It turns out that I'm wrong about the Bible, a fact that will become relevant in a minute. It turns out fire was not, in fact, one of the plagues of Egypt, but rather just part of the Plague of Hail (which was not composed entirely of hail, despite the name)
At any rate, Delhi has catastrophic problems with plumbing and wiring and just about any convenience necessary to a comfortable life. This really became apparent to me at about 3 AM yesterday, when I woke up to investigate a brawl outside my house and discovered that my building was, instead, on fire.
I should mention at this point that I live in Hauz Khas Village, of brief NY Times fame and illegal construction notoriety, and also THE hottest and most happening address in New Delhi today. The narrow main road is so crammed with construction that the only way to build is up, resulting in bars and boutiques stacked one atop the other like Jenga pieces or coins, teeteering ever more precariously. After a hundred yards the lane narrows and takes an abrupt left into an alley that looks like an ideal setting for a tryst or a murder. This is where I live.
Some people might call the alley "shady" but the better term for it is dank. There are occasional gaps in the concrete walls through which a casual observer can see people who may or may not be homeless, mixed in with the occasional down-market fashion boutique. The alley is a borderland between the chic shops of the main Village, frequented by deadbeat foreigners, and an actual village, complete with cows and mass apathy. The result is a schizophrenic melting pot of a bylane.
My building is part of Delhi's infamous network of "Lal Dora" constructions, which means "red thread" (I think!) and sounds like it would be sexy, although it isn't. These are semi-legal dwellings over which the police exercise what seems to be almost no control, although I don't know why that is. At any given hour, the pipes in my building might fizzle with electricity or the wiring might start to spew water, but the reverse is relatively unlikely.
The neighborhood is chaotic. A friend who walked me home a while back raised his eyebrows at the street and asked if I didn't think it was too "public," a euphemism meant to encompass the vast gossip network of tailors, vegetable vendors and small shop owners crammed into the narrow space. There were also a few jobless youths on bicycles, a demographic that makes up fully half of Delhi's population at any given time.
No, I do not, although there was a memorable incident two months ago when I woke up at 6 am to the sound of shouting and clamor. When it didn't abate, I dragged myself to the window, intending to holler village-style at the noisemakers. But I couldn't quite do it, because it turns out the entire village had formed a semi circle around an elephant, which bore in a palanquin on its back a tall white girl in a filmy blue harem ensemble ala Aladdin's Jasmine. Every so often the crowd would cheer, which led me to believe that the elephant was performing tricks, or maybe the girl was.
So when I first heard the clamor outside my apartment building two days ago, I assumed it was another ethnically-mismatched Disney wannabe mounted on a zoo animal, or something like that. But then I heard what sounded like a million tiny explosions. Still assuming that it was a party ran amok, I dragged myself once more to the window.
This is what I beheld: a street awash in humanity, and also people whose faces reflected a blazing orange light. A cloud of gray smoke billowing from right beneath me (the ground floor of our building is a garage) and a woman screaming "get out, get out!" in Hindi.
Indeed, my building was on fire. My first instinct was that I didn't want to die alone, so I dashed down the dark hallway to wake up my roommates by barging into their rooms and screaming at them to wake up. This is actually unusual behavior for me.
At any rate, they woke up and spilled into the hallway. I wrenched open the main door and was immediately choked by thick, black smoke, acrid with the smell of burning rubber. The hallway was lost in this haze, in which inexplicable red lights flashed like the cell phone lights of people who had been lost in the blaze. I was immediately reminded of all my fire safety courses - do you know where the fire is? do NOT run into the fire - and so I rapidly shut the door and ran to the window. There were several moments of panic during which I was convinced I was going to die. My life didn't flash before my eyes, nor did I regret not sleeping around more/becoming famous/backpacking Istanbul when I had the chance. The deep thoughts that went through my mind as it trembled on the brink of nothingness were:
no no no no NO FUCK NO!!! and the desperate need to find a way out.
This is where the "public" came in handy.
We're on a low floor, and I gestured at several random men in the street to come catch me as I leapt from the building. As a little girl I often lay awake at night plotting escape routes from my bedroom in the event of fire/molestation/theft, and most involved jumping from my bedroom window into the bushes below the house. I finally got to live a far more indie version of this plan, leaping instead into the welcoming arms of various jobless youths. Perhaps because of the innate decency of Delhi-ites facing disaster, these arms were no more welcoming than they strictly had to be, a fact for which I was and remain grateful.
So there we were, blinking in the street. It took several minutes for the public to douse the fire by pouring sand on it. At that point the fire brigade arrived, outfitted in hats and rubber suits. They took a quick peek at the smoldering remains of the fire and then barged up the stairs to invade people's apartments in search of valuables - excuse me, fire code violations. In search of fire code violations. If only they had thought to do that a few days earlier, or ever, I thought morosely, as a friend scaled a ladder to break back into our apartment and let the fire brigade - and us - in.
We wandered through the smoky night in search of a place to sleep. Between us, my roommates and I were wearing probably two full sets of underwear. This is notable only because there are three of us.
Eventually we ended up at the house of some random lawyer who was a friend of a friend (but more importantly, who had a spare room) and he let the three of us crash in his spare room for a few hours. When I turned on the water in the sink I startled a very large cockroach out of the tap. In an effort to forget that sighting and the fact that I'd scraped the first layer of skin off my thighs in my precipitous hurtle to safety, I decided to drink several shots of straight whiskey out of what appeared to be a cannon shell or a soap dish of some kind. Just kidding! It was a ceramic glass. Yes, that's what I said. A ceramic glass.
Anyway, I felt much better by the time I climbed into bed with my roommates. I remember a party long ago when I introduced one of my roommates to a friend. "Is she your roommate or your flatmate?" asked the friend, although I'm not sure why she cared. At the time, I'd boggled. Now, of course, I can say both, depending on whether our house has just burned down. A roommate remains a roommate even when you have no physical room to share, apparently.
Not that our house had burned down anyway. We arrived after a few hours and found that the apartment was intact, albeit dark and smoky. I threw my valuables into a bag and went to another friend's house, where I ate an entire pizza just to remind myself that I was still alive and a glutton.
A few hours later, I was in the back of an auto on the way to my aunt's house. My aunt lives in a house so commodious, so palatial, that it should probably be illegal, or so it always seems to me because I usually arrive on the brink of some personal disaster. Last time, it was food poisoning. That was only two weeks ago.
This time, slightly singed and still shell-shocked, I arrived at her house and put my things in her basement. We enjoyed a dinner that I again ate heartily of, even though I still felt hungry afterwards because I am alive and a glutton. At about 10, it began to rain, and my sister-in-law and I watched the panes of rain - liquid glass - cover the the garden in a clear glaze. Lightning flashed so often I was reminded of the time Hillary Clinton spoke at my mom's college graduation, and the audience erupted with camera flashes.
At about 10:30, my aunt went downstairs. And this is when the trouble began. Or perhaps I should say, resumed.
Despite living in one of Delhi's most planned neighborhoods, somehow my uncle's basement has no proper drainage system. My aunt spied water seeping from one of the basement drains. The water had backed up. A reverse whirlpool quickly formed, and suddenly the drain was regurgitating - spewing, frothing, projectile vomiting - a noxious brew of brackish black water all over the floor. Within minutes there was thick black water ankle-deep all over the floor, staining the furniture and the marble tile. And it stank. How much did it stink? Like God's wrath called down upon the unbelieving Egyptians, like month-old tofu abandoned in the sink, like the alley in INA market where the butcher let his "free range" chickens roam.
It really, really stank.
I had never before seen a roach in my aunt's house, but I did that night. It was dead, floating along atop a clump of some swampy black grunge. These blackened clumps were everywhere in the water.
On the brink of tears, I rescued my possessions from the basement, thinking how it was that they'd escaped fire only to be brought low by bilge.
Then I rolled up my pants - we all did - and waded into the fray. With rags buckets and a small army of servants attending, we began mopping up the gallons of nasty water that had collected on the floor. I was using a shower squeegee, a household appliance that is invaluable in India and almost unheard of in the United States. It's like a garden rake, but instead of tines it has a rubber strip for sluicing water. Like this, but with a longer handle. My cousin and I began squeegeeing the water across the marble floor, pushing great waves of filthy, roiling black water towards where my aunt and her helpers waited to collect it in buckets and dispose of it.
At one point, squeegee handle in hand and sailing around the floor, I felt like a particularly perverted gondolier. Or like that character in Greek myth, who waits to ferry people across the River of Death.
Lest you accuse me of being too plain-spoken about this, I'll wrap up by saying that it took us three and a half hours to clean the mess that it took the drain only 10 minutes to create.
At the end, dripping with apocalyptic grossness and muck, I surveyed the now almost-dry floor with a look that might also have suggested revenge. Then I collapsed over my squeegee handle.
Just kidding! I stayed upright, barely long enough to go soak my entire body in the strongest-smelling disinfectant I could find. Then I fell into a guest bed upstairs and slept the sleep of the deserving, although deserving of what I couldn't really say.
At any rate, Delhi has catastrophic problems with plumbing and wiring and just about any convenience necessary to a comfortable life. This really became apparent to me at about 3 AM yesterday, when I woke up to investigate a brawl outside my house and discovered that my building was, instead, on fire.
I should mention at this point that I live in Hauz Khas Village, of brief NY Times fame and illegal construction notoriety, and also THE hottest and most happening address in New Delhi today. The narrow main road is so crammed with construction that the only way to build is up, resulting in bars and boutiques stacked one atop the other like Jenga pieces or coins, teeteering ever more precariously. After a hundred yards the lane narrows and takes an abrupt left into an alley that looks like an ideal setting for a tryst or a murder. This is where I live.
Some people might call the alley "shady" but the better term for it is dank. There are occasional gaps in the concrete walls through which a casual observer can see people who may or may not be homeless, mixed in with the occasional down-market fashion boutique. The alley is a borderland between the chic shops of the main Village, frequented by deadbeat foreigners, and an actual village, complete with cows and mass apathy. The result is a schizophrenic melting pot of a bylane.
My building is part of Delhi's infamous network of "Lal Dora" constructions, which means "red thread" (I think!) and sounds like it would be sexy, although it isn't. These are semi-legal dwellings over which the police exercise what seems to be almost no control, although I don't know why that is. At any given hour, the pipes in my building might fizzle with electricity or the wiring might start to spew water, but the reverse is relatively unlikely.
The neighborhood is chaotic. A friend who walked me home a while back raised his eyebrows at the street and asked if I didn't think it was too "public," a euphemism meant to encompass the vast gossip network of tailors, vegetable vendors and small shop owners crammed into the narrow space. There were also a few jobless youths on bicycles, a demographic that makes up fully half of Delhi's population at any given time.
No, I do not, although there was a memorable incident two months ago when I woke up at 6 am to the sound of shouting and clamor. When it didn't abate, I dragged myself to the window, intending to holler village-style at the noisemakers. But I couldn't quite do it, because it turns out the entire village had formed a semi circle around an elephant, which bore in a palanquin on its back a tall white girl in a filmy blue harem ensemble ala Aladdin's Jasmine. Every so often the crowd would cheer, which led me to believe that the elephant was performing tricks, or maybe the girl was.
So when I first heard the clamor outside my apartment building two days ago, I assumed it was another ethnically-mismatched Disney wannabe mounted on a zoo animal, or something like that. But then I heard what sounded like a million tiny explosions. Still assuming that it was a party ran amok, I dragged myself once more to the window.
This is what I beheld: a street awash in humanity, and also people whose faces reflected a blazing orange light. A cloud of gray smoke billowing from right beneath me (the ground floor of our building is a garage) and a woman screaming "get out, get out!" in Hindi.
Indeed, my building was on fire. My first instinct was that I didn't want to die alone, so I dashed down the dark hallway to wake up my roommates by barging into their rooms and screaming at them to wake up. This is actually unusual behavior for me.
At any rate, they woke up and spilled into the hallway. I wrenched open the main door and was immediately choked by thick, black smoke, acrid with the smell of burning rubber. The hallway was lost in this haze, in which inexplicable red lights flashed like the cell phone lights of people who had been lost in the blaze. I was immediately reminded of all my fire safety courses - do you know where the fire is? do NOT run into the fire - and so I rapidly shut the door and ran to the window. There were several moments of panic during which I was convinced I was going to die. My life didn't flash before my eyes, nor did I regret not sleeping around more/becoming famous/backpacking Istanbul when I had the chance. The deep thoughts that went through my mind as it trembled on the brink of nothingness were:
no no no no NO FUCK NO!!! and the desperate need to find a way out.
This is where the "public" came in handy.
We're on a low floor, and I gestured at several random men in the street to come catch me as I leapt from the building. As a little girl I often lay awake at night plotting escape routes from my bedroom in the event of fire/molestation/theft, and most involved jumping from my bedroom window into the bushes below the house. I finally got to live a far more indie version of this plan, leaping instead into the welcoming arms of various jobless youths. Perhaps because of the innate decency of Delhi-ites facing disaster, these arms were no more welcoming than they strictly had to be, a fact for which I was and remain grateful.
So there we were, blinking in the street. It took several minutes for the public to douse the fire by pouring sand on it. At that point the fire brigade arrived, outfitted in hats and rubber suits. They took a quick peek at the smoldering remains of the fire and then barged up the stairs to invade people's apartments in search of valuables - excuse me, fire code violations. In search of fire code violations. If only they had thought to do that a few days earlier, or ever, I thought morosely, as a friend scaled a ladder to break back into our apartment and let the fire brigade - and us - in.
We wandered through the smoky night in search of a place to sleep. Between us, my roommates and I were wearing probably two full sets of underwear. This is notable only because there are three of us.
Eventually we ended up at the house of some random lawyer who was a friend of a friend (but more importantly, who had a spare room) and he let the three of us crash in his spare room for a few hours. When I turned on the water in the sink I startled a very large cockroach out of the tap. In an effort to forget that sighting and the fact that I'd scraped the first layer of skin off my thighs in my precipitous hurtle to safety, I decided to drink several shots of straight whiskey out of what appeared to be a cannon shell or a soap dish of some kind. Just kidding! It was a ceramic glass. Yes, that's what I said. A ceramic glass.
Anyway, I felt much better by the time I climbed into bed with my roommates. I remember a party long ago when I introduced one of my roommates to a friend. "Is she your roommate or your flatmate?" asked the friend, although I'm not sure why she cared. At the time, I'd boggled. Now, of course, I can say both, depending on whether our house has just burned down. A roommate remains a roommate even when you have no physical room to share, apparently.
Not that our house had burned down anyway. We arrived after a few hours and found that the apartment was intact, albeit dark and smoky. I threw my valuables into a bag and went to another friend's house, where I ate an entire pizza just to remind myself that I was still alive and a glutton.
A few hours later, I was in the back of an auto on the way to my aunt's house. My aunt lives in a house so commodious, so palatial, that it should probably be illegal, or so it always seems to me because I usually arrive on the brink of some personal disaster. Last time, it was food poisoning. That was only two weeks ago.
This time, slightly singed and still shell-shocked, I arrived at her house and put my things in her basement. We enjoyed a dinner that I again ate heartily of, even though I still felt hungry afterwards because I am alive and a glutton. At about 10, it began to rain, and my sister-in-law and I watched the panes of rain - liquid glass - cover the the garden in a clear glaze. Lightning flashed so often I was reminded of the time Hillary Clinton spoke at my mom's college graduation, and the audience erupted with camera flashes.
At about 10:30, my aunt went downstairs. And this is when the trouble began. Or perhaps I should say, resumed.
Despite living in one of Delhi's most planned neighborhoods, somehow my uncle's basement has no proper drainage system. My aunt spied water seeping from one of the basement drains. The water had backed up. A reverse whirlpool quickly formed, and suddenly the drain was regurgitating - spewing, frothing, projectile vomiting - a noxious brew of brackish black water all over the floor. Within minutes there was thick black water ankle-deep all over the floor, staining the furniture and the marble tile. And it stank. How much did it stink? Like God's wrath called down upon the unbelieving Egyptians, like month-old tofu abandoned in the sink, like the alley in INA market where the butcher let his "free range" chickens roam.
It really, really stank.
I had never before seen a roach in my aunt's house, but I did that night. It was dead, floating along atop a clump of some swampy black grunge. These blackened clumps were everywhere in the water.
On the brink of tears, I rescued my possessions from the basement, thinking how it was that they'd escaped fire only to be brought low by bilge.
Then I rolled up my pants - we all did - and waded into the fray. With rags buckets and a small army of servants attending, we began mopping up the gallons of nasty water that had collected on the floor. I was using a shower squeegee, a household appliance that is invaluable in India and almost unheard of in the United States. It's like a garden rake, but instead of tines it has a rubber strip for sluicing water. Like this, but with a longer handle. My cousin and I began squeegeeing the water across the marble floor, pushing great waves of filthy, roiling black water towards where my aunt and her helpers waited to collect it in buckets and dispose of it.
At one point, squeegee handle in hand and sailing around the floor, I felt like a particularly perverted gondolier. Or like that character in Greek myth, who waits to ferry people across the River of Death.
Lest you accuse me of being too plain-spoken about this, I'll wrap up by saying that it took us three and a half hours to clean the mess that it took the drain only 10 minutes to create.
At the end, dripping with apocalyptic grossness and muck, I surveyed the now almost-dry floor with a look that might also have suggested revenge. Then I collapsed over my squeegee handle.
Just kidding! I stayed upright, barely long enough to go soak my entire body in the strongest-smelling disinfectant I could find. Then I fell into a guest bed upstairs and slept the sleep of the deserving, although deserving of what I couldn't really say.
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