Into India

When we left North Dakota, spring was just getting genuinely under way. Day time highs of 55F/13C, nightly lows around 32F/0C. A crisp and delightful menu of seasonable spring weather. Stepping off our Lufthansa flight into the Indian night, I was instantly swaddled in a sultry humidity so dense I could taste it. Being a couple days out of a shower as I was, this did not provide for a pleasant sensation. However, since I didn't have another plane to catch it was not enough to prevent me from smiling. We made our way off the jet with the exhausted masses. The baggage claim was blessedly near by. For the first time in my life I grabbed one of those carts for people with too much luggage because we had way too much luggage. Our largest bags were among the very first that came out on the conveyor. Yay! Then we waited for our other check bags while I took in the glitz and splendor of the Mumbai airport.Twenty minutes later I was getting a little anxious when our two smallest check bags came out very last onto the conveyor. All is well that ends well. Now the dreaded ordeal of customs.

Except it wasn't. My wife explained to me that when Mumbai is your final destination all your check bags are checked by customs before you get them. Instead of going through what i expected of customs, we just went to an express line, ran our carry-ons thru a scanner, and explained to one of the agents that we would not be running our cats thru the scanner. He looked at us blankly, looked at the cats blankly, shrugged, and waved us through. By now it was about 2AM local time, so his giveadamn may have run its course for the day.

I had my messenger bag and my cat cross slung like suburbanite bandoliers. I had my baggage cart loaded five feet high. We were both sweaty and disgusting. We had arrived.

...

INTO INDIA

If you've read this far you you are probably tired of hearing about traveling with cats. In fact, if you're reading someone's expat blog you probably want to know what the destination is like. That commences... now.

That first day in Mumbai I was sans wife, sans Hindi, and sans cell phone.

My wife was at work. My attempts at Hindi had been directed through the app world via Duolingo and Drops. Duolingo is obsessed with teaching the Devanagari alphabet. I would roughly approximate this to a native Arabic speaker trying to learn English by sitting down with an English dictionary. It can be done, but would necessarily make one hate their adopted language. Drops is obsessed with teaching you how to say "spoon" and "wind" and other terms equally useless for hailing a taxi or buying a mango. My cellphone situation is a can of worms whose explanation can wait. I was, in short, freewheeling like 1992.

My only serious task for the day was to register the cats with the local branch of the Animal Quarantine and Certification Center. I know I said no more cat stuff - I'll keep it to a bare minimum. Other than that I had few pressing issues of the sort that I could actually address. We sprang out of bed at 7ishAM with all the zeal of people that had completed a transcontinental transplant about 3.5 hours earlier. I assume we ate something, Kelly called our driver, and off we went to drop her off.

Having a driver sounds pretty cool, right? Presidents and diplomats have drivers. Wal-Mart heirs have drivers. When I say we have a driver, that ain't what I'm talking about, at all.

It's difficult to imagine what traffic looks like in Mumbai unless you were the type of kid that ever pried the top off an ant hill. The roads have lines on them, it's true. These serve precisely the same purpose as as painted toenails and fancy neckties - strictly decorative. Traffic to the Western eye is the unbridled chaos of 10,000 people trying to go down a thoroughfare designed for 200. People pop in and out of "lanes" and weave and cut each other off all within literal inches of one another. And they honk as though the sound of the horn is the fuel source that makes it all go. Somehow, by seeming divine intervention, it all works with very few accidents and better flow than L.A. could pull off on its best day.

All of this is simply to say that having a driver is not some swanky luxury for the filthy rich. It is a basic requirement to get from point A to point B in one piece. Learning to drive here, to my eyes at least, is a full degree of magnitude more difficult than learning the language. Besides, one thing that is abundantly clear in India is that labor is so cheap it's practically free. Whatever The Job is paying for our driver, I know it isn't much.

It is true that our drivers probably cost a bit more than average in Mumbai. This is because they speak English. You may have read from various sources that English is the official language of India, or that "most people speak some English." This is a grand prank perpetuated on us by our forerunners abroad; a sort of hazing ritual for new tourists and expats. Many people do speak a language that bears enough similarity to English to possibly be classified as an English dialect, but even that is decidedly generous. In their defense, the locals here probably do think they speak English. But it will take you exactly three exchanges with a native Mumbaikar to understand what I mean.

The challenges are manifold. First, Indian English has British roots. Being an American, I frequently struggle to converse with the folk of Great Britain simply due to idiom and phrasing. On top of that you get various Indian formalisms. It's similar to the way the Japanese have a gradient of formalisms for referring to elders and authority figures. Third, there is sometimes seemingly bizarre word selection. Fourth, in Hindi questions are defined by the specific words and grammar used. This means that Indians often do not understand the use of inflection in English that signals that a question is being asked. Everything just sounds like a statement. And of course last is the notorious Indian accent. Even when everything else lines up properly, the totality of the mangling applied by the Indian accent can make literally anything incomprehensible. And I suppose I should include the sidenote that Indians will fully refuse to recognize a request to speak more slowly or clearly. Consider the following illustration from an encounter with an agent of the Indian government, with a four year degree and ostensibly some years of intensive English study:

Me: Hello, my name is Fulton Fortner. I'm here to drop off the paperwork for my cats. (Offers folder full of documents.)

Government Agent: Myplisask yogur nimsar.

Me: I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch what you said.

GA: Myplisask yogur nimsar.

Me: I Am Sorry, I Speak Very Little Hindi. Kya aap angríze bólti hai(n)? (This is the latinized representation of the Hindi question, "Do you speak English?" )

GA (angrily): Ya ya! Myplisask yogur nimsar!

Me: ... ... ...I'm sorry, could you say that more slowly, please?

GA (rolls eyes): Myplisask yogur nimsar!

At this point a timid young assistant sidled over from where he'd been working a few meters away. Blessedly, he had half the accent of his boss.

Assistant: Aikskoos me suhr, she is askink, "May I Please Ask Your Good Name Sir."

He delivered this quotation with such effort at good pronunciation that a gossamer sheen of perspiration materialized upon his brow. His superior rolled her eyes superciliously again, saying, "Yesyesyes." Never mind that I had answered this question before it was ask-stated. This interaction proceeded along these lines for another 45 minutes. It was a true delight.

This is essentially the degree of proficiency I'm talking about when I say our drivers speak better English than most. So far the only people I've met with full and comprehensible command of English fall into two categories. These are my wife's co-workers at The Job and the beggars and scammers in all tourist areas. More on those little stinkers later.

I had decided to engage an instructor and learn Hindi months before we arrived. With what I know now, I feel the same motivation to learn the language that the starving jackal feels to attempt an attack on dangerously large and powerful prey.

I quickly found that this is a long way from the norm for expats here, regardless of their origin. When I tell a fellow expat that I'm learning Hindi they look at me as though they don't quite get the joke I am making. When I respond to Indian taxi drivers, retail workers, servers or bartenders in Hindi they literally gape at me wide eyed for a full second and half giggle before they compose themselves to respond. This entire dynamic is baffling to me. Why in the blessed name of Lord Ganesha would anyone want to isolate themselves by living for years in a place where they cannot understand what the holy hell anyone is saying??

That's not for me. Especially considering that many Indians that do speak intelligible English suddenly can't quite understand you when you are asking for something they don't quite feel like doing. I like very much to know what the hell is going on.