Survival

Finally, what to do on a Saturday night? The music is blaring a rock tune in Marathi,the language of Maharashtra. I am sitting in a little 5 foot by 2 foot cubicle, mustard yellow, rock and roll baby.. my laptop hooked up to their internet.
Survival. The first three weeks were rough, I came down with a bronchial infection almost right away, but resisted antibiotics. The pollution here is so bad.. One night we surfaced from a fabulous pranayama class, stoned out of our minds and high on prana, to emerge into a cloud of smoky DDT mosquito prevention treatment… we ran to the park to get back to our flat, only to see the cloud get thicker… Panic, everyone. another adventure in the land of contrasts.
There are regular power outages, ours is from 8am to 9am. So we plan our morning showers with the geyser, which delivers about a 5 minute hot shower, before the power goes out. However,we had never had a night time outage. I lent my flashlight to Leslie, as they were going to the Ellora caves. We had no candles… and of course, 10 pm, black as pitch. The only reliable battery operated pack we had was the laptop. Have you ever brushed your teeth to the light of a laptop? Even Microsoft would never have imagined that.