices) and ready to cook.
The inspection of the apartment commenced. It started with a thorough look at the contents of the kitchen cupboards and refrigerator, before a tour of the rest of the rooms. Aryan's mum then turned and spoke to me in a rapid string of Hindi. As I'd dreaded, I didn't understand a word. I stood there blinking dumbly as my mind tried to process the words.
‘Cookbooks. She's asking if you have Indian cookbooks,’ Maliha came to my rescue in English. She did speak quite a bit of English after all, it seemed, now that she was feeling more comfortable around me.
Relieved, I rushed into the kitchen and gathered a suitable collection of cookbooks.
‘Arre wah! (Oh, wow, great!)’ Aryan's mum was impressed.
Having gained some approval, I started to relax. I felt surprisingly comfortable in her presence. She wasn't at all intimidating. In fact, she joked a lot and was very funny. She merrily told me how she'd learned to say ‘come here’ in English. But then a friend had asked her what if she needed to tell someone to ‘go there’. Her solution? She'd go there first and then tell them to come! Somehow, I managed to understand what she was saying.
By the time she left, I was sad to see her go. I knew the fear I felt about Aryan's family wasn't justified. Even though they didn't expect me to be Indian and weren't at all critical of me, I was hard on myself and judged myself more harshly than others did.
I'd been in Mumbai for almost two months when the universe rewarded me for being brave enough to leave my comfort zone. It showed me, via an unexpected and unusual email from a stranger, the gateway to my big dream. The sender was an Australian who wrote for the same website I did. She didn't get in touch merely to compliment me; she told me to apply for a position with an organisation that was part of the New York Times Company. They wanted someone to write and manage their Indian travel website. Preferably someone who was living in India, and had experience writing for the web and using content management systems.
I was stunned. A stranger had gone to the effort of writing to me to tell me about a job she thought I might be interested in! Not only was it a job that would suit me perfectly, it was one that combined everything that I was aspiring to: my own website and Indian travel. This job had both. And I'd be able to work from home.<
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The application process looked intense. The company wanted professional travel writers with published clips. They intended to select five candidates to take part in a two-week online preparation program, the outcome of which would determine who'd get the job. I'd have to learn about the company's editorial standards, prepare a sample website, write sample articles and blog posts, and publish them on the sample site using the company's templates and publishing tools. An editor would evaluate my work and decide who to hire at the end of the process.
For some reason, I was oddly undeterred. I sent in my application and was accepted into the program in a matter of hours. I would start in a week. Meanwhile, the company sent me hundreds of pages of instructions about how to use their publishing tools and what they wanted me to write. Hotel reviews, restaurant reviews, walking tours, lists of attractions, photo galleries – all of it original.
Madly, I sorted through all my travel photos, roamed around Mumbai compiling interesting walking tours and racked my brains to create appealing articles about the places I'd visited, stayed and eaten in. Twice, I worked through the night. Once, I worked continuously for over 24 hours with barely any breaks. I didn't even have a desk, so I sat with my laptop in a beanbag on the floor, papers spread out all around me. I'd never worked so hard or put so much effort into anything in my life. Somehow, from somewhere, energy kept flowing into me to allow me to continue.
When I received the email telling me that I'd been selected for the position, it felt like two years of wandering around India and questioning myself had culminated in something worthwhile. As the Dream Giver had promised, I'd been rewarded for my courage, and in a way greater than I could ever have imagined. I could hardly believe that I had been so blessed. I felt like weeping tears of relief and joy. I told my parents the good news, and they shared my excitement.
What I later discovered astounded me even more. The company usually gets hundreds of applicants for its positions, especially in the popular travel channel. And I was the person who got the job – I couldn't help feeling like the universe had manifested a miracle. I may have attracted the opportunity into my life with my thoughts and actions. But, like a genie in the fairytale creation process, a greater force had conspired to deliver it to me. There was no other way to view what had happened. I hadn't even been searching for a job; I was humbled and touched.
The event was indisputable proof that it really was possible to create my own reality. It was one thing to read about the power of attraction, but another to have it take place in my life. All I needed to do was persist and have faith in the power of the universe. The job couldn't have come at a better time. It provided us with a much needed source of income and kept me focused when the wearisome trials of daily life in Mumbai became too much.
Aryan had decided to prove to his family that he was responsible by working with his sister Maliha and her husband in their manufacturing business. It was expanding, and they were importing a computer-operated wire-cut machine to make engineering parts out of metal. Aryan would learn how to operate the machine, oversee the workshop and visit clients. The machine took months longer to arrive than expected. In the meantime, he did random DJ gigs when openings came up. There was no point looking for a permanent job as no one knew exactly when the machine would arrive. I also didn't want him to be out working late in clubs every night, while I was alone in our apartment.
Pieces were being moved around, and it was a period of great transition. I couldn't wait for some quiet, and for when things would settle down. But first, I would have to adjust to life in Maximum City, a city that seemed to have minimum middle ground. A city that's both addictive and repulsive at the same time. A city that takes so much, and yet gives so much.
Maximum City Mayhem
MUCH to my dismay, the first thing to be taken away was our ceiling fans. A few months after we'd moved into our apartment, our landlord decided to repossess them for his new home. There was little we could do. Our rental agreement didn't include a list of fixtures and fittings, plus the landlord held our security deposit. Property rental laws are archaic in India, and full of pitfalls for tenant and landlord alike. While it's difficult for a landlord to remove an overstaying tenant, it can be as challenging to get the security deposit back from a landlord. Even if contracts are legally enforceable, it can take years or even decades for this to happen. A landlord has the right to set the amount of the security deposit payable by the tenant. In Mumbai it's often equal to the total rent for the whole eleven-month term of the agreement. The rent on our apartment was 9000 ($220) rupees a month, and the security deposit a whopping 100,000 rupees ($2500). We'd also paid the standard one month's rental to the real estate broker for finding the apartment.
‘I'll come and get the fans on Monday,’ the landlord informed us. Monday came and went, and there was no sign of him. On Wednesday evening, he phoned again. ‘I'll come and get the fans tomorrow. Call me after you've removed them and got them ready.’
It prompted familiar feelings of indignation. ‘Not only has he not bothered to turn up when expected, he wants us to do his work for him and at short notice too,’ I muttered. Surely these things shouldn't surprise me anymore. Where was my Indian commonsense?
Aryan just wanted to get the inevitable job done as soon as possible. At ten-thirty that night, we were surrounded by disassembled ceiling fans partially hanging from the ceiling and spread all over the floor. Dirt and dust sullied the tiles that I had freshly washed that day. I'd have to do it all again tomorrow. At least at that moment, I was spared from knowing that there wouldn't be any water to clean with.
The water supply was the second thing to be taken away. The watchman delivered the bad news to us the next morning when he knocked on our door.
‘The water supply will be turned off in half an hour,’ he informed us. Apparently some repair works were needed and the outage would only last two hours. Ten hours later, at 8 pm, the water supply was finally restored.
The next day, it was turned off again. The same routine continued for four days. Little did we know that it was the beginning of the end of our 24-hour water supply. The water mysteriously continued to go off at irregular and unannounced intervals. Various excuses were given by the watchmen, who were custodians of the water supply in the apartment complex. The tanks were being cleaned, a pipeline was being repaired, the municipal council wasn't supplying enough water.
Eventually, the water supply settled into a regular pattern. We got water for a few hours three times a day, and never any to flush the toilet. The water supply to the toilet had been completely cut off.
Having a 24-hour water supply was something I'd taken for granted all my life. I found this new way of living hard to fathom, especially in India's most progressive city. My whole day had to be planned around the water supply, and we had to fill large buckets full of water to pour down the toilet. I was even more perplexed that the landlord didn't seem particularly concerned about the problem.
I sent him disgruntled emails. ‘We're paying you rent on an apartment that's supposed to have 24-hour water supply, and we're barely getting six hours of water a day. Please investigate.’
One evening, he turned up at our apartment unannounced.
‘The municipal council isn't supplying enough water to the apartment complex,’ he declared. ‘The council has been diverting water away to new developments in the area. This is because the housing society registration formalities are yet to be completed, and the apartment complex doesn't have its own pipeline.’
The booming number of new real-estate developments in Mumbai had put further pressure on Mumbai's already scarce water supply. As a result, the municipal council didn't provide new apartment complexes with full water supply until their housing societies were properly registered. Never mind that the apartment complex had been built almost five years ago. The application for registration was still sitting in a notoriously inefficient council office somewhere.
‘Once all the formali
ties are complete, the paani ka problem will be solved forever. It won't take much longer, just a few more months,’ the landlord reassured us.
My tenuous Indian commonsense told me not to believe him.
‘Anyway, you should be thankful you have a water storage tank. It's an excellent solution. Your apartment is the only apartment in the whole complex to have one,’ the landlord enthused.
Our apartment did indeed have an overhead water storage tank, which could be directly filled from the water supply, when it was available, just by turning on a tap. However, its only outlet was a small tap in the far corner of the bathroom. It wasn't much use for washing dishes in the kitchen or taking a shower. I'd assumed that every apartment in our complex had one of those water storage tanks.
‘Really? Why doesn't everyone install a water storage tank?’ I asked.
‘Oh, they're not allowed to. Overhead water storage tanks are not permitted in the apartments. I used to be a member of the housing society and I actively implemented a rule that banned the installation of overhead water storage tanks. But I installed a tank in my own apartment,’ he concluded proudly.
‘So how do the other residents store water?’ I wanted to know.
‘They have to put it in big drums and buckets.’
The outcome of the landlord's actions was predictable.
‘An angry mob of residents gathered at the door of this apartment. They hammered on the door and threatened to beat me up. However, in reality, they couldn't do anything. I was a member of the housing society and had all the power,’ he gloated.
I couldn't believe not only the unfairness and hypocrisy of the situation, but also the landlord's self-interest. He wasn't at all concerned that he'd deprived all the residents of an important convenience. Instead, he was supremely satisfied that he had something that they didn't.
For decades, Mumbai had been a magnet to Indians from all over the country who were seeking a better life. Her arms wide open, she'd generously welcome anyone who had a dream and find a place for them in her fold, even if it was merely a patch of pavement. She adjusted. But overburdened, she now harshly forced them to fend for themselves, in any way they could. One person's loss was always another's gain.