PEREGRINATIONS

Building my own lab...well I knew what it meant in the abstract. Even, I imagined, in the concrete. Well now apparently it is the reality. Although it still has a surreal quality to it.  As I always do, I plan, replan, map out, write down, dream, dream, dream some more...now, all the details are like a well written algorithm on my eyelids, I close my eyes and the screen lights up. But then it really happens, and it looks nothing like what it did in the eyelid-map! But ages later, when you look back at it, on the whole things worked out, rather well, but the details are all different.  So now, I have a job (I write project proposals, attend faculty meetings, begin making lists of equipment), but I don't really (I don't get paid, I take off from work when I please, I don't receive any of the emails notifying the faculty about faculty meetings!) . I have a proposed office, a cleaned out lab bench, fish in the nursery and no plasmids to call my own,  no students, no work...

Something that I hadn't accounted for before I came to India was how a new environment makes perfectly functional, sometimes highly efficient systems completely obsolete or irrelevant. The other day I took out a pack of chewing gum from my bag to clean my palette after a delicious meal and its melted into a clump of goo and sticks to my fingers! I had brought a boat load of electronic gizmos (at least by my standards it was a boatload) and a few days in my newly refurbished bedroom and the laptop has scratches and dirt streaks on it, the E-reader has a coating of dust on its screen. My beautiful, delicate looking white blouse, bought for the hot climate is suddenly a dirty brown colour. On another note, but the same song...the birds and flying squirrels (so says the newspaper) are dying of dehydration; people have been encouraged to leave out shallow bowls of water for them (the birds, not the squirrels that is). Who said humanity is dead?

Had a brush with death, or less dramatically speaking a brush with a huge bus!! Literally. Driving on Delhi streets or probably any other city-streets in India is a hypertensive experience or an adventure, if you like to look at it that way (which is much preferable). No inch, no quarter is given. No opportunity to squeeze through must be missed. Or you will be left standing where you are while the world rushes (or inches) past you. And I used to wonder at this tearing hurry everyone is in. As if they might all be ambulances rushing to save fatally wounded passengers, while of course the real ambulances are just another set of blaring sirens (or horns) in the sea of sound, pleasantly ignored. BUT... now I have developed a hypothesis. It is this. Indians have to wait so much, so long, everywhere, that a moment saved on the streets is a moment more you could wait...somewhere more productive. This of course comes from my (very limited for now) experiences of waiting... ...waiting for the ...