[Heads-up: contains a couple instances of profanity, as well as some (potentially related) toilet discussion. There’s also an undeniably low-hanging-fruit joke about Indian bureaucracy, in case you’re in the comedy business and need to avoid having your razor-sharp wit dulled by my shameless low-effort fruit-picking.]
[Note for future posts: i’ll try my best to use heads-ups at the top of each future post, so that you can avoid things like profanity or toilet talk or any number of questionable things i might choose to publicly post on the internet. I think this is a pretty ideal system for allowing myself to write freely in these posts, while still giving those who might take offence a chance to opt out (and receive India updates via some other means). I was originally going to borrow the established terminology of content warnings (CWs) for these, but since i will inevitably want to make jokes in mine and CWs are meant to be treated seriously, i decided it’d be poor form to start being wantonly offensive via my attempted tool for avoiding offence.]
[Okay, i promised you last time that this blog would be more about India than about spilling my overthought brain vomit onto the internet’s throw rug. And that’s a promise i intend to keep.]
Now, onto the good stuff.
*ahem*
I arrived in India around 8pm on Friday, 18 October, 2019. After clearing immigration and collecting my bags, i headed outside to meet up with the colleague who’d arranged a ride for me.
Many of the things i immediately noticed after leaving the airport were things i knew to expect. The heat. The humidity. The crowds of people. The lingering looks from a lot of them, the eager offers of a taxi ride from the drivers among them. These all marked a clear difference between my new home and the one i’d just left behind, but none was so intense as to constitute “culture shock” in my mind. I knew what my true sources of culture shock were going to be, thanks to earlier conversations with Nimmi1 and with friends who’ve either visited or lived in India. And within five minutes of stepping out into the Chennai air, i was facing down the gauntlet’s first test of my mettle: Indian driving.
Now, the universe contains a whole host of dichotomies, where each half is neither good nor bad and both are equally necessary: order and chaos, science and art, stability and freedom, et cetera. As i clutched my backpack in the backseat of the car, watching vehicle after vehicle come within inches of making contact with our own, i quickly realised that US/UK driving and Indian driving form another such dichotomy. The lane markers here seem to function as quiet suggestions rather than rigid instructions, and drivers don’t so much “cautiously merge over” as they do “regularly apply their knowledge of the exact width of their vehicle”. For those of us who are used to adhering to strict rules on the road, it seems like a system for generating as many car collisions as possible, but despite how nervous i got watching all the cars, rickshaws, and motorbikes in a seemingly constant state of near-collision, i didn’t see a single impact on the entire drive home from the airport. It feels like watching an intricately choreographed dance or crowd scene, where the audience perceives randomness and chaos but the participants each know their part and, once in motion, can seamlessly2 get to where they’re going without bumping into anybody. It’s quite mesmerising, once you stop imagining that every person on a motorcycle has a life expectancy of just under two minutes (and once your ears get acclimated to the unending symphony of personality-packed car horns, come to think of it).
And because i know you’re just clamouring for it, here’s a short snippet of what my first car ride in India was like. (Spoiler: no one died. Not even a little.)
We arrived to my flat in about half an hour, and my colleague exchanged a few words with the guys working at the complex before heading out. And after being whisked into the reception office to fill out a form (because of course my first responsibility in India was filling out a form), i took my first step into my home for the next year.
A couple of my coworkers were kind enough to stock my flat with a few essentials before i arrived, so that i wouldn’t need to worry about what to eat while i was simultaneously starting my first full-time job and starting to assimilate into a completely new country. I checked the kitchen area and, based on the food they bought, it seems they deemed the following to constitute the quintessential weekend diet of a 24-year-old American fresh out of grad school:
- 1 loaf of white bread
- 1 stick of butter
- 2 cartons of milk
- 1 carton of orange juice
- 4 apples
- 1 350g jar of Nutella
God bless ’em.
Now, coming into this move, i had been expecting the drive over to be my sole encounter with culture shock on my first night in India. In the process of touring my new digs, however, i suddenly found myself face-to-face with the completely unheralded Gauntlet Round 2: the bum gun, also known as the bidet spray, the health faucet, the shattaf, or (my personal favourite) the ass-blaster/ungabunga-blaster. I shit you not, look it up on Wikipedia3.
The keen-eyed Westerners among you will notice that this here toilet setup lacks a place to hang toilet paper, and that, in its place, there is a hose-like mechanism akin to what some kitchens have for washing dirty dishes. Putting two and two together4, you come to the same realisation that i did: your butt5, dear reader, is the dirty dishes. The people at HeyMath! who sorted my apartment for me were kind enough to include two (2) rolls of our precious waste-wiping paper in the apartment, which i will be using as a sort of “training wheels” while i get used to the spray-off method. And to be honest, i’m pretty excited about it! After all, in what other context could we get something gross on our body and feel satisfactorily clean after merely wiping it off with some dry paper? And besides, dry paper is slow and annoying and probably not all that good for the plumbing.
Well, no more, i say! From this point forward, Dan Kinch shall be a man who cleans himself with water, like a gentleman.
And before i go any further down this increasingly worrisome rabbit-hole, i should probably wrap this post up — it’s already been three weeks since the events of this post actually took place, and if i spend any more time adding to it / editing it / doing anything besides publishing it, this’ll all start to get just a bit too silly. And if there’s one thing i detest more than any other ill on God’s green Earth, it’s surfeits of silliness6.
Till next time ✌
Stranger in a New Land 