(I am) Packing Up

In just over three weeks we will be leaving India and heading back home to Britain. Rod and I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to sort out everything needed to make the move back as painless as possible. One of the things we had to arrange was a moving and packing company to get all our stuff back home. You might think that wouldn't be so hard...but, if it was that easy, I wouldn't be writing about it here, would I?

On our first attempt we called a number of moving and packing companies we found in a local version of the Yellow Pages. Two of them had quoted for our move from Gurgaon to Hauz Khas last year. One turned up, walked around the house looking knowledgably at the furniture we would be taking back, made a few notes on his pad and never got back to us. The other turned up, walked around the house, went away, came back the next day with another guy, took some photos of our furniture and went away again. When Rod called a couple of days later asking for their quote, both guys came back to our house with a scrap of paper. They said it would cost us 160 rupees a kilogram to send our stuff by air, or $70 USD a cubic metre to send it by sea. But they didn't know how many cubic metres the stuff they'd photographed was, nor had any idea how many kilograms our stuff weighed. So, a really, really comprehensive quote... Now, as I do not work for a moving and packing company I do not assess housefuls daily, so I didn't know either. But I was going to hazard a guess that with two sofas, a double bed and mattress, a dining table, six chairs, a chest of drawers and assorted boxes all made from Sheesham (Indian Rosewood, really heavy) and a longarm quilting machine and frame, as well as clothes etc, we wouldn't be sending our stuff by air!

Thankfully, our third moving company had a representative who did assess housefuls daily. Maybe not daily, but often enough to be able to look at each piece of furniture to work out how much space we would need in our container. And Peggy got back to us with a quote, typed, on headed paper without us asking for it. But the only problem was, even though we had had three companies visit, we only had one quote. So we tried again...

This time, we asked for recommendations on an expat internet group. Peggy's name came up, along with another two companies. Joy, joy, joy, more appointments...

A guy came, but he wanted to tell us how he'd arranged lots of moves for people at the British Embassy. We told him we weren't with the British Embassy, and weren't using the British government to pay for our move back, so we didn't want an "Embassy quote". The money's got to come from our pockets, which even in these troubled times, are not as deep as Gordon Brown's (or whoever is running the country right now!). And could we tell him how much we wanted for the RO water filter?

A lady came. I say came, she rang to say she was on her way, could we give her directions. We did. Then she rang back, telling us what landmarks she could see around her, and could we give her directions from there. We did. And then she called back, describing another set of landmarks, further from our house than the first set of landmarks, and asking could we give her some more directions. We did. Didn't think this boded well. If a moving and packing company can't find our home in Delhi, can we trust that they might be able to get our stuff to us in England? Anyway, she found her way here eventually. I say she found her way here, only after Rod told her to stop driving and wait for him and Thalia to walk to where she was so she could follow them. Anyway, once she got here she was very nice and efficient, but I couldn't help feeling maybe her company would do better if they invested in a map. Not a world map, just an Eicher map of Delhi...

Unsurprisingly, we went with Peggy. She found us first time, was on time. She has this air of efficiency about her. She's tall and imposing, speaks fluent German, English and Hindi. I have this feeling she won't let anything go wrong on her watch. Please God, let me be right this time!

A Stitch in (Indian) Time...

I might have brought the only longarm quilting machine into India, but the country is teeming with sewing machines. There must be five tailors shops in my local market alone, turning out everything from Western suits for the gentleman to cholis, the little blouse worn with a sari, for the ladies.

The model in the photo has really taken to his part. Suits you, Sir!

Not all the sewing machines are in fancy establishments like this. Outside, on the pavement, between the darbar cooking curry in a huge metal pot and an electrical repair shop, there’s a man sitting on the sidewalk with his sewing machine. All day long he hems dupattas, long, wide, scarf-like lengths of fabric, which ladies wear with their Indian outfits. The dupatta is a draped across the front of your blouse with the ends flowing behind your back (to prevent glimpses of cleavage), as a shawl if it turns chilly (it does happen, just not often), to cover your head if you’re going to a temple or holy place, or to protect your hairstyle when you’re on the back of your boyfriend’s motorbike. Unless they’re in a sari (which at 6 yards of fabric is a dress and dupatta all rolled into one), a lady’s not dressed without her dupatta. Personally, I can’t see the point of draping a yard and a half of extra fabric over me when it’s 45 degrees outside. Guess that makes me no lady! Anyway, the guy with his sewing machine is busy. He doesn’t even need to stop when the power goes off. His machine is powered by foot.

With all these industrious sewers around me, tailoring entire garments for sums you’d pay to have a broken zip replaced back home, I decided to treat myself. I’d brought a blouse with me I really liked, and wanted to have it remade in silk. I took it to Ramesh, whose sewing machines were hidden away from the front of the shop, so they could have even been some of those new fangled electric ones! Ramesh took my fabric and the shirt I wanted copied and told me to come back in a week.

So more than a week later, because Indians’ sense of time is “flexible”, I returned to the shop. Ramesh had stepped out, so the man who sat behind the counter decided to help me. I don’t know what his official job title was. Every time I’d ever been in the shop I’d never seen him do anything but sit behind the counter. I showed him my invoice, so he could get my blouse. He asked me to describe it. He barely spoke English. Having an invoice, with an invoice number, didn’t mean he knew where to find my new silk shirt. So not exactly a very efficient booking in system. In a pile of clothes behind the counter, I spotted an offcut of my fabric. I showed it to him, and using it he trawled through a pile of plastic bags under the counter to find the garment to match. That scrap of fabric could have been purchased by anyone! Maybe I had bought it, maybe I spotted it for the first time and liked it. He’d have no way of knowing…

But where was my original blouse? I found it at the bottom of a heap of other clothes, presumably other customers’ sample garments. I know my original blouse was only polyester, but it was still pretty. It didn’t really deserve that kind of treatment! I made him go and find the rest of the left over silk. No idea what I’ll do with it, but being silk it was expensive (by local standards at least), and it was mine. I’d paid for it. Eventually Ramesh returned and gathered together everything that belonged to me. I gave him my 500 rupees (£7, $11USD – double the usual price because working with silk takes twice as long) and left.

As a longarm quilter, the whole experience amused me. People bring me things that are precious to them – their quilt tops - to turn into finished quilts. I pin a label to them to identify who the quilt belongs to and hang them in a wardrobe, safe and clean, until I get to work on them. And once I’ve finished the quilting, the top and any extra backing and batting, get placed together in a bag with a copy of the invoice and hung back in the wardrobe until I can return it. I know at all times where the quilts are, and if I dropped dead, Rod would know who to contact to get them back to their rightful owners. It’s a fairly simple system, and I bet most longarmers use similar ones. Unfortunately Ramesh doesn’t use a system anywhere near as complicated as this one. And before we diss him too much, he’s one of the better ones. Heaven help the next lady who can’t spot a scrap of her fabric in the pile in the corner…

My Favourite Oxymoron

Yes, it's Fresh Cream. In a tetra-pak. Needs no refrigeration till opened. Best before 120 days from manufacture. I've no more to add...

Darwin Award

The other day Rod and I saw a serious potential candidate for a Darwin Award, the honour bestowed on those who "do a service to humanity by removing themselves from the gene pool". We were driving along the NH8, the motorway between Gurgaon and Delhi, where the official speed limit is 50mph, but the actual speed you do depends upon whether you're in a car, tractor or rickshaw with a two stroke engine. Some of the vehicles which use the NH8 only dream of a top speed of 50mph, many more see the speed limit as something which only applies to other drivers, not them. But it was not the speed at which this potential Darwin candidate was travelling that caught our attention...

In the lane next to us was a guy on a motorbike. Maybe he'd rushed his morning routine, because he had failed to do his stretches in the comfort of his own home. So he was doing them on the motorway, while he was riding his motorbike. First he reached his right arm around his back, placing the back of his hand on his opposite hip, while his left hand held the bike handle. Then he changed sides, repeating with his left hand. While we thought this was a little odd, at least he had one hand on the controls. Which he did not, when he joined both hands behind his back and opened out the front of his shoulders by stretching back. We thought we'd seen everything, but then he took his phone out of his pocket and started texting. While riding a motorbike at 50mph on the motorway...

As Raju was driving our car and Rod was a backseat passenger, he tried to take a picture with his telephone. I don't have a problem with passengers using their phones, I just object when it's the one allegedly in control of the fast moving vehicle who does it. Our Darwin candidate spotted Rod and took his helmet off, possibly so he would look more dashing in the photo. While riding a motorbike at 50mph on the motorway... Rod was unwilling to take the shot, because he didn't think it appropriate to do anything that might encourage this guy to attain his Darwin Award sooner rather than later. But it's only a matter of time...

The Hole Story

On Wednesday, a group of men came along and dug a bloody big hole outside our house. This hole prevented us from using our parking bay, which is a problem, because parking's very hard to come by in Hauz Khas. The workers piled the contents of the hole on the side of the road, which isn't very wide, so that was a problem too. No one informed us they were going to dig the hole, and no one told us why they needed to. They dug the hole, and went home.


On Thursday, three men turned up at half past one in the afternoon. One man got in the hole and dug a bit more, and the other two sat in the shade under the frangipani tree and watched him. They all left at half past three. We still couldn't park in our parking bay, and the road was still being encroached on.


On Friday, no one turned up to work at all. The only change to the hole outside our house was that someone had thrown some rubbish into it.


On Saturday, there was a change to the status quo. Someone drove their car into the hole. I'm sure he didn't mean to...

Notice the barricades, orange cones and lights warning passersby of the presence of the hole. Don't worry if you can't see them, the driver didn't see them either, or the hole for that matter! Rod says he wasn't too pleased...

He used his tyre jack to try to lever the car up, but that wouldn't do it. A couple of labourers who were working on the building opposite eventually came over, jumped into the hole and tried to push the car up and out. That didn't work. Someone found something resembling a concrete paving slab and half wedged that in the hole. All in all, it took them about an hour to eventually get the car unstuck.

For us there was a positive aspect to the car falling down the hole, though I don't suppose the driver would see it that way. Very soon after the car had been lifted up up and away, the workers came back, laid a cable and refilled the hole. I can't say it's been done to a terribly high standard, because it seems there's at least a third of the hole debris still on our drive. I suppose we'll find out tomorrow when we try to drive off in the car how well they've tamped it all down!

Just like Snap, We've Got The Power!

Well, now at any rate. It's not been a great week for electricity in sunny South Delhi. Every summer, the power companies fail to make enough electricity to run luxury items like air conditioners, fridges and ceiling lights. And as we're currently experiencing the warmest start to the year since records began, you wouldn't be wrong in assuming the usual electricity under supply is...proceeding as usual.

For the last couple of weeks we've been having a few power outages a day, generally for an hour or less. It's almost routine now. Everyone has a torch, and we have a portable battery back up light in the dining room in the centre of the house. The light plugs into a wall socket, charging up. When the supply to the socket fails, the light immediately turns on. You wouldn't want to read a newspaper by it, but it's plenty bright enough to see where the furniture is when all the other lights have failed. I've even cooked dinner by it.

Friday at 3.40, when we got home from collecting the kids from school, the power was off. We have no idea when it actually went off, it was on when Rod and I left the house at 12.30. Our emergency light was faithfully glowing when we opened the door. The power didn't come back on until 6.10. I quickly cooked dinner. The stove and oven are gas, so are unaffected by the electricity supply. But the cook likes to use lights to see what she's doing. Luckily the family doesn't need a lot of light to eat, as the power went off again 35 minutes later. After that we retired into the front room. We have a car battery in the corner of our living room, which works in the same way as our back up light. It keeps the television/DVD/Tata Sky box/modem/telephone going until the power company restores power to our area. So we watched Kung Fu Panda in the dark. Then, because there's not much you can do when you can't turn any lights on, Keir went to bed, Thalia went to use the last 24 minutes of her laptop's battery, Rod watched some television and I had a bath. You don't actually need electricity to have a bath, not when the water tank is on the roof and it's been another 43 degree day. What comes out of the cold water tap could be taken to court for false advertising. Rod gave me the battery back up light, but within moments it forgot it was in a beige bathroom, and thought it was in a nightclub, flashing on and off like a strobe. The power had been off for so long our battery backup light had died. So not Duracell then. We switched to candles. You don't want the heat, but you need to not fall over the furniture. It's a dilemma. Power was eventually restored at 10.10, when I blew out the candles and turned on all the AC's.

Saturday was a much better day. Maybe the power company was trying to make up for the previous day's incredibly long outage... but we weren't surprised when we were plunged into the dark at 10.10 that evening. But after 10 minutes or so, Rod realised the glow he could see coming through the glass door from the dining room was a golden tone, not the cold light from the back up. The power had failed, but only in the living room and Thalia's bedroom. We checked the fuse box by the door. Everything, including the geckoes, was in order. This is not the first time we have lost power to half the house. Just before the kids and I went to Australia last summer exactly the same thing happened. An electrician came and fixed one of the main supplies into the house by using two pieces of bare wire to replace a fuse because he did not have any fuse wire. In case any long time readers thought at the time, "I wonder how long it will be before that catches fire", about 10 and a half months.

So it was dark outside, after the burnt wires stopped glowing, and it was dark in half our house. Too late to do anything about it, we moved Thalia into Keir's room and watched DVDs in our room where the AC still worked.

In the morning Rod reported the fault to Mr Gupta who lives on the top floor. He's in charge of building maintenance and repair. Mr Gupta said he'd send an electrician in half an hour. Three and a half hours later, Rod called him to check when the electrician would arrive. Mr Gupta hadn't called one yet, he'd been busy. So Rod told him he would go and fix the fault himself. And he told him, falsely, that he would have to turn off the electricity to the entire building, including Mr Gupta's apartment, while he did this. That seemed to get his attention, because within three minutes Mr Gupta was standing next to Rod. Rod pulled the fuses to our floor and the top floor (but not the first floor, because it wasn't their job to get the electrician). Mr Gupta sent his houseboy to the market to find an electrician. The houseboy returned with one five minutes later. How busy can you be, if all you're going to do is ask someone else to do something for you! But half an hour, and 150 rupees later, we had power back. Not sure the work's been done to an extremely high standard, but it only has to last five weeks... and when I return to Britain, I will be well qualified for a job as a cinema usherette!

The Prodigal Son (and Daughter) return...

Tommy and Gurshagun, our pet geckoes, have returned! They disappeared over the winter, but now it's warm (41 degrees C/106F...bit more than warm in my books!) they've ventured back into the house. Last night on my way to bed I spotted a gecko on the wall above the front door (which patently could do a better job of fitting the doorframe). I thought it was the return of Tommy, until I spotted another gecko further up the hallway. Both were much bigger than they had been last time we saw them. But I suppose, that's what grandparents etc always say when they see their grandchildren again after an extended time...

Tommy - my, hasn't he grown!