Bad Wife #10

For the past month, I have been on the “Bad Wife” list at Robin’s job.  Never mind that I moved my whole family across the world for him.  I closed up a life of 20 years in Los Angeles, helped to rent our house, sold three cars, and arranged dental and medical care for the whole family in a foreign country.  The thing that makes me a disgrace in the eyes of the Indians Robin works with, supervises, and is supervised by, is that he doesn’t bring his lunch to work, packed at home, in stackable containers called Tiffin Boxes, like most of the Indians at his job do.  Inside these containers should be three different dishes, some sauces, homemade pickle. Maybe, and fresh, still warm, chapattis.

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Trip to the Hospital #9

We took Taj to the hospital the other day.  He was getting thinner and quieter with every trip to the toilet.  It was past time for an expert opinion.

It was Day 11 of the yearly Ganesh Festival, the culmination of celebrations and worship that had rocked the town for days.  Lord Ganesh is the Indian god who is half boy and half elephant.  He is thought to remove obstacles and is very popular in Hinduism.

There was a hush over the city as teams of women, men, and children, with idols of Ganesh perched on shoulders, in rickshaws and trucks, headed across the road to Lake Powai for the Immersion.

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Salaam Salim #8

As the taxi speeds home from my friend Jacinta’s dinner party, I get the distinct impression that I am riding through a Ridley Scott film.  Dark, damp, glistening streets, buildings in some dilapidated state of disrepair or construction.  Men huddled in the shadows around fires and dim bulbs.  Colorful women, dingy children, murky pools of standing water.

Streetlights flash green and red but the cab plows through the intersections, dodging dogs and slowing only for deep potholes and cement construction barriers.

We are going much too fast on this slick and uneven street, but the taxi driver is calm and confident, unflinching and unflappable as he blows through red lights and careens in front of rickshaws.

As is often the case in the backseat of cars in India, I have no seatbelt.  I simply plant myself behind the passenger seat so that there will be something to slow me on impact.  And then, I sit back and marvel about how far away I am from Silverlake, Los Angeles.

Somehow, I am not particularly afraid.  Perhaps it’s the lychee martinis that have dulled my senses; maybe it’s just that after having driven with “Salim the Maniac” for more than 2 weeks, something very precious and critical is broken.

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New Mom #7

My friends and family think I’m very brave to be here, to move to India, a place I’ve never been, a country I don’t know, on the other side of the world.  What they don’t know is how brave it would have been not to be here at all.

My Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis came during the Writers’ Strike and just before Christmas.  I was sad all of the time.  Prone to tears for no discernible reason and fragile beyond belief.  I didn’t know whether I was depressed as a result of the MS or just heart-broken by the sad news.

In an instant, I became too big for my life in LA and too small for it at the same time.  I was clumsy and invisible, suffocating and alone, plagued by irony and pain… at a loss for everything.  I felt like “scab” writers, desperate for ratings, were writing the story of my life.  How long could it be before I got amnesia or met an unknown evil twin?

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