Survival

December 22, 2005

Today we went out to look at apartments. Having decided against lugging two small children around for days of apartment or flat hunting (as they say here) my husband was good enough to do a first pass over the prior two days and short list a few candidates. The driver was to take the kids and myself to meet my husband, the real estate agent, and the office manager from his work in Bandra. Our hotel is located in Lower Parel, in central Mumbai. The distance is not supposed to be too great but I'm finding that going anywhere in Mumbai takes at least 30 minutes.

Ten minutes in the air-conditioned car stuck in traffic and both kids were knocked out. What is it about cars and kids falling asleep? We used to take the kids for a drive in the car when they couldn't sleep when we were in the U.S. and ironically it seems to work here too. However, a major difference is that in the U.S. it was the steady rolling of the car that put them to sleep while here they seemed to have found some rythmn in the ever-present possibility of a collision, the constant stopping and starting, and horns blaring in the traffic around them.

As I looked outside there seemed to be constant action. Curtains that served like doors on the makeshift shanties that sprang up from a mish mash of cloth and steel and brick and whatever else would withstand the elements waved open in the wind revealing block after block of women mixing "who knows what" in steel vessels, men squatting in circles chatting earnestly to one another, and small children with tangled hair climbing over rickety walls in search of something. Although not much to speak of, these shelters were certainly bustling with activity.

Ironically, we cut short our "short list" of apartments since it was taking so long...the traffic, picking up keys, feeding hungry children, getting in and out of two cars all seemed to take so long. At the end of the day, we say only 6 of the 11 places that we planned to see and would have to go out again tomorrow.

I am sure if others were to watch us getting in and out of the car and walking through apartments, and discussing what we liked and didn't they would think that we were busy too. However at the end of the day I felt that we didn't get as much done today as we were used to accomplishing in the U.S. Can't figure out if it was the traffic, the pace or what? I couldn't help but wonder if many of the people that we passed during our drive accomplished what they wanted to. But as I compared their "homes" to the "homes" that we were considering I realized that it is all relative. Mere survival was an accomplishment for them.