One more thing you can do with duct tape

Bringing a little rainy-day box with needle and thread, spare buttons, strong shoelace for repairing a broken napsac strap or what not, a little bit of duct tape and a sandwich-baggie sized zip-loc bag turned out to be pretty handy today.


Friday night I noticed these bites on the back of one leg and the weird thing was that the bites were in perfectly straight lines.  And what kind of bug lays down bites in a straight line?.  Guess what you get if you google "bites in straight lines"?  About 10,000 hits about bed bugs.  In hindsight I should have twigged sooner, but the monsoon rains (the few that we've had) brought so many various bugs with them that it was hard to tell what was what.  All weekend long my suspicions got stronger and the pain at one particular spot on my behind at my underwear line got more painful.  Sunday evening when I got back to the dorm after dinner (and after dark when they like to come out) I found some of the little black bastards on my bed and crawling along the base of the wall adjacent.  And here's where the duct tape comes in.  I used the duct tape like fly paper to pick up about 20 or 30 bed bugs in total - mostly from the floor, thank god - and lay the tape flat inside the ziploc bag and sealed it tight tight tight.  The thing is that collecting so many on a few square inches of duct tape made it look like we actually had that density of bugs in the room or on one bed (yuck!!!), which wasn't the case, thank god.   Suffice it to say, it looked gross and packed dramatic punch.  


One convenient thing about the ashram is that there is a medical clinic on the grounds.  So Monday morning I dropped in to have the doctor look at all those bites - especially the more painful ones (near my bum) but it turns out that doctor's appointments aren't very private here, at least not here at the ashram.  I shared the doctor's office with two men, two female high school students, six or seven kindergarden kids and a young woman who was either a nurse or a teacher and whose job was to keep the kids sitting in a neat row on the bed, which they politely did.  The doctor looked at some of my bites but didn't ask me to drop my drawers, which I'm thankful about, but didn't exactly boost my confidence in his examination.  In fact he didn't ask much, just wrote out a scrip and told me to come back in two days.  I showed him the baggie with the bugs but didn't get any reaction out of him.  To be honest, I wasn't sure his eyesight was good enough.  


Realizing I wasn't going to get much more from him, I headed to ashram Reception toting my baggie and showed them.  To be honest, even at this point I wasn't entirely sure what I was dealing with because a lot of the websites I'd been reading said that if I had bed bugs then there would likely be tiny blood spots or stains on the sheets, which I hadn't found.  So I approached Reception a little sheepishly, suggested that they might have bed bugs and showed them the evidence.  "Yes", they said, "we've been telling them," pointing at Tara-Didi's office, "for a long time and they won't believe us."  Sheesh, I thought, thanks a lot.  How many of you have known about this, for how long and just let it go?   "You will have to show Tara-Didi yourself," they told me.  


Background info: Tara-Didi is the Elle-Supremo here.  She runs the place and inspires a combination of love, devotion and obedience from the ashramites.  This is what I found about her on a website, that actually suggested that she was Sri Aurobindo's daughter, which would explain a lot, but I'm not really sure about.  Maybe it was meant figuratively:

• "Thus, when three years after the Mother left her body, Tara came to Delhi in 1976 to be by her father’s side to help him in developing the Delhi Branch of the Ashram, Chacha ji got a person who was not only physically and mentally well-equipped, but who also had the right level of consciousness for the job.  She soon became popular in the Delhi Ashram as Tara Didi.  Under the guidance of Chacha ji, and with the help of her brother, Anil ji, (Tara-Didi) became a powerful instrument of the Mother’s Force for developing the Ashram.  Under Tara Didi’s guidance and with her initiative started the Vocational Training and Teacher Training Courses at Delhi, and the Study Camps, Youth Camps and National Integration Camps at Van Niwas, Nainital.  Tara Didi’s planning and organization has led to the construction of several new buildings on the campus, and with that the expansion of the activities of the Ashram."  

I'd never even said hello or talked to her since May.  Why would she talk to me, afterall?  Why is it that now I have to talk to her about bed bugs?  Why does she even have to deal with bed bugs?  Doesn't she have all that middle-management and staff to deal with mundane and dirty little problems like them?  Anyway, yes, I had to march in and see Tara-Didi like I was going to the principal's office and show her the bugs on the duct tape.  Needless to say, this time, it got a reaction: many expressions of shock, orders over the phone to reception to have maintenance clean out the room right away, assurances (more than one) that this was the first she's ever heard of it (so obviously someone is lying) - and all in English so that I'd be sure to understand that she was taking charge.  And yes, they will move us out of the dorm into double rooms, but only charge us the dorm rate, just come back after work and we'll sort it all out, blah, blah, blah.  

Turns out by 5:30 when I got back from work the afternoon reception staff didn't have a clue about us changing rooms and tried to fob us off on the after-dinner crew.  Eventually, I got a double room key out of them and got us moved over but, needless to say, there's no sign that any cleaning or airing out of mattresses  happened in the dorm.  In fact, they even checked a new Italian or German woman in this afternoon.  Last I saw after dinner, she was still trying to convince reception staff to move her into a double room.  I guess I'll find out at breakfast if she was successful and, if not, speak to the morning staff about it.

So whatever everyone (even me, I think) was saying about the ashram being so clean - take that with a qualification. Just one week to go before getting out of here.  So close, but so far.  Problem is, it is really difficult to get hot water to properly wash the blighters out of your sheets and if you leave everything out in the sun it might get rained on, so dealing with our stuff might be a bit of a problem.


Anyway, no pictures in this blog post.  Tara-Didi kept the baggie of bugs and, in hindsight, I should have photographed it in case the evidence goes missing.  Don't tell anyone, but I still have of them crawling around the floor.    


On a couple of separate notes:
- I've developed a weird little heat rash on my left cheek under my eyeglasses rim.  And it's not even that hot now, but maybe it's the humidity.  I'm absolutely sure, it is unrelated to the bed bugs.  
- some of the ashram men caught a cobra in the ashram grounds on Saturday afternoon, outside the kitchen.  So from now on, I'm going to have to watch my step in the gardens.


Last weekend: Saturday, I was a tourist and poked around Old Delhi and visited the Jama Masjid, a big beautiful (slightly crowded at 1pm) mosque in Old Delhi.  Then I bought an accessory for my mobile phone from Nehru Place Market, so all that research I've been doing about grey market mobile phone stores in Delhi came in handy.  I tried to dedicate Sunday to writing but found it too hot to concentrate.  I guess I was also distracted about my growing beg-bug suspicions.  


I expect the rest of this week will be spent report-writing and getting ready to hit the road on Sunday.  Work at DEF has been great, but I have to admit I'm looking forward to a change of scene.  No offence, anyone who's listening from DEF.  Hopefully, I won't be bringing a family of tiny stowaways with me.

Too much typing. Not enough mangos.

Sorry, this won’t be the most exciting blog post.   

Only a week and a half remaining of my internship (can you believe it?) and my task is to compile all the information I’ve been collecting about mobile phone culture, electronic waste and the associated grey market economies in India into some kind of report that will make sense even though I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.  So for the last few days (and probably the remaining 10) I’ve been pretty much keeping my nose to the grindstone and pounding the keyboard.  Suddenly, this internship thing feels like the end of last term when all my papers were due.  I pounded out more than 2,000 words yesterday and about the same today.  Yikes, how long is this things going to be?!?

I did take last Saturday off to tour Old Delhi and the Chandni Chowk market area and then sample mangos at the Delhi Mango Festival and watch a mango eating contest.  (Okay everybody listen up: nobody can think about the starving children in India just now for this paragraph.)  Have to admit, all those mangos made me a little sick of them for about 48 hours, but I got over it and had some for lunch today.  Dee-lish.

So, with not much more to report, here’s some photos to give you a sense life at the ashram.  I hope I’m not repeating myself.

Here’s Archana in front of a picture of Sri Aurobindo, the founder and namesake of the ashram, in the dining hall.  Archana is an Ashramite in charge of keeping the dining hall spick and span, and since that’s where I do my one hour’s cleaning-duty every morning before breakfast, she’s my boss.    She’s sweet, though, and I like her

And a toothy picture of the Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s right hand in the pursuit of enlightenment through integral yoga that apparently only gets going at Nirvana where old yoga leaves off, or so Meena-Didi told me.  Their images are everywhere.  Sometimes it feels like you are being watched.

A gothic image the Mother.

Here’s my 5 star accommodation: the bed with the blue sheets.   To be sure, I shouldn't complain about the thin mattress.  It's more than most people in India get.  The place is clean and serves three meals a day.  

I don't think we're in the Taj Mahal Hotel anymore, Toto !!

There is a pair of peacocks on the grounds and they had chicks this summer.  One of the chicks was bitten by a mongoose and is lame but we hope it will get better.  Mongoose are famous for being the only animal that can take down a cobra, so how the little chick survived the mongoose attack is beyond me.

This is the view of the ashram building from the grounds where there is a big well and a vegetable garden.

Squash anyone?

 The shrine with some little relic of the Mother’s remains.

One of the nice things about staying at the ashram when we did was that it coincided with a class of young men and women who were here to learn spoken English.  Cathy and I got to know some of them when they started using us to practice their English, or relieve their tedium, as the case may be.  In any event, their course ended about 10 days ago, they all went home and the place seems lonely without them.  This is Anu.  Happily, she returned yesterday to start 3 years of teacher training at the ashram affiliated school.

Anu and somebody with a double chin

And this is Ballav.  He and his brother Madan didn’t take the English course nearly as seriously as Anu and, not surprisingly, didn’t get to move on to teacher training.  They were a lot of fun too but they’ve gone back to Orrissa.  I still get broken-english texts from them but the dialogue is pretty limited since they are a lot better at spoken english than written.  (The photo also shows me after my haircut, since you were asking.)

Ballav

Line up at the dining hall for breakfast and the usual instructions about not wasting food:

The breakfast line

More instructions about sugar

Most of our socializing with Anu, Ballav and the others takes place in the dining hall and you never know who’ll you’ll meet there.  Two nights ago, Meena-Didi, not an ashramite but a semi-regular of some sort, sat down at our table and before long was scolding me for drinking water with my dinner.  (Who knew you shouldn't?)  She went on to tell me ad nauseum about how water dilutes the juices in your stomach, prevents proper digestion of your food and makes you constipated.  No water, therefore, from half an hour before meal time till one hour after.  Since being bunged up is exactly the problem I’ve been having since I arrived I was receptive to her theory.  (Who’d have guessed, eh?  You expect a westerner with a westerner's typically fussy tummy to have the opposite problem in India.)  So I promised to try out her theory for a week and get back to her.  File that under too much information.  Obviously it is a slow news day.

At dinner the next night she sought me out again and talked my ear off about Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga and the fact that he was so enlightened, in body as well as mind, that when he died a light shone out of his forehead and his body didn’t decompose for five days.  I don’t mean to make light of the more sensational details, but sadly, most of what she went on (and on and on) about was lost on me.  Truly, I wish I’d had a tape recorder to capture it.  

Breakfast at the ashram

Idli and sambar with sugary chai. Dee-lish. It isn't always this good (yesterday was custard) but today was above average.

We were moved into a double room for two nights because a class of teenagers were going to be staying in the dorm room. Now that I've had a taste of the relative luxury of privacy, a cupboard, shower and a sit down toilet I'm not sure I want to go back to the dorm.

Today's weather: high 44, low 29 and, you guesses it, dust.

P.S. Typical dinner at the ashram: rice, daal, some kind of curry with lots of potatoes and chappatis. Covers all the major starch groups. But what do you expect for six dollars a day including bed, breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner?