Election Time

Today's the final day of voting in the Indian General Election. Hooray! I know India's a big country, with an even bigger population, but voting began over a month ago, and I'm getting mighty bored by it all. The newspapers are full of page after page of who is cosying up to who and who's likely to garner a few extra votes by giving out free alcohol. So not exactly subtle electioneering. But it has led to some fun headlines, like "Left is Now Right for a Desperate PM". I'm a bit confused, because only yesterday "Left was the Centre Ground".

India has some unusual electoral laws. You can't stand for election if you're a convicted criminal, as Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt found out. He's spent some time behind bars for gun running. His fault, he committed this crime so long ago it his case had reached the courts, and he'd been found guilty and served time. But there's away around this - it's not unusual for it to take 7 years or more for a case to reach trial. Commit your crimes and then stand for parliament while you're waiting. It's what they do in Bihar, over a third of the politicians in this state are awaiting trial - corruption, extortion, murder. Just the usual stuff.

There's barely any space left in the papers for the regular features, like what Pakistan is lying about now (because according to the Indian papers, and Raju, there's always something), and the exciting lives of Bollywood stars - who's been seen with who, and who actually ate food at a function. Not all the actresses do. It's really "in" to faint on movie sets. Obviously there's still cricket on the back pages...it's the Indian Premier League (albeit in South Africa, because of fears there would not be enough police available to keep the peace during both the elections and the cricket.) Maybe if the politicians gave out less alcohol it would make policing a little easier...

I Hasn't Bin Drinkin, Hofficer...

We all like it when our friends do well, but when is it not a good idea to celebrate a colleague's promotion? Maybe when he's a police officer, and you're the on-duty Station House Officer. In this morning's newspaper I read the story of Rajesh Kumar Nathani. Now Mr Nathani has risen to a position of authority in the police in North West Delhi. Good for him, and good that he is happy to welcome others into a similar level of authority. Not so good that he was on duty at the time, and was found drunk during a vigilance raid on his police station on Sunday night. When I say found drunk, the vigilance raiders didn't catch him and his fellow officers drinking. The booze had run out by then. But when asked to explain the reek of alcohol emanating from his body, Station House Officer Nathani was unable to. He also refused a medical examination to determine if he had been imbibing. He jumped in his car to drive away, and drove straight into the police station wall. Reader, I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions...

Daas Boat

Keir's reading a book at the moment which is really holding his interest. It's "Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets". The plot in brief - a couple of schoolboys have accidentally created an army of evil, vicious, talking toilets which are intent on taking over the world. Will Captain Underpants save the day? Would it be giving the game away to say there's another three books in the series... Anyway, you're all wondering why I'm telling you this (except anyone who's been a parent of an eight year old boy obviously - they know how compelling toilet jokes are to this group), well the other evening Keir's bathroom was taken over by something as unexpected and frightening as a talking toilet.

It all started so innocently, like these things do. Keir had just had a shower, and I'd gone in to turn off the shower taps, which are pretty stiff. I left Keir in the bathroom drying himself. All was well. Then Keir yelped, and burst out of the bathroom. As the bathroom door opened, I was covered from waist to knees in a moving plume of really quite warm water. Then there was a loud bang, the bathroom went dark, and the water spurted at me again. So I grabbed Keir, put him behind me, closed the bathroom door and called for Rod. Seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

Rod opened the bathroom door, got covered from waist to knees in really quite warm water, and shut the door. He called for a torch. Because we have so many power cuts we have lots of torches, and they've even got live batteries in them. So armed with a torch he opened the door and we tried to find where the water was coming from, while staying out of range of the plume. It wasn't the shower, nor the basin. Eventually we spotted the culprit. One of the pipes into the hot water cylinder had come out of its socket on the wall near the ceiling. Now that we knew where the water was coming from, Rod had to enter the bathroom to try and stop it. Rod said later: "I felt like an actor in one of those disaster movies, when the submarine has been torpedoed and there's water pouring in to the vessel, and the hero has to go in to stop the leak so everyone is saved and I get the girl". Anyway, our hero climbed onto the toilet seat and isolated the water supply to the hot water cylinder and the water stopped gushing. Not quite as glamorous as they do it in the movies, but it worked. Then we had to try to clean up the bathroom. Thankfully Indian bathrooms are designed to get quite wet. Because no Indian maid, reknowned for being very generous with water while cleaning, has ever been quite this generous in a bathroom before. A day later, once the room was dry we had to go in and change all the lightbulbs. They had shattered in the incident. Still waiting for the plumber to come and reconnect the hot water cylinder. Hopefully he'll do a decent job - this is one movie that can do without a sequel.

And then it rained

And weren't we grateful! After days and days of extreme heat the long awaited rain came. The kids had to go outside to celebrate. But we did it quickly, before the hail started :-) They don't call us Fairweathers for nothing...

It's really been very difficult getting much done in the last week. 44.3 degrees (that's 112) is really rather draining. Thalia keeps telling me the heat is ridiculous, and she's not wrong...

Mr Morgan knew Best

A long time ago, back in the early 1980's, I had a maths teacher called Mr Morgan. He used to stand in front of the whole class and tell us to pay attention, because one day we'd need to know what he was going to teach us. I didn't know at the time how clever Mr Morgan was. How he knew that one day I would end up living in India where unscrupulous shop keepers would try to add extra charges to my bills, at a time when I didn't even know I'd go off to live in Britain for 17 years first, I'll never know...

One of the things I really like about India is MRP. MRP is Maximum Retail Price, and it's printed on every item manufactured in India. It's generally printed very small, so you have to go off and look for it in decent light, but it's always there. And as a legal requirement, items imported into India have a label stuck on them, showing the MRP. MRP is good, because everyone who wants to buy a product knows exactly what it costs. It stops the "white tax", as my friend Mary calls it, being added to your shopping just because you're not Indian. The "white tax" is much more prevalent in Hauz Khas than it was in Gurgaon. I'm not sure why, maybe it's because we're so much more foreign in Hauz Khas than we were in Gurgaon, where there is a large expatriate community. Trust me, the Fairweather family is actually no more foreign than we've ever been!

There's an "English Wine and Beer" shop in the local market, which by the way stocks no English wine or beer. It's full of spirits I've never seen before, some beers I've never heard of, and a small range of Indian wines, including a rather drinkable Indian Rose. This rose has a MRP of 420 rupees a bottle, which makes it one of the cheapest wines we've found here that doesn't make you regret drinking it later. Well, not the first bottle... Anyway, we've been in three or four times now to buy a bottle or two. I have no idea what he charged us per bottle the first time, but it wasn't the same as he charged us the second. Now when I'm in the shop handing my money over I'm sober, I notice things like that. So I had a good look at the bottle when I came home, and found the MRP. Never again was the wine shop guy going to get his "white tax" from me. The third time I went shopping I took Raju with me, so he could carry all my purchases. I put two bottles of Rose on the counter. Wine shop guy got out his calculator and did his sum. 940 rupees. I turned to Raju and said, very loudly, he's wrong Raju, it's 840 rupees. See, the price is here on the bottle! 420 add 420 is 840! Amazingly, the wine shop guy agreed he'd done his sum wrong, even while using a calculator, and accepted 840 rupees. Thank you, Mr Morgan. You're right, mental maths is important!

And it's not just wine shop guy. Thalia and I were shopping at a stall the other day and she wanted to buy some hair slides. I was after a loaf of bread. One stall had them both. The hair slides were 10 rupees a pair, she wanted three pairs: black, blue and purple (or kala, neela and jamuni if you like the Hindi). My bread had an MRP of 12 rupees, but the man in the stall thought I should be paying 22 rupees. He declared I owed 52 rupees. I turned the loaf around to show the man the MRP, proclaiming loudly that the bread cost 12 rupees, and 12 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 did not add up to 52, but 42. Mr Morgan would have been so proud...

Hold the Front Page!

On Friday, something truly momentous happened in the Fairweather family household. Something so strange, so unheard of, that Rod and I were caught completely off guard. We've asked around, and no one we know has ever heard of it happening in India before either. Workmen turned up early. I know, I should have asked you all to sit down first. Sorry about that.

You see, when we rented this flat there was no airconditioner in the main living room. That wasn't a problem, we arranged to buy one second hand off an online group for expatriates living in Gurgaon. Which was great, until the lady heading back to Austria decided to sell it to her landlord instead three weeks later. Bitch. So we needed to buy a second hand airconditioner. Needless to say, when it's pushing 40 degrees outside, there's not too many good second hand AC's floating around. So we call AC rental places and get the prices of different AC's. We decide, even though it's the most expensive, we want a split AC, because it will be quieter, and a 2 ton one, because the room is quite big, and we don't want to be hot anymore. Ever. The AC guy says he can install it at 3pm on Thursday. It's Wednesday, so that's not too bad. Our hopes are raised at 2.20pm on Thursday, when he calls to say he'll be at our place between 3 and 3.30. And he does turn up at that time, but he does not bring a 2 ton split AC with him. He has a 2 ton window AC. It'll be cheaper, but it'll be loud. I imagine my longarm stitching away, with the AC on, while someone tries to watch the telly. The TV volume is going to have to be so high eardrums will burst. There might even be blood. As all longarmers know, it's poor form to bleed on a customer's quilt, so we reluctantly send him away and tell him to bring a split AC instead. This takes great willpower, because it's 40 degrees outside. He says he will return at 10.30-11 the following day. Rod and I know what that means (11.30 if you're lucky, and never on a Sunday).

So when I woke up Friday morning at 9.15 (our bedroom in the new house is at the back and doesn't get any direct sunlight. It's impossible to tell what the time is when the curtains are closed. There's barely a discernable difference between 1am and 9am!) I put a load of washing on and sat down to read yesterday's paper over breakfast in my nightie. The paper guy still hasn't grasped the concept of morning delivery. And I have no idea who is delivering the paper. I have to wait until he comes for money to explain morning to him. Rod got up about 20 minutes later, and peered out Thalia's window to see if today's paper had arrived yet. Imagine his surprise when he saw two men unloading a 2 ton split AC out the front of our place. It wasn't even 9.45 yet. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief - this isn't how it works. We hurriedly got dressed so we could pretend we hadn't been caught out. Who knows, these AC guys could have been trying to catch the goras (white people) out...and we weren't going to give them the satisfaction of finding out they had!

Hot Hot Hot

Oh My God, it's freaking hot in this country! You know it's all getting to you when you describe a 40C (104F) day as being "better than yesterday". It's not supposed to be this hot yet, it's not May. I should be floating around in 36C (97F) temperatures, glowing like ladies do. Instead I'm slumped in a heat induced stupor, sweating like a horse! How did I let myself be talked into moving to such a hot place? Diamonds weren't even mentioned as tools of bribery...

But on a positive note, the bath has moved from its original position (upright, next to the front door) into our bathroom. Considering the neighbours like to ring our doorbell in the evenings to ask us if we've settled in all right, this is a much more preferable place to bathe. And I've even learned how to take the plug out at the end of my bath and not flood the whole bathroom floor. When Rod asked the installer if the bath waste went straight down into the existing shower waste outlet and the man said "Yes", what he should have said was "Yes, and also under the bath panel into the existing shower tray, and eventually out the top end of the bath, along the wall, and then across the floor all over your bath mat, if you're lucky". I'm sure he would have said that if only his English was better. Thankfully I was only lucky once.