The summer that never ends

Readers in the UK might see the title of this post and think "how lovely". Make no mistake, this is not going to be a lovely post. This is going to be a big old moan about Delhi's climate. Yes, I know I've been silent for two months and it's not good form to return on a whinge. I don't care. The weather in Delhi is to a large degree to blame for my failure to write anything since August, and it's about time I just said it out loud so we can both move on (hopefully, into a nice chilly winter).

I am sick and tired of this summer.

It is now seven months since the temperatures rose to what I would term largely uncomfortable. Admittedly for some of that time I was out of India, thanks to visa complications, but for the sake of rhetoric I will disregard that. Seven months of being perpetually sweaty. Seven months of attempting to sleep to the lullaby of my geriatric AC system or else lying spreadeagled on the bed feeling beads of moisture trickle down my forehead onto the pillow. And seven months of getting gradually, progressively, inexorably, more and more exhausted.

I don't know how people do this every year of their lives. I've never been so tired. OK, my job is fairly responsible, involves a lot of multitasking and a fair amount of travel, but on the other hand I'm not exactly working 18 hours shifts in the Emergency room. I shouldn't come home at the end of the working day with barely enough energy to open my front door. I shouldn't wake up in the morning after 10 hours of sleep feeling like I've had three. Doing something I love (recently, singing with my choir or making a short mostly-Hindi-language film with friends, which involved standing around on roadsides a lot and not understanding anything about the plot) shouldn't feel like an impossible demand designed to wring out the very last drop of enthusiasm from my mangled get-up-and-go. But that's how I feel right now.

Maybe it's not just the weather. Maybe it's Delhi - the traffic, the crowds, the pace of life, and all those other things that you have to deal with here. Maybe I just need a holiday (a proper one, rather than snatched long weekends which, although terrific fun, are not all that effective as a restorative). But my heart says that I just need to spend some time in temperatures well below 30 degrees C for a while.

I've lived through the Delhi summer before, but when I arrived last year it was already mid-June. This year, breaks aside, I've been here for the entire seven months. I think my body's just caved in. I'm not designed to cope with these temperatures for this long. Hell, I don't think anyone is.

So, the last couple of months have been marked by a feebleness unmatched by anything I've experienced since I was hooked up to a dozen medical machines as a 4 month old with meningitis. Since this has coincided with the recruitment of my team (finally!) and the corresponding increase in my workload (I'm sure that's not how it's supposed to go, but it has) it's left me unfit for much in the evenings beyond staring open-mouthed (and quite possibly dribbling) at YouTube videos of 1980s English cooking shows. I wish I was kidding about this.

I exaggerate but a little. To be honest, I've actually spent a lot of the last couple of months thinking about a whole ton of things and how India has changed my perspective on them. I haven't yet reached a sufficient degree of lucidity to blog about them yet. I hope that the cooler weather just around the corner (please, Lord, please) will let me do so. But for as long as summer keeps its gnarly hands grasped round October's throat, my productivity is more or less confined to the working day.

Dark and Dry

If you're reading this outside India, you've probably already heard that we've been having some power problems of late. On Sunday night, somewhere around 2 a.m., I was awoken by the unmistakable sound of my AC unit clunking off with a finality that can only mean "power cut". Believe me, it's not a sound you want to hear on a Delhi summer night.

To be fair, Sunday night was only slightly sauna-like, positively mild by Delhi standards, and anyway I was too dog-tired to have much difficulty getting back to sleep. To my surprise, though, the power was still off when my alarm went off five and a half hours later, and hadn't returned an hour after that when Anil came to pick me up.

Turned out, as I'm sure you're all aware, that I wasn't the only one having problems. In fact, everyone in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh had apparently also lost their juice. The whole northern-central part of the country - millions and millions of people - had been affected by the Great Northern Grid Failure.

Only we can't call it that, because it happened again today, this time in the afternoon. Or at least that's what I'm told, because our office generators did sterling work and we didn't even notice (a colleague spotted it on the BBC news). But it's all quite worrying. India has creaky power infrastructure and supply shortages, but a failure on this scale hasn't been seen for about a decade. So I'm thinking two in one week is not a good indicator of things to come.

As if that wasn't bad enough, it's looking like the future is going to be increasingly dry and hot as well as dark. Delhi is parched right now. Last year, when I got caught in a downpour at Humayun's Tomb, it was the start of a couple of months when it rained almost every day - not constantly, but reliably there was a pretty hefty dumping of water every afternoon during the monsoon. This year, there have been three serious bouts of rainfall that I can think of. Days and days go by during India's famous rainy season without a drop. I'm told the last few monsoons have been late and capricious. This year, the monsoon just hasn't bothered at all.

The rains fail every now and then and it's unpleasant for the city's residents, worse for the farmers who depend on the monsoon for their livelihoods. But there is now serious talk of a permanent change in the monsoon patterns. That's a truly terrifying prospect. One drought can be weathered without significant social change; take away the monsoon, and you lose a key part of what makes this much life possible in such a relatively small amount of space. The majority of India's population is still rural, and the majority of them still farm. And all of them, of course, need to eat.

This week feels like a rather alarming foretaste of things to come, if India's stressed climate does not get some relief. A hotter, drier, hungrier Delhi with paralysing power shortages and ever-more people moving in from the parched fields? It's a scary vision indeed. 

Dust to dust

Delhi is about as hot as it gets right now. Today was 43 degrees and we are set to hit 45 on Friday. This isn't the first time I've experienced these temperatures here - this time last year I was in Delhi looking for a place to live, and when I moved in mid-June it wasn't much cooler. I can't say I enjoy it much, but it's better than Delhi's meanest climate trick, which it saved until the very end of my first year here: the dust storms.

This time of year, as the city burns like a furnace, the broiling air rises rapidly and creates a vacuum into which some pretty strong winds can sweep. When those winds come from the South West, from the deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat, they come laden with dust that can transform a merely uncomfortably hot day into a swirling tornado of misery.

I was in Green Park market when the latest one hit Delhi. It's a surreal experience watching the approach of the storm: a distant blurriness on the horizon transforms into an advancing brown wall, gradually obscuring the buildings until suddenly it's upon you. The air suddenly becomes thick with grit and particles; the dust whips your skin and creeps into your ears and eyes; breathing becomes a matter of sucking a minimal amount in through clenched nostrils; when you clench your teeth you can feel the grit grinding between them. The streets empty as everyone seeks shelter wherever they can. The polluting effects, several newspapers noted, are even worse than those caused by the insane quantity of fireworks let off during Diwali (which says a lot about just how insane that quantity of fireworks is). The dust gathers in great swathes on any horizontal surface, which dance and morph into new patterns as the wind sweeps over them. Vehicles, balconies and pavements are caked in the stuff. It becomes inescapable.

Photo taken from The Hindu website

This isn't my first time dealing with this; Seoul's infamous "yellow dust" comes from the deserts of Mongolia at a similar time each year and blankets much of Eastern China, Korea and Japan in choking squalls. Maybe it's just the luxury of distance, but I don't recall the experience being quite so unpleasant as Delhi's dust storms though.

Apparently these storms are set to get worse as desertification increases across Asia, including North West India as well as Mongolia. Already the storms - rather than the dust - are deadly; India's often-sub standard infrastructure is vulnerable to severe weather and buildings frequently collapse under the high winds. But the health effects of the dust itself are also becoming severe, with rising cases of asthma and other respiratory conditions.

There's not much that can be done about the storms themselves, which will continue for as long as the deserts do. But it seems that the job of cleaning up the dust is currently something that is beyond the city authorities. Outside of the squeaky-clean, embassy-heavy areas around India Gate and Chanakyapuri, Delhi's streets are constantly dusty and dirty, and walking for any length of time here will leave you needing a shower. I suspect that the May storms are the origins of a lot of this dust (though the non-stop construction work must also play a significant role). Contrary to popular belief, despite the crazy traffic, vehicular emissions represent only a small percentage of the total particulate matter in the city. 

For the most part I haven't found Delhi's pollution to be half as bad as you might suspect, but the figures speak for themselves. The city has made successful initiatives on the environment in the past (particularly its much-ballyhooed initiative to LPG fuel. But it's already too big to manage easily, and continues to grow at a breakneck pace; and there seems to be more pressures for new malls and new roads than for environmental improvements. Delhi's dust is probably not going anywhere any time soon.

Oh, so THIS is a monsoon

I thought I had got the hang of this monsoon business. In Delhi, you know when the rains are coming. Almost always in the afternoon, and preceded by hours of heavy, humid air that makes your clothes stick to your body after thirty seconds outside. The rains come in pounding torrents but are usually over within an hour. Not very pleasant, but manageable - you just have to learn to recognise the signs that they are on their way and make sure you have suitable shelter handy.

Mumbai, it turns out, is different. It started raining on my way from the airport on Wednesday night, and until last night it didn't stop once. I don't mean this in the English sense, whereby "it didn't stop raining for days" means "actually there were quite long periods when it wasn't raining, but the sky was so grey and miserable that it might as well have been, and anyway moaning about English weather is so much more satisfying if you can use pithy but not entirely accurate descriptors." I mean that it didn't stop raining. A constant downpour emptied itself over the city at rates ranging from moderate to torrential from 7 pm on Wednesday until around 9 pm Saturday night.

Now I've done a fair amount of independent travel and I'm not normally the sort to let something as inconsequential as weather stop me from exploring a new city. True to form, I set off on Saturday morning to see Mumbai. I'd been vaguely planning to go out to Elephanta Island, but even I had the sense to see that that probably wasn't going to be much fun on this trip. So instead I decided to explore the Fort and Colaba areas (i.e. the hub of the colonial-era city) and figured I could hop between cafes and galleries if the rain got too much.

I did get a chance to admire some of the truly gorgeous gothic and art deco buildings, which face each other across the open space of the Oval Maidan like two opposing architectural armies. I did make it to the Gateway of India (which I think is a more impressive sight than its Delhi rival, India Gate). But I couldn't withstand the onslaught. I lasted an hour and a half before, utterly soaked through and miserable, I took refuge in the national museum of modern art. After an hour squelching around looking at the exhibits (most of which, I am afraid to say, failed to rouse me from my sodden gloom) I retreated back to the hotel and spent most of the afternoon surfing the internet and reading, broken only by a quick trip during a realtively dry period to buy some new shoes and socks.

This morning I awoke to a blissful silence, the hammering on the roof of the hotel having stopped. Perhaps my final day in Mumbai would actually involve some enjoyable tourist activities! Delighted, I leapt into the shower. Unfortunately, when I turned the shower off the noise of cascading water continued. A quick peek out of the window confirmed Mumbai had only been toying with me: the rains were back, and harder than ever. That was three hours ago and they're not showing any inclination to go away.

So I am sat in my hotel's less-than-great cafe, and will remain here until 3 pm when I shall relocate to the airport (earlier than I need to, but what the hell). I don't think I've ever experienced such a comprehensive washout of a weekend (and I grew up in Manchester). Lesson learned - if you're coming to Mumbai for work between July and September, don't bother hanging around for the weekend...

At least I've got my health

Or most of it, anyway. Truth to tell I've been feeling pretty rotten this week, even more than when I wrote this post. I'm constantly fatigued and my brain feels like it's made of mushy peas. This has come at the same time as our scheduled strategic planning process at work, when myself and my colleague Rajat are holed up in my flat plotting over my dining room table. Strategic planning is important but, my word, it can be tedious at times. So this is not the best time for simple mental processes to feel like they are more taxing than studying for my finals.

I'm still blaming the weather. Apparently the US is currently experiencing a "punishing heatwave" that has killed 22 people right now. The conditions sound very similar to Delhi (mid to high 30s and very high humidity, which the human body is not well equipped to deal with). So I guess it's not all that surprising that I'm not feeling in the peak of condition right now. However, I still have a job to do (not to mention a blog to maintain) so I am just going to have to find the energy from somewhere, ideally without resorting to stimulant drugs.

Anyway, while we're on the subject of health, here's something else I'm having to get used to: the possibility of contracting a tropical nasty. Delhi is not too bad health-wise but one thing I do have to watch out for is mosquitoes. It's not that the city is teeming with them, but the ones that are around have a significant chance of carrying some deeply unpleasant bugs in their evil little saliva glands.

Malaria is mainly a rural problem in India, but the cities do not escape. At least as worrying (and probably more so, given the descriptions of the frankly horrific-sounding symptomps) are Dengue fever and Chikungunya, one of which is nicknamed "breakbone fever" for the horrific pain it inflicts, while the name of the other translates as "that which bends up", after the contorted positions assumed by the poor buggers who pick it up. (This emphasis on pain in the bone and joints made me panic a bit at the touch of back pain I have been experiencing this week, but I'm pretty sure it has more to do with the horrible chair I sit on in the office.)

I really, really don't want to get any of these diseases. The chances are I won't - at least in the case of Chikungunya, which records a few dozen victims in the city each year. Not bad for a city of 17 million. Malaria cases number a few hundred each year. Dengue, on the other hand, is much more prevalent, with around 6,000 victims last year.

Still not too bad odds, but enough to make you more than usually worried about the mozzies. This has also been drummed into me by my landlord, who is positively convinced that I am certain to succumb to one of these horrible diseases. He's not totally without cause. There is an open drain running through the middle of Defence Colony, which is currently in the process of being covered (when finished it is due to become a large and hopefully lovely park). For the moment, though, it's not just a breeding ground for mosquitoes, it's a breeding ground that is constantly being disrupted and disturbed by dozens of working men.

So there are plenty of mozzies around. The little buggers have also got every angle covered. While malaria mosquitoes attack during the night, dengue and chikungunya-carrying ones favour daytime snacking. So you can never relax. Long trousers, liberal use of insect repellent, and regular spraying of one's flat are the order of the day. Despite these precautions, I've picked up three or four bites since I moved here.

The most evil life form known to man?

Most of the cases of these diseases, of course, tend to be found in slums of the city where conditions are poor and people can't afford the kind of precautions I am able to take. So with a bit of care I should make it through my time here without enduring weeks of horrendous pain (horn honking-induced headaches excepted).

Meanwhile, I just have to learn to live with this kind of threat. My Indian colleagues find it amusing that I'm unable to endure a mosquito in the office - it has to be squished as soon as I'm aware of its presence. Which goes to show, of course, that statistically they are really not that much of a threat, and most people from Delhi barely give them a second's thought.

On the other hand, you never know. So I'll keep smearing on that repellent for the foreseeable future.

Things that make me go "bah"

OK, I've pretty much been in a bad mood for the last three days. Right now, all the daily irritations of life in Delhi, usually a source of wry amusement and material for this blog, seem to have been put there just to annoy me. The taxi and tuk tuk drivers are all getting lost on purpose, and quoting extra-high fares specifically aimed at me personally. The power cuts out just to piss me off. My internet connection spends all day whizzing with energy and then collapses just as I try to use it. The mosquitoes have set up a "get Chris" campaign. It's all aimed at me.

Actually my mood is really about the weather. After a lovely couple of days that saw temperatures beginning with a 2 and some really refreshing monsoon downpours, the Delhi climate has come back with a vengeance and bitten me on the bottom like you wouldn't believe. We are back up in the mid-30s, only now the humidity has risen into the 80-90 percent range. And it's putting me in a foul temper.

No matter where you go or how long you stay in the aircon, you can always feel a layer of sweat between your skin and your clothes. The perceived effort / task size ratio goes through the roof. Sleeping becomes patchy at best. I'm constantly sluggish, irritable and annoyed with myself for not dealing with it better.

However, what's really guaranteed to lead to a Grumpy Sims is combining these joyful conditions with the willful denial of my lunch. I was at an education conference today, where lunch was slated from 1 till 2. I was already hungry at 11.30, so concentrating on the presentations was getting more and more difficult (especially as there were ten of them...ouch). But then they over-ran.

Now, we Brits might be thought of generally as stand-on-ceremony types, but I venture to say that if you're at a conference in the UK and the pre-lunchtime session overruns even before questions, they'll cancel the questions, tell people to nobble the speakers over a vol-au-vent if they can, and release everyone to get some scran. This is because they know that if they don't, in most cases they have about 20 minutes before outright rebellion happens and people just start helping themselves to the food anyway.

It's different here. At 1.15 they had questions. And then they had more questions. And then some more, which predictably were less questions and more long-winded statements about particular bugbears (that's universal - never been to a conference without one of those). And then there were the concluding remarks to be made. And then the vote of thanks (where everyone must be thanked individually and have their esteemed and honoured status affirmed).

I have to admit that by this point my love for India was at a fairly low ebb. However, at five to two we were finally unleashed upon the buffet (which was right behind us just to torture us, and which was delicious). After stuffing our faces, my colleague and I managed to speak to a few useful people, which almost made up for the previous two hours of misery. However, my grumpiness was not going away any time soon. So I decided to skip the subsequent session, which was delayed by half an hour to allow for food, and snuck off with my laptop to the coffee shop, where in theory I could get any food I wanted, straight away.

And where the aircon was on the blink.

Bah.

Two sides of Delhi: Humayun's tomb and Nizamuddin

True to my word, I did touristy things for the first time today. After a few days of cooler weather the thermometer had bounced back up again, so it took me a while to get going. But gosh, I'm glad I did.

So first up: Humayun's tomb. It dates from the mid-16th century and sits in a frankly gorgeous setting, surrounded by parkland in an area that appears to be one vast Mughal mausoleum, so many beautiful tombs and monuments are dotted around the landscape. It's very central in the city but the peace in the gardens is just lovely. And very welcome for those of us who occasionally feel a little worn down by Delhi's urban clamour.

Before I got there, though, I experienced my first serious brush with Delhi's monsoon rains. I'd walked to the tomb from the metro and was feeling hot, sweaty and a bit headachy, so a ferocious downpour was in theory highly welcome. Unfortunately I also had my Kindle, mobile phone and camera in my bag, whose waterproofness I decidedly do not trust.

Happily the rains came just as I got to the ticket booth. This was not particularly effective as a shelter however, as the rains were more or less horizontal, and the ticket booth was not exactly designed to be waterproof either:

So there I was, stuck under a corrugated iron roof between two concrete walls open on three sides, with the Delhi monsoon unleashing its full rage upon me. Admittedly the views were lovely:

...or at least they were until a whole load of other visitors to the tomb showed up, and the views were replaced with a nose-to-armpit acquaintanceship with some very damp Delhiwallas:

Others, though, thought the rains were the best thing that had happened to them. Ever!

I defy you not to smile at these pictures.

Anyway, eventually the rains wore off and we squelched out to carry on into the tomb complex. I won't bore you with tons of photos of the tomb, but suffice to say that when I emerged from the West gate and saw it for the first time, I was so stunned I nearly walked straight into this:

Which would, I am sure, have been highly amusing for my fellow visitors but made relatively little difference to my already soggy state.

Anyway, back to the tomb. This is quite simply one of the most perfectly beautiful buildings I've ever seen. It's known as a precursor to the Taj Mahal, which I've yet to go to, and all I can say is if this is the rehearsal I can't wait to see the show. My photos don't to it justice, but I have to post at least one:

I spent a very happy couple of hours mooching around the building and admiring the gorgeous layout of the grounds, the wonderful use of sunlight in the interior, the patterning of the walls...and of course the peace! I have to admit that my expectations were not all that high, having been very disappointed by my visit to the Red Fort on my first visit to India back in January (it just felt a bit depressing, mainly thanks to the "improvements" imposed upon it by, yup, the British) but Humayun's tomb blew me away. My first real taste of the richness of India's architectural heritage.

A very different side to India lies across the road from the tomb. Searching vaguely for something to eat, I found myself in Nizamuddin - a district that exists because of the community of the faithful that grew up around the tomb of the Sufi saint who gave the area its name. This is Delhi at its most confusing, fascinating and intimidating, and I have to admit I was a bit overwhelmed - though not as much as the two Belgian girls hovering near the entrance from the main road who at first asked me to escort them in and then three minutes later, having decided I wasn't sufficient protection, chickened out and scurried back the way they had come.

The reason for this nervousness? There was not a single woman in sight: dozens of muslim men, a sea of white skullcaps, taqiyah skullcaps, milling through a warren of densely packed streets through fruit stands, butchers, rubbish heaps, random goats, flower stalls and incense-stick-choppers. And more flies than I have ever seen anywhere. I didn't take many photos, feeling a bit apprehensive about how it would be received, so this one doesn't really convey the atmosphere all that well. But it's the best I've got:

As far as I could see there was absolutely no hostility towards us, but I could understand the girls' nervousness (especially since they were not exactly dressed in burkas). But I ploughed on into the melee.

I am at a loss as to how to describe Nizamuddin. Suffice to say I am resolved to go back one day when I'm less hot, tired and sweaty and take my time over it a bit more. Today it was just sensory overload - so many sights, smells, sounds and sensations that my brain couldn't take it all in. India feels very foreign to me, of course, but never so much as here. Just the idea of the place - a suburb of a capital city that does not only originate in a religious movement, but that continues to revolve around it nearly 2000 years later - I find extraordinary.

I drifted through the alleyways - at one point almost managing to blunder my way into a shrine without removing my shoes, though in my defence it looked pretty much like an arcade of shops from the entrance - and let it all wash over me. I'm normally painfully shy around street traders but I managed to buy some tomatoes from this chap (though I think he probably ripped me off):

I didn't feel unsafe - just very, very foreign. When I emerged onto the main road again, it was 4.30 pm and I was feeling a little bit peaky (overdoing it in the sun, Chris - you know you shouldn't do this) so I hopped in a tuk tuk back home. And got under a long, long, cold, cold shower.

So, two places visited, two places marked down for return visits: not bad going. And there is so much more to see here in a city that has been built, lost and reincarnated around a dozen times. I can't wait.

On moving slowly and buying clothes

I tend to have two speeds: stationary and manic. It's been my general approach to life to spend half of it bumming around and half of it being the proverbial blue-arsed fly, and while it might not be conducive to controlling stress levels, it's generally got me through.

Well, I'm going to learn how to do things differently. It's increasingly clear that until the weather cools down a bit my speed setting is going to be stuck on slow. Walking down the street of necessity becomes a gentle amble, and I still get to my destination dripping. Lists of tasks that need to be done are stripped down to the most basic priorities, because the running-around-doing-30-things-in-a-day trick just isn't going to work here.

On the one hand this is a bit frustrating. Suddenly I have to plan properly, because last minute whirlwinds of activity are out of the question. On the other hand, having to move at a slow pace does a funny thing to you: it kind of makes things seem less urgent, and so less stress-inducing. Maybe I will come back in a few years doing everything on Indian time (in which case God help you if we have an appointment).

Anyway, today took me (eventually) to SouthEx to check out those clothing stores. I didn't pack very cleverly - I have tons of shirts but only a few pairs of trousers, the rest being en route and due to arrive some time in August - and I was in desperate need of a couple of new suits.

I always find buying clothes overseas interesting, because it says a lot about the local culture. In Seoul it was impossible to get the shop assistants to stop shoving items of clothing under your nose every five seconds when you were trying to have a quiet browse, which resulted in me walking out more often than not. In Holland it was sometimes hard to get them to acknowledge your existence at all.

In Delhi, a small gaggle of them appear as soon as you enter the shop and then follow you doggedly around, rarely making any sound and only occasionally showing any interest in the clothes on display. Once in a while one will offer commentary on some item you have picked up, such as "this is trousers". Eventually when you have decided to buy something they will spring into action, usually consisting of one of them taking the item from you and giving it to another of them, while another goes and gets a bag and gives it to another, and a fifth runs to the checkout to tell a sixth how much it is...you get the idea.

I exaggerate slightly. The truth is that the service is rather good, if delivered by three times more people than necessary. And in most of the higher end places a senior bod will appear, usually with perfect English, who will provide just the right mixture of helpfulness, expertise and reticence to make the whole experience quite pleasurable. And everyone is so damn nice it's quite impossible to get annoyed even when they are being useless.

Plus they don't get annoyed about ridiculously sweaty westerners trying on their nice clean suits, for which I could only be extremely grateful.

Arriving

So I finally made it to India. I've been here for two and a half days now, which has been just enough time to get an internet connection sorted and start to find my way around Defence Colony, the little, green corner of Delhi I now call home.

The beginning was not auspicious. Having slept dreadfully on the plane, I arrived at about 10.30 on Friday morning with a strong desire to check into a five star hotel, have a long bath and book a masseur. Unfortunately I had instead to go to my new apartment, which was likely to be scantily furnished if at all and which would certainly lack a masseur. However, before I could do so, I had to find it.

The Delhi street address system resembles the Seoul street address system in the following way: they are both insane. As in Seoul, Delhi neighbourhoods are divided up into sub-units, within which houses are numbered. As in Seoul, there is no discernable logic in the way in which this is done, meaning that if you don't happen to know exactly where unit C413 is, you could spend a good hour driving round before you hit upon it.

My driver did not know where unit C413 was.

Another thing about India is that if you ask someone for directions, they will give them to you whether or not they have the first clue where the place is.

My driver asked for directions about 15 times.

Altogether I was quite proud of myself for staying calm and using the time to think about how I would amusingly convey the experience in the present blog post. We made it eventually, and I was happy to find that my apartment did in fact have furniture (albeit with a touch of the 1970s about it) and functioning bathrooms (albeit with one mysteriously missing toilet seat).

It's hot. Seriously hot. It's pre-monsoon here, so the height of summer has yet to be broken by the rains (though we have had a couple of storms which in the UK would be thought significant). The problem with heat is that it slows you down, which when you have a thousand and one things to do on arriving in a new country is a bit of a problem. I've developed a pattern over the last couple of days of doing two or three things, then stopping for a juice or a coffee. Fortunately there is an excellent market near me with a couple of nice air conditioned cafes that don't object to sweaty westerners visiting every couple of hours.

So far I've done pretty well in terms of getting essentials sorted. Groceries are expensive, at least in Defence Colony, so I need to work out a better place to go shopping. And I haven't quite figure out how to attach the toilet seat (which eventually turned up) to the toilet. On the plus side, I don't need to worry about ironing, because there is a man with an ironing board who stands on the corner by my local park and does shirts for 5 rupees each (about 7 p).

Words can't really express how glad I am that this man exists.

The rhythms of Indian life are so totally different. I doubt I will ever get used to the existence of "servants" or be comfortable with the way in which such relationships are conducted here. I already knew this of course, and knew I would have to put aside my liberal prejudices and accept certain roles to which I am not accustomed. But this is going to take practice. When I leave my flat, for instance, it's quite clear that I am not to latch the gate behind me. This is one of the many diverse duties of Santosh, who is for want of a better term the security guard. Invariably as I emerge from the gate, Santosh is already trotting towards it to close it behind me. When I insisted on closing it myself my reward was a look made up of equal parts reproach and hurt.

I have not closed it myself again since.

Anyway, I don't want to start all this off with an enormous post so I will save the rest of the long, rambling discussion I have in mind for future entries. Love to all back home...

Chris