Housing Lessons

It’s been about a week since I arrived in Delhi. Even though adjusting to jet lag has been fairly annoying (I would get tired at random times of the day - 11am, 6pm, and any other time except bedtime), tonight might be the first night that I'll make it through the day without napping or dozing off in the middle of doing something. If you had talked to me anytime up to a couple days before I left New Jersey, I probably would have still said that I did not know where I was staying, or “put up” as the locals might say. When I was negotiating the logistics for my time in Delhi, my boss and I made a deal that if he could find housing for me, I would take care of everything else, including travel, food, and other expenses. Early Tuesday morning (I left Wednesday night), I got an email finally with my accommodations. I was pleased because it was walking distance to work and it supposedly included breakfast and internet as well.

My boss has some good taste. The “colony” or neighborhood that I’m living in right now is called Hauz Khas. My boss even remarked as he was driving me to work on the first day that he couldn't even afford to live in this area, which is why he has to drive about one hour (it should be shorter if there wasn’t so much traffic) to work everyday. Some of the houses remind me of the places that I would see when I visited my cousins in California – they are huge. I’m staying with my landlord and his servant, and I got the bedroom upstairs to myself. It’s been a great place for me to settle down and get adjusted to Indian life. There are little perks here and there, like having coffee and biscuits brought to me every morning, sleeping on a king sized bed in the privacy of my own room, and even having a friendly servant whose smile makes my day whenever I bump into him.

The only thing that I regrettably have to object to is the price. I knew it was going to be expensive coming in (I was planning on shelling out 1,000 dollars for six weeks), but not this expensive. Turns out I’m expected to pay 1250 rupees (thirty dollars) per night plus 100 rupees (two dollars and thirty cents) for my entire time here. Doing the math, that adds up to about 57,000 rupees or 1,360 dollars for six weeks accommodation! I was talking to some people at work as well as people I met from church and I met someone who pays 80 dollars a month for her studio. Another girl who has an entire apartment to herself with a big terrace is only paying 20,000 rupees (500 dollars) a month. There was no way I could justify spending so much money, even more than I would ever pay at school in Ann Arbor regardless of how I split my funding and my own money up.

So I decided today that I was going to move out. Where? I have no idea right now. I teeter tottered all weekend about staying, thinking about how comfortable it would be to stay, how the breakfast tastes really good, how I’m so close to work, etc. But along with the whole money situation, I realized that where I’m living right now is not exactly the experience of India that I was imagining coming in. There isn’t really much street life (except for the guards that sit outside the gated fences of houses all night) and I barely get to interact with people outside of my landlord and his servant. I’m figuring that while I’m in India, I should go out of my way to interact with the people as much as possible. I feel like even those little five minute exchanges over prices for fruits or that innocent question about where the best place to buy a cell phone goes a long way in the memory of my experience here. I’m going to believe that my experience will be so much richer in memory as I move into a neighborhood with greater people to interaction while freeing up some funds to do other things than pay rent.

So my new journey starts tomorrow. I’m going to temporarily move into a hostel at the local university, Jawaharlal Nehru University, with the Naga friend I met from church on Sunday. We’ll spend a couple days looking for housing nearby my work in a different area of town , and we’ll see what happens from there. Heres to another adventure!