Today in my Hindi copy I wrote sentences in unusual formats like future perfect continuous (“…will have been going”) because I wanted to be comfortable with the grammar. I continually want more and more vocabulary and my memory cannot meet my needs at the rate which would satisfy me.
Tonight I go to Lucknow with Nandan. He is to retrieve is babi‘s passport, which has been eaten by the state’s confusion during the election. The cycle party got thrown out, but the way, and now the swastika elephants are in. They have already started arresting the bicyclers and Nandan says that former “governor” (I forget the Indian equivalent) might even be arrested.
Krista is due to arrive Wednesday morning and we have reservations to return Tuesday night. Rajan is upset at Krista arriving for a lot of reasons. I gave Krista the link to this blog a long time ago, and I sort of regret that because I do not want her to know the things that Rajan tells me in semi-confidence, but I really do need to post this and I do not think that Krista reads this…
Rajan is concerned about her disrupting his puja. I think that moving her into the house will lead to Devananda and Lara moving out. They will be flying to Italy on the 26th but leaving for Delhi on the 21st. Nandan wants to move folks into their flat while they are gone, presumably by moving their stuff somewhere else. I think in the end moving foreigners into the house will clear their drama and the ensuing drama with have a lesser absolute value, but he only thinks of the present.
Rajan, if I have not explained clearly before, outright believes in what I would call “magic.” He does jupa – which I can roughly equate to what Catholics call rosary – with intent to controllably force very specific miracles. He sees no problem in telling me that he or any number of other people can induce miracles, affirming that the same is easy to do, then not producing the miracles. He claims to be able to foretell the minutia of the future, produce objects from thin air (food, specifically), use pools of water as solid ground (i.e. “walk on water”), fly, live without food or air, and get money and sex.
He talks a lot about those last two. He does jupa with the expectation of filling a spiritual bank account, and at a certain time when interest has accrued he will cash it in for money and foreigner girls. For now, though, he cannot touch either, and part of his concern with Krista is that her presence will add another menstrator to the household. I told him that she will only be here a month but that that dirty window of time contained therein is a bother to him.
I have a little concern about Rajan. He is taking a test tomorrow in physics. In the Indian system there is an eight-month course with one test at the end, and the course’s grade comes from that one test. Rajan has not studied at all, but he has done a lot of jupa. I tutored him a little two nights ago for about a half-hour, and he really does know nothing. The test is on thermodynamics, optics, and quantum mechanics. It is not hard and is theory rather than math-based. I think I could pass it if I reviewed for a week but I learned all this before. For him, I do not know what will happen.
Now that I have been speaking Hindi at home I have been talking to Nandan’s wife Bunti. She has started at the basics, like “What does your father do for a living?” That question is one in a series that strangers always ask me (it comes more quickly from females than males, as I have explained in other posts). It is fun because I have been living with her for four months and just now we are getting to meet each other. It is so strange because I have directly depended on her for water, food, other things but just now we started having long conversations.