Chores, chores, chores

Note on pictures: We apologize for the recent dearth of pictures. Since we have arrived in Tirur, we have had to do all our emailing, blogging, and web-surfing at a local Internet cafe. The staff is wonderfully friendly but the broadband is unreliable. With that said, this is an image of the outside of our Tirur apartment, uploaded on a day when the broadband was relatively swift.

To keep our sanity, Jenna and I have found it necessary to begin doing ‘chores’ around our apartment.

I think I have mentioned in previous blog posts the state of decrepitude in which we found our residence upon arrival to Tirur more than a week ago.

Cobwebs hung suspended from every corner of every room. Dark metastasizing mold stains ran along the baseboards in the kitchen and living room. The windows, when closed, revealed a gauzy layer of grime which made the outside world look as if it was shrouded in perpetual mist. Scuffmarks blackened the walls in our bedroom. And every pillow overturned, every dish picked up, every door opened, and every sundry item of rubbish kicked, produced a scampering insect of some sort.

To battle this situation, Jenna and I have resorted to chores. We find it necessary every day to do some bit of cleaning: sweeping a floor, dusting a shelf, wiping down a mirror, washing a sink basin, disinfecting a countertop. But these duties are ancillary to our main tasks each morning.

When we wake up, both of us have some jobs to do before we leave for school. After a morning cup of tea, I start on the small load of laundry I began soaking the previous night. Since we have no washing machine—and India is totally bereft of Laundromats—we have become quite accustomed to doing our laundry by hand. Most guesthouses and hotels will come equipped with a large plastic basin in the bathroom, which can be used for both washing clothes and bathing in the Indian style.

In Tirur, we have found it easer to do our laundry in short constant bursts than one great all-consuming cycle of dirty clothes. So, each day, we will place the clothes we wore to school in a bucket of sudsy water to let soak overnight. In the mornings, it is my job to take these clothes out, wring them, and hang them in the spare bedroom on a clothesline we fashioned from the window grates to the doorframe. In this way, we have learned that most cotton shirts, underwear and socks take a full eight hours to dry under the wind of a ceiling fan. Long pants take two days to dry. And towels take four.

As I do the laundry, Jenna begins preparing the day’s lunch. We are forced to make our lunch in the mornings because we have no refrigerator. Microwaveable lunches—the type that I used to eat quite frequently during work in the US—are nonexistent in Tirur’s markets. Plus, the school does not have a microwave anyway. So, we must make meals from scratch, with an experimental zest that defies most Indian culinary traditions. Chop some potatoes and okra, throw in some garlic, add some turmeric and cumin. There you go. We have gotten in the habit of stopping by a small grocery stand near our apartment on the way back from work each day and buying the assorted ingredients. Our inexperience in cooking gives us bravery in buying these items. And our desperation allows us to ignore the skeptical looks we get from the other customers who spy the odd mixture of things in our basket.

Jenna starts the morning cooking usually around 7:30, by chopping some vegetables while a pot of rice boils. After the rice is done, she usually adds an improvisatory mixture of Indian spices to a pan of oil. “What do you think? Will masala with turmeric and salt be good?” she might ask me. “I dunno. Sure,” I usually respond. After this, she throws all the veggies in with the rice and spices and lets it simmer.

While she is completing our lunch, I have moved on to ‘making water’. Since we were told not to trust tap water in Tirur, I use the water purifier bought at the Bass Pro Shop nearly every day to filter three bottles of water. This process involves dipping a plastic tube in one bucket of water and sticking another plastic tube down the gullet of an empty water bottle. Then, a hand crank pumps the water from bucket to bottle. After the bottle is full, the process is completed by squeezing a few drops of iodine solution into the bottle and letting it sit for five minutes. The resulting water tastes like water in a hotel pool, but it doesn’t make you sick.

Sounds from adjoining buildings let us know that we are not the only people engaged in this type of domestic frenzy. The audible slap of wet laundry being struck against stone begins to resonate emphatically from our backyard as soon as the sun rises—a woman in the complex behind us washing her family’s clothes. The clink of dishware and the wails of waking children in other buildings nearby can be heard for several blocks. The smell of onions and garlic wafts through the neighborhood as the day commences. Lines of sopping wet clothes strung from trees and windows and the eaves of buildings are filled and dripping by the time we leave for work. Freshly scrubbed children play shoeless in the street while their older brothers and sisters leave their homes dressed smartly in pressed uniforms.

Our own domestic duties have made us strangely feel more a part of Tirur. The laundry, the cooking, the making of water, the sweeping, the cleaning—we realize we are in league with the other families around us—doing all the little things that keeps one sane in such a tough environment.