Delhi Daze

On Sunday, I actually had the day to do as I pleased without a scheduled activity. In New York City, I have whiled away whole days without leaving my home, and prepared for bed at night realizing that I did not actively attempt to do anything. Here in India, I have had a harder time giving myself the room to not be actively pursuing something to justify “uprooting” myself to spend six months in India.  This is not to say that I don’t have plenty to do today, with classes and choreography to prepare, writing this blog, writing a blog post for Fulbright to post on their website (http://blog.usief.org.in/Posts.aspx?PostID=2339), reviewing and continuing my Hindi studies (still working on identifying letters and words), reaching out to new contacts and setting up meetings, etc. However, I have come to realize that sometimes it is critical to allow “down-time” for processing information with some reflection, recording my observations and postulating next “steps”.

Last Wednesday evening, I travelled from Mumbai to Delhi, where I am teaching and exploring more opportunities to learn about things I did not think about previously. I often forget that when travelling domestically, that one does not have to go through the extensive immigration upon first entry to and final exit from a country. So when I arrived at Indira Gandhi International airport, I automatically went to the line that said “international passports”. Fortunately I then saw a second sign beyond my line that said “domestic arrivals with “D” boarding cards”. Lo and behold, my boarding card had a big ole “D” on it. Before leaving the line I shouted (as politely as one can shout in an immigration hall) to the officials nearby, if I was okay to use that line as I was only arriving from Mumbai. Much of my relief at zipping through that line was the fact that I had only just gotten final approval from the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) of my application to register being accepted, earlier in the day. No one was sure if I would be questioned about the fact that I had been in country for five weeks on a research visa without an official registration. The immigration officer did not look in my passport when he saw my boarding card, and I received my official registration document by email the very next day. Hooray!

Danceworx, my host institution, have their primary Delhi location in Gurgaon in a stand-alone building with a small apartment for visitors. To be honest, this location reminds me a little of when I was staging a Taylor work in Germany, and I stayed in an apartment that was located in the same building as the studios. When everyone is gone, it is a little like wandering the halls of an abandoned building as I leave and return, especially as I have to sign in and out with security at the gate. Dance studios are large open spaces with minimal furniture, and the office spaces are relegated to one corner of one floor, so when no one is around the echoing silence of cavernous space within a building feels like it has been abandoned.

Unlike my arrival in Mumbai, I started teaching the morning after I arrived. The studios are more spacious, though I have fewer students, and the “commute” is just down three flights of stairs. In both cases, the content of my ballet and modern classes are very foreign to the students and the first classes are big learning experiences for them and me. I need to find out where their capacity for picking up material and detail stands, and they are learning how to communicate their needs to pick up the information being laid out. Fortunately I have a few weeks of daily classes with two different levels of students here in Delhi. I will also choose a few of them to learn a segment of choreography to give them a benchmark for applying what I might elicit out of them through my classes. Beyond my classes with Danceworx, I am already coordinating to meet with other dance artists in Delhi to possibly conduct a few workshops before I return to Mumbai.

Friday night happened to be a dinner reception for the current English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) cohort along with senior Fulbright Scholars in Delhi at the United States India Educational Foundation (USIEF) headquarters. It was a serendipitous opportunity to meet the Executive Director, Adam J. Grotsky, and the Program Officers responsible for all of our presence in India as grant recipients. I was reminded again of how impressively reassuring diplomats can be to new arrivals from abroad, when Mr. Grotsky, took the time to introduce himself to me and talked about knowing me specifically from having reviewed my application. The first time I came to India was with the Paul Taylor Dance Company under the auspices of senior US Ambassador, Frank Wisner, who greeted each member of the company by name and shared a personal aside with each of us, also here in Delhi.

At the dinner were two other Fulbrighters (one former and the other current) with whom I started a collaboration to commission music before any of us left the USA. They are a married couple, David and Sunita, who have spent a lot of their lives connected to and living in India, and as Fulbrighters their fields are music and math. When I was originally asked to maybe create work here, I noticed David’s music specialty listed amongst this year’s Fulbrighters, and approached him about commissioning a score while on our residencies in India. Then I got an email that his wife has been researching the mathematical mapping of a particular South Indian tradition of creating Kolams, and they thought I might find it interesting to have a look, listen to some ideas they have been playing with combining a musical response to the mathematical analyses of the specific designs that comprise Kolams.

Photo copied from link below.

https://www.sahapedia.org/significance-of-kolam-tamil-culture

David and Sunita had invited me to stay in town at their place after the USIEF dinner, as I am staying in a South Western district of Delhi which is at the end the “yellow” line of the Delhi Metro system. It was nice to visit with them and have a chance to see the neighborhood and spacious two bedroom apartment they had found. As with many households, they employ a “helper” (as I referred to such people growing up in Jamaica) who would come in once a day for an hour to clean or cook. They agreed on an arrangement where their helper would cook and clean on alternate days. And I lucked out that she was to cook the next day when I stayed for lunch. Saturday morning was a great opportunity for us to discuss the development of the music I am commissioning, and it was also a frantic rush to register as overseas voters for the upcoming mid-term elections in the USA! None of us realized that the deadline to register as overseas voters was listed as Friday October 12. Fortunately, it was still the 12^th in the USA, even though we were well into the 13^th in India. Oh the joys of electronic communications.

Once I returned to my place on Saturday evening it was time for me to see how well I could do at ordering food for delivery. Ha! I made a valiant effort, but I could not get past trying to get the person on the other end of the line to understand the address for delivery. I desperately went to find someone working in the studio offices to help me order food to tide me through the weekend. To my relief, I was not the only one who had trouble getting the delivery restaurant to understand and take down the address. Fortunately I am a pretty easy person when it comes to eating most things, as I cannot easily decipher what things are on a menu. I have learned a few things, like “murgh” means chicken, “sabzi” is some kind of green vegetable, and sadly less than a handful more “menu” words. So, mostly I just pick a dish each from the vegetarian and the non-vegetarian lists, then I decide if I feel more like having some kind of bread or rice, or both.

I do have the capacity to cook here, but I have so little interest in trying to shop and stock a pantry for a variety of reasons beyond the amount of work I have to do. In Mumbai, I pass restaurants with affordable food regularly, and I can shop in my typical leisurely pace. The situation is not the same here in Delhi. The nearby restaurants and shops have an open market-bazaar vibe that makes me anxious if I don’t know exactly what I want to get before I walk in, and I do run into a distinct language barrier when I don’t understand how a particular shop’s system works. For example, when buying dinner at a nearby restaurant/bakery, I ordered and paid for the meal at the cashier then gave that receipt to the cooks at the meal counter, but at the bakery counter, I made my selections first, then that counter person would say what weight should be paid for at the cashier, then I would return with the receipt before my baked treats would be given to me. Fortunately I was not alone on this first venture. I will need to go get my fresh fruit and snacks on my own at some point. And I will get used to it. Just not right away. Sigh.

Based on hearing about a service used by another Fulbrighter, Rochelle, in Mumbai, I knew what an ad for “home cooked tiffin” delivery meant. Tiffin is technically just a small meal that is carried in a multi-compartment “tiffin carrier”, and it seems that some industrious home cooks will package up meals made in their own homes for delivery, and for sale on the streets. After seeing the condition of the commercial kitchens that were offering delivery service, I decided that I preferred the idea of getting a meal cooked in someone’s home (it may just be my own fantasy about hygiene standards), and I am pretty open to whatever the cook decides is on the menu that day. So I tried a “tiffin” delivery meal yesterday, and my only disappointment was that it came in typical “take out” containers rather than an actual tiffin carrier. I quite liked the idea of cleaning and returning a metal tiffin in exchange for my next meal; at least that was what I fantasized would happen.

Beyond the day-to-day, I sense that my time in Delhi will be spent meeting a lot of different people and going to visit a variety of institutions and homes. I have been offered multiple names and introductions to all kinds of dance and performance artistes and schools, and I have been surprised that almost everyone to whom I have reached out, has responded back to me. Already my week and next weekend are filling up with meetings and excursions beyond my routine here in Gurgaon.