The mundane and the captivating

29th and 30th November 2011

I believe I will firstly have to apologise for the lack of further posts. This time the reasons were not lack of time, but rather a lack of inspiration. This can happen quite often when you start entering into a routine, and our routine has been our main occupation in the last week or even more. We wake up in the morning (first alarm Jess’ very nice iPad relaxing alarm sound), snooze once. 10 minutes later my more mundane alarm clock from my blackberry starts imitating an Asian morning and genuinely fails. This is followed by a very nice little morning schedule of shower, tea, breakfast, English lesson planning, with some electricity problems intervals.  At 10 am the first English lesson starts, normally this class has to cope with either our half sleepy brains or with the lack of security on how we should explain this grammatical form, a writing style or reading comprehension exercise. By the end of the morning we are slightly warmed up even if occasionally touched by a so called “coup de barre” in the post lunch lesson. After 3 o’clock we normally try getting some education on embroidery or just decide to eclipse ourselves in our suite at the last floor of the trust for the rest of the day and in some occasion have the possibility to practice our badminton skills which are not so bad in the end considering the last time we played it.

As much as every human being always wishes some stability, a so called routine to repeat the term, but imagining to have to be closed up in this trust and doing this everyday becomes a quite brutal thought in the mind of two girls having travelled all the way from over there to discover a new place. The new place is transformed in a routine and slightly looses the whole charme it had in the beginning. The first impressions and experiences fade in relation to this routine and an always more oppressing non-liberty starts troubling you as well as a sensation of imprisonment begins worrying your westernized liberty right. Directly the first thought is, we need to go and discover India! When will we be able to go on holiday on our own and experience crazy new things, be put in a new challenging situation, when will we be free to decide what we want to do? Go where we want to go?

It is very strange how we are in a completely new context, but in this new context we have a very stable, almost mundane existence. Everyday we see our students, sometimes they are just exhausting and literally annoying, and the next day you are in love with them and your teaching profession. In the evening you either are correcting dictation or homework, but what you always do is talking to your partner about the horrible or amazing day you just experienced. And I think this full immersion in a routine has in a certain way scared us, a sensation of un-liberty of limitation, of a boring routine, probably exactly the opposite you imagined from entering a completely new environment.

But I am not sure whether we can define what we are experiencing as being simply a dull routine, without being fed by this environment. Or in other words this routine is not as tedious as we are afraid of it to be. It might seem that we are not anymore in this crazy trip to India, but this is replaced by being always more part of this place. People are getting used to you, you are getting used to the people, you start being able to talk about work and you take slowly part in the general gossip which always decorates the work environment. You are always less the visitor and increasingly become a stable person here in Bassi Pathana/Chandigarh. But I believe that one of the main factors which still makes us visitors/tourist someone not totally from here is the language barrier, we are trying very slowly to learn Punjabi, but there is still a lot to learn to be able to form a proper sentence, hence communication remains limited apart with some occasional member of the Trust. And this language barrier will probably haunt us for quite a while. In the same way that we have trouble not being able to simply go around on our own to buy the very important candles which light our evenings or oranges and other fruits for which we always have to ask our host to bring us some. All these little things limit our possibility to be totally emerged in the new culture we are experiencing and make us feel like two hostages of the Trust. I don’t know whether it’s just very hard for us to be dependent on other persons to be able to do something, but through the fact that we can’t simply leave the room and have a walk, we tend to imprison ourselves in our room rather than having the impression to oblige someone to come with us to buy some fabric. I think we have trouble continuously having to ask someone to do something for us, to show us around, to take care of us, as nice as it is it becomes very difficult when you realise that you are genuinely dependent on this niceness of the others.

But all this difficulty to understand where your standing, if you are a tourist or not, whether you have liberty or not, does not eliminate all these little Punjabi inputs you receive everyday, all these little experiences and most of all of these little sensations. You still observe, discover and elaborate so many new things, as for example how a man greets a respectable man by touching his knee. Or have the possibility to explore Nek Chand’s Rock garden in Chandigarh (even if rushed by a mother and her daughter who were our accompanying couple on that day) and very important learn almost daily some new Punjabi words, that you actually quite often forget straight away if you don’t have a notebook and a pen 24/7 to capture them on a piece of paper. You still wake up in the darkness of the morning through the Morning Prayer, you still get up and can observe from the toilet window some wonderful scenes of the Bassi Pathana life and you still get to visit a breathtaking lunch palace (hence a small palace) which has something enchanting even if half abandoned and considerably falling apart as well as being inhabited by 2 families. And last but not least you still have the possibility to taste some incredible dark rum which melts your stomach through its delightfulness and is produced from the sugar canes of the fields you drive by on your way to Chandigarh (Or at least this is my romantic interpretation).

All the best from Bassi Pathana