I also visited the post office for the first time—one of the closest things to our buildings, yet I hadn’t seen it there before—the sign is in Hindi. Outside the door and on the steps sat bags of mail…I stepped over them at 4:00 today and was the only person needing help. Lucky me. After asking to be acknowledged…I am learning that’s how it works here…my big envelopes got weighed and the price was written on each. Then I asked about buying some extra stamps to put on letters to the US. And for some reason the guy then just walked away. A few people walked around me, past me, and the other guy behind the counter, who I could now see—as the first had asked me to step around--, had put his bare foot up on his desk and was scrubbing it with something. A strange scene as I stood there waiting, trying to seem nonchalant. I also noticed that there was an electric ring plugged into the wall just to the right of my feet and an old pot sat on top with a tarry substance inside. I wasn’t sure what it was until the guy came back. I asked again about individual stamps. It’s so hard to know if people understand my weird English… After some rough exchange of individual words and gestures I learned that he expected me to decide how heavy my letters were going to be. I guessed and then asked for 20 rupee stamps. After a good deal of shuffling about and flipping of pages in a stamp book and counting and recounting of stamps he produced five 20 rupee stamps and insisted that I put them immediately in my wallet so that they didn’t get mixed up with the ones that were counted out to go on my packages. He gestured that I put them on. I licked the back of the first set and they stuck but the second didn’t. I showed him and he slammed some paste down and back through the window—indicating that I should go back to the other side of the window to stick these one. I struggled to get paste out of the nearly empty bottle, got the stamps affixed and handed them back. (The tarry substance must close bigger packages). Now, let’s see how long it takes from them to arrive.
I finally got my ID today…no hassle, it was there in a stack of 20 or so. After five separate inquiries over the course of 3 weeks it somehow finally appeared—signed by the Chief Security officer, officially stamped and laminated. I had to sign next to the other photo I’d given them. So my face is in the JNU ID book for all eternity. I’m not sure now what I’ll need it for—but still it’s fun to have.
And then I headed over to the office of someone we met through Norbert’s friend Jorg’s wife. Rohan is a friendly, energetic, environmental historian who’s spent a number of years in the US (including a longish stint at Berkeley), and I was lured over to his office with the promise of a cup of coffee—as good at Peets! He’s got it figured out—the coffee making in Delhi, I mean. He’s found a very good coffee distributor, Devan’s, and he gave me their card. There he also buys filters. He has one of those handy plastic cones that you set on top of a mug and then set a filter in it. Then he heats the water in the electric kettle that is standard in every office and home all over Britain and India. And he even offered me a dark chocolate to go along with it, “since it was my first visit.” What a treat. The only coffee I have had so far has been the occasional visit to Café Coffee Day (we’ve made it about once a week to the Vasant Arcade) and the Nescafe that I bought to try to relieve my coffee urge—which so did not work. So this was such a treat!
I sat in his office and was entertained by people coming and going. His good friend Sangeeta came in and sat down to chat. She’s just gotten a position there and is getting set up. It was interesting to hear about her frustration dealing with Indian ways—so much time “wasted” she said just chasing down people to get the apartment she’s been given (subsidized and paid for with her housing allowance) on campus “liveable.” We tried to describe what we each would consider “liveable,” as Rohan assumed that in the US if you moved into an apartment it would be “cleaned up.” I tried to explain how university housing wouldn’t necessarily be that nice—perhaps needing a paint job and new floor covering. But they seemed to think that what I’d consider “liveable” and what they would were quite different…that American’s have much higher expectations. Probably true…but hard to articulate without seeing the “unliveable” place she’s dealing with. She talked about it needing tile…but it’s hard for me to picture what that actually means. And she said that bathroom needed work, but I couldn’t quite tell what that meant either. What would she think of the bathroom we have here? The toilet leaks and there’s not really a proper shower, but it's adequate...see pic below.
She’s also trying to get her office painted because she just can’t stand the institutional yellow—and the lighting is so bad she just can’t work there. I have complained about the same things in many US university offices. While I was there she and Rohan went over to meet a painter who gave her an estimate that they both thought was robbery. They have a plan to “negotiate” with him…something Rohan thinks Indians are particularly good at…since they are constantly negotiating with service people. Americans are nervous about dealing with such things, especially when we know that the people who serve are making a miniscule wage. Here the poor are right in front of you all the time, so you learn to “negotiate” as he says. It’s true, in the US the poor are pretty invisible—shunted off in bad neighborhoods and bad schools. We often forget that they exist. Here ignoring or denying poverty is completely impossible.
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