What to say? Well for starters that I have been horrible at continuing up this blog the last few weeks. Part of the reason for this is an inability to come up with topics that I think will interest you all. Life has reached a point here where everything seems normal and those “oh India” moments have faded into the recent past. This is apropos, seeing that I will be leaving here in less than 2 months. But this is also reminiscent of the fact that Hyderabad is now completely a second home for us. And there is probably nothing that drives that fact home more than the story of our evolving relationship with the watchman of our building and his family.
When we first moved in, Mr. Tiwali (or Tiwari – we’re still not sure) was an unknown entity. He was amiable enough, with a wife who was always to be found sitting in the parking area of our building, overseeing all, and two daughters who could speak English better than most kids their age, and a son who I have yet to hear speak. However we always felt awkward around him, feeling bad when we would come home after the gate was locked at 12PM and we tried our best to quietly open the latch, which inevitably squeaked and groaned and moaned with each pull. And as much as we would try to silently sneak past the platform where he slept, he would almost always wake up with a start before recognizing us in the dark. We started to think he resented us and our late nights.
Even worse was when we would have friends over. He seemed willing to let our American eccentricities extend to our foreign friends but it was a different story when it came to Indians. Once, when my boyfriend came over early in the evening for dinner, Mr. T (as we now call him), came storming upstairs, informing us that as we live in an all-girls flat, there would be no boys allowed. Of course, this made all of us girls angry, as we had never been told what to do in this manner. We cursed the traditional Indian sentiments surrounding gender roles; we reflected on the irony that the American boys who lived in the flat below us would walk in at any time of day or night to borrow a spatula or milk and that this wasn’t a problem yet with an Indian it was. Most of all, I went downstairs and gave Mr. T a piece of my mind, saying that this was our home, we paid to live here and we also paid for him as our watchman, and that I would invite anyone over I damn well pleased. Of course, with his limited English skills and the fact that his daughters were not around to translate, I’m not sure how much he understood, but at least I felt better about the whole ordeal.
After tip-toeing around for several weeks, things started to settle into normal and somehow, though I can’t quite pinpoint where the change occurred, Mr. T’s family started to warm up to us. His wife cooked a chicken curry and brought it up to our flat, which I reciprocated by baking them brownies on my birthday (apparently here, you give people things on your birthday and not the other way around). Mr. T started to give us rides on his motorbike if he spotted us trudging up the hill on our way home, and he always jovially came to fix our broken light switches. His daughters also took to watching movies with one of our flatmates and finding reasons to linger in our apartment whenever they needed to deliver a message to us. It has gotten to the point that we refer to Mr. T’s wife as “mommy” (partly because we don’t know her actually name and that’s what everyone else calls her, and partly because she forever endeared herself to us when she asked us for a beer one day).
It is funny how quickly relationships change and grow here. At first, the watchman’s family was as suspicious of us as we were of them – an unknown entity, foreign, and with cultural values and traditions different from each other. But over time, perhaps just through the closeness of living in the same place, that all changed and our difference became a point of hilarity and humanity between us.
So here’s to home sweet Hyderabad. My approaching departure leaves me with mixed feelings that I will be sorting with for months to come. But for now, I’m just going to appreciate this life as is.
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