Whatever Ubekistan lacks in natural resources, I'm sure it makes up for in producing rediculously fabulous human specimens. I once came across one (in West St. Louis County at that!) - and given the opportunity, the 6'9 Igor Ivanov would never fail to delight. After snatching the guitar from the swooning Norwegian, he'd grab the petite Austrian girl by the pigtail, belch her a joke and erupt in laughter. Should you fail to share the sentiment, he'd turn abruptly, 'stare into your soul' and slowly raise two fingers to his head. After pulling the imaginary trigger, the same two fingers would swoop below his chin and across his throat, before instantly contracting into a fist that slowly pulled the noose into the air. The implications of such a life-boggling act were anything but ambiguous: should you happen to upset him, Young Igor would shoot, slash and hang you in under 2 seconds - though not without a touch of humor throughout the spectacle! (which oddly enough was riotously funny at the time (2003?)).
The moral of the story, as any quasi-relatively-life-experienced-twat can tell you, is that the world is awash in great characters; India, as you may have guessed, is no exception. Let's start with Mr. Chatterjee, our Brahman landlord who lives directly above us. Not to sound overtly effeminate, but he's a perfectly adorable little man. Chatterjee's got a golden halo of shiny brown baldness to crown his royal little figure, which in its turn is surrounded by a circularly descending flock of white shaggy hair. Apart from his thick-rimmed glasses (either holy or merely intelligentsia-issued) and long, white goatee, he dons a thin, golden sachet underneath his loosely drapped traditional Hindu garb (sorry all you culture-gurus, I can't recall the name of the shirt). He's an extremely well-read and well-traveled man - though has been more or less in the neighborhood since Partition (1947). The stairs to his second floor apartment lead directly to the living room and there are no doors or completely closed-off walls in his abode. When I used to venture up there in the morning to catch a glimpse of the massive, 2X2ft electric clock in the hallway, Chatterjee would either be in the kitchen reading the paper or in the living room catching up on some tubaboober. Behind the television set is a wall length sculptured mural of Socrates (lecturing in the marketplace) protruding from the wall. Socrates' face, shoulder and parts of his forearm are beige (against on otherwise brown blackground) - the rest of the figures are still the primer white. At the foot of the mural there stand a variety of (almost) lifesize Hindu gods (then again I've no clue how tall that demonic blue rascal was reckoned to be!); Shiva the blue-god and Someone-Else-the-Elephant-nosed-child-god are also present - though don't ask me to make the distinction in front of any pious soul.
Chatterjee sometimes gets out the photo album or recites old films he's seen or books he's read. I should've taken note during out first encounter, for truly an eclectic bunch it was. I skim through a biography of Charlie Chaplan that was lying on the coffee table while a four inch salamander comes in from the second floor balcony and scatters across the floor into the kitchen. Chatterjee lights some incense before getting back to the movie: he loves Will Smith, though isn't crazy about this 'Wild Wild West'
India is either (still) 'extremely traditional', overtly misogynous or methodologically patriarchical (whether or not any of you actually see a distinction in the aforementioned terms is another point of debate!). Being the only 'long-term' male in the trainee apartment (we get new interns almost every night from China, though they're usually mysteriously whisked away within 72 hours), I have the privilege of officially interacting with the outside world concerning all matters of practical/domestic concern. I could be in the shower, fast asleep, on the pot or in the park for that matter, and the landlord, waterboy, gasman and delivery guy would wait until I got back before conducting any business with the inhabitants of our apartment (though yes, of course, I am slightly exagerrating). Not that the guy from DHL would question me as to my current marital status (as was the case with a friend of ours who went to send a package back to France) - though some of my 8yearold students were appalled to learn that after twentythreeyears on mother earth, I still wasnt married...
More character profiles to come (and maybe oneday even pictures!)
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