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Day 11, 12
India was closed yesterday. Literally, closed. The government got up and decided India needs to save some money, so they closed everything. People just accepted this and everything stopped. How does that save money? Surely spending money is the key. Then we experienced our first series of power cuts, which came regularly for several hours. The worst bit is the air con and fans switch off making the heat almost
unbearable. I lay in bed most of the day, nursing poor old Lungy with the last of the Night Nurse and my inhalers. I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 on the laptop for the millionth time and finished White Tiger- not quite the literary masterpiece I was promised.
Feeling a bit bored today. India is a funny old place. Today I saw a woman in full saree sitting on a camel, on a Blackberry. She was on the Blackberry, not the camel - although it wouldn't surprise me.
This place is a weird mix of cows and wi-fi, rickshaws and rent boys, poverty and pollution, motorbikes and goats, dust and desert, cell phones and slums. Children appear to either be immaculately dressed in uniforms attending private schools, or are naked from the waist down (a lot of grown men too, which isn't so nice) begging on roundabouts. And seem to always be only about 10 yards away from each other, some living under tarpaulin in an open plan 'community', others coming from large gated villas.
The monsoon arrived late yesterday to relieve us of the terrible heat, and Fern and Clover joined in the local rain dancing - we all did. It was a joy to feel hot rain in this desert.
Today Clover is learning to sew with some local women and children. Fern is fuming because she didn't have the confidence to ask for a needle and thread so is sitting beside me just now shouting 'I am not fuming'. She is though.
Am finding the diet a little carb heavy (rice, bread) and worry I will be the only Westerner to return from India two stone heavier. We negotiated the local supermarket where I managed to buy some plums, bananas, coffee and mango flavoured cornflakes (Kelloggs!) which we are looking forward to with some anxiety. The shop was full of whitening lotions which I thought was really sad - all the Indian women want to be
lighter, white is beautiful and the lighter the better. And yet in the UK we all want to be a little darker. I wonder what they would make of the Scottish sunbed shop phenomenon. I bought some cream anyway to stop my moustache getting any darker. My hyper-pigmentation is all over the place and am starting to look like Rufus.
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