Day after day: peeling carrots

I may have said this before, but life in rural India is so strange.  As I fall into a routine, I find I have less and less to say each day, but something happened yesterday that I want to stand out, even once it fades from my memory, like all little moments do when given enough time. 

Yesterday, like every day, I woke up, and was put to work peeling vegetables.  We start preparing lunch around 9AM, and then we eat for the first time each day around noon or so.  We only eat two meals a day, both times a curry with chapattis.  The rest of the day, I’m free to munch on as much fruit as I’d like, although, I think if I eat one more guava straight from the tree, my tongue is going to split.  I’ve had way too much citrus lately.  I can’t help it though, I love citrus fruits.  Oranges, pineapple, guava...they are the bane of my tongue’s existence after a while.

Anyhow, I wasn’t feeling very well, and I was put to work peeling an entire bucket of carrots.  It was well over a hundred carrots, possibly on the upwards end of TWO hundred carrots.  So I plugged in my headphones, put my phone on shuffle, and sat against the wall in the sun of the courtyard peeling carrots.  At one point, Harpal (who is more and more my saviour these days – he provides me with the little moments that make this WWOOFing thing worth it) ...he came up and asked me if I was enjoying myself.  I gave my usual noncommittal answer of ‘yeah, it’s okay’ ...or  ‘well, I’m peeling 200 carrots, but other than that...’ – and he gave me a mini-lecture on how I should only do things in life which are enjoyable, and not do things which are not enjoyable.  I told him I enjoy being useful, and I ended the conversation and put my headphones back in. 

A little while later, he told me to grab a jacket, he needed me for work.  So I ran into the house real quick, and told Surrinder I had to leave, and I had done only so much of the peeling for her, and I took off.  As we headed out in the broken down work truck, Harpal confessed that he knew I was bored out of my mind, but it amused him that I let Surrinder tell me to do whatever she wishes (which invariably involves peeling vegetables for hours on end), and that he finally decided that I had enough of peeling carrots, and dragged me along with him because he said I needed some fun, too. 

So crammed three people to a two person vehicle (I sat on the center console) ...we took off to that village that I went to a couple of days ago, where the mechanics shop is.  And this time was a lot better – we were both more talkative, and we talked about all kinds of things, though I regret having brought up the topic of religion, because it sparked a huge rant on Harpal’s end, and me and Khan (a friend visiting from Uttar Pradesh) got really quiet and the conversation became pretty one sided.  All I wanted to know is the difference between Hindu and Sikh!  I still don’t know, by the way.  The second someone starts to talk about religion, apathetic-atheist brain kicks in, and I just don’t give a shit.  I just wanted my question answered, damn it!

Anyhow, we got to the village, and it was a nice day, and the sun was shining – I wasn’t feeling very well, but I’ve never let that stop me in the past.  We checked out the machine he’d brought in, which was being fitted with parts so that it can be driven through the field and remove weeds from between the rows of wheat.  Harpal thinks it will be a revolutionary invention to the Indian farmers.  Do machines that get rid of weeds not exist in this world already?  It was pretty ingenious, considering the whole thing was built in two days by men using welder’s arcs without face masks or any formal schooling.  We tested it out, and we were there for two cups of tea (I think time is measured in the number of cups of tea someone offers you during your stay) and well after sunset. 

Again, I was stared at, but I decided to take Robbie’s advice, and not be so awkward about it, and smile once in a while, and I think it worked.  That, and they recognized me from a few days ago, so they were even MORE curious – who is this foreigner who comes to our village, and then comes AGAIN?  I had a conversation with an old woman who only knew how to say ‘water’ in English, and coincidentally, that’s the only Punjabi word I know, too – ‘pani’.  Khan did some translating for us, and it was a pretty neat experience, to converse with someone in the way that only two people who can’t use words to say what they want to say, can manage to converse.   Also, I think that was a terrible sentence.  I’m sick, so sue me.

At one point, and this is the point that I wanted to make sure I remember, though I don’t understand how I could ever forget – at one point, I was surrounded, in the dark, by about twenty Punjabi men, and they were all staring at me and shouting questions at me, and they pushed a teenage boy to the front of the group, and he looked at me really shyly, and then he started to translate their questions for me.  “Where are you from?  What is it like there?  Do you like our village? Why are you in our village?  Thank you for coming to our village, we are very glad you came to see us.  Do you like India?  Is Canada the same as India?” ...I told them I thought their village and their people were very beautiful, and that it was very good, also.  India is also good, but it is very different from Canada, and I told them my name, and they all took turns trying to pronounce my name (it is hard for the Indian tongue to pronounce, it turns out) and then one of them brought out a Nikon, and wanted all the mechanics to pose next to the machine, and they wanted me in the picture too!  So we had our picture taken in the dark, and ten minutes later, a boy shyly handed me a copy of the pictures, so now I have copies of them.  It’s crazy.  When we left, I made Harpal translate for me to say that I really enjoyed conversing with everyone, and in my lingering uncomfortableness at the situation, when I had to leave I did the Thai hand-bow thing without thinking, and a few of them copied me and did it back to me.  It’s funny how when I’m extremely grateful of something, I revert to that Thai gesture now.    

This is why India is strange, and wonderful, and why I get so upset when people keep telling me I should leave, and that they are horrible people.  This is why it is not true.