My Quality of Life

Sorry I haven't updated recently folks. In truth not that much was going on and I didn't know what to write. I go to work every morning at 8:30 and I come home at 6. It's a long day in the office, with lots of reading and drinking of chai, and then a quiet evening at home.

One interesting bit, though. Two days ago I got in a fight (not a fight of fists, a fight of words) with a tempo driver. After he drove me all the way back to my stop, he tried to claim that the ride would cost me 60 rupees! Not this again. His reasoning was that I had "reserved" the tempo, in that nobody else had ridden with me. There were a few flaws in his logic. First, I hadn't ridden alone. He seemed to have forgotten that the tempo was full when I got in and people had just gotten out over the course of the ride. Second, I told him "no reserve" when I was the only one remaining, to make my point clear. We ended up getting into a very strange English/Hindi fight that involved a lot of gesticulating. It turned out nobody spoke English so I had very few allies. But, the one thing I have learned over this past week and a half is that I need to stick up for myself in these situations, or else I will just get cheated.

Needless to say, the police got involved. Seriously. But everything in the end was okay. I tried to pay him 20 rupees as a compromise, but he got offended, gave me my money back and drove off. All in a day's work people, all in a day's work.

Now for the really exciting part. GABRIELLE HAS ARRIVED!

Incredibly and inexplicably since Gabrielle has arrived my quality of life has improved drastically. It's not only that now there is somebody else to speak English too...though this is great. Other things have changed. I'm not sure if she is magical or if it just a coincidence. Let me count the ways my life is better:

1) I have a mattress now.
2) I have an extra blanket now. (This is key...it's freezing in the morning)
3) The maid has finally come and threw out the trash! She also scrubbed the floors!

The last way my life has improved is due to our (mine and Gabrielle's) own efforts. After Gabrielle saw the cockroach infestation that I had been living with, she voted that we get rid of them. In all seriousness, if she had never come I probably would have lived with it for two months. But! With her bug-killing energies we bought a big can of cockroach killer and had at them for a good hour.

At the beginning we felt a little bad for killing so many. Our sprays were hesitant. Our motions were feeble. However, maybe it was the fumes...or just the power that the can imparted...but soon we were hooting and hollering, egging each other on in our deadly quest! We lunged from one cupboard to another, the burden of death no longer weighing our movements down. Each of our sprays hit their mark with deadly accuracy and the roaches seemed to fall from the walls not from the poison but from fear. Unfortunately, this spree was not to last. As we started coughing from the fumes and considered the irony of committing suicide as well as roach-icide, we thought it best to leave the kitchen be for awhile and let things settle a bit.

In a half hour, we opened the kitchen door once again to survey the damage. The countertop, floor and cupboards were littered with hundreds of cockroach carcasses. Some legs flailing still amidst pools of poisonous liquid. I had never seen this many cockroaches in my life, let alone this many dead ones.

The kitchen is a lot nicer now.