Wednesday 11 July 2012

ENGLISH AUGUST


MONDAY, AUGUST 02, 2004

English August

It is 1st of August and about 4 weeks since I landed in England…

It feels good… settled into an apartment …new place… nice weather… it is supposed to be english summer … but I feel slightly cold… and I am told it will only get colder…

Among other things, I am slowly getting out of this habit of multiplying price tags by 70-80 to see how expensive things are out here…

I still cannot get used to eating out – for one considering that there are hardly any vegetarian options available and whatever is available is so damn expensive … any case sandwiches and burgers are not my idea of eating out … wonder if the English have ever had a staple food…after all a mumbaiite does’nt call vada pav his staple food … what the hell did they eat before the Earl of sandwich discovered Sandwich - that universal staple food…
Where do their fibres and greens come from ??? The fact that they are as healthy if not healthier than us Indians negates the fact that their diets are’nt really wholesome…
I am curious to see what a typical English family eats on a Sunday lunch…

Talking of families, I have’nt really come across a “family” as yet. All My English colleagues are living with boyfriends or girlfriends and that is’nt family by conventional definition.

The only other English person I know is my landlady Mrs Susanne king.. whose is getting over the pangs of a divorce at 60. Her two grown up daughters live in France and new-zealand . Her 65 year old husband divorced her last year (I wonder what greener pastures he discovered at that age ) and she desperately needs my rent to make ends meet . So technically even the King family is’nt a family.

I think she is extraordinarily sweet. I cannot make out if that is her nature or if that is normal English formality...She once sent me flowers and called me up twice to check if I am comfortably settling in …and if I need her to buy me anything in the house…Makes me wonder if I am her tenant or the other way…

I said I need nothing… not because I do not need anything else.. but because I do not know what can be asked and what cannot be asked. Of course … I need a pressure cooker, a kadai, a tawa ,a mixer, a pakkad ,a broadband connection and maybe a TV. But I have not yet figured out whether all this is luxury or a part of what I can ask her for …

Wanted to tell her that her sherry glasses, wine glasses , liqueur glasses, pudding bowls , meat plate , baking oven, coffee maker and casseroles are things I could have managed without … how I miss my tawa and kadai back home…I miss shobha tai’s phulka rotis… and BTW bloody milk when set does’nt become dahi here…no it is not the climate… I even kept it in the warm heater cupboard .I Figured out that the yoghurt here probably does not have the lactobaccilus ( or whatever it is that makes dahi out of milk) which can reproduce. They are probably sterilised to prevent reproduction and thus help the Yoghurt industry grow.

Can’t deprive a Tam of her daily dose of curd rice you see … so now I buy yogurt every week instead of milk from sainsbury’s …
******************
It is cute to see couples young or old hold hands and walk in the streets…
But I must admit it was a mild shock to see couples smooch in public…I have seen that in HBO movies … but in real life !!! could not quite hold my curiosity to stare at them … maybe they must have thought … “bloody Indian country brute”... or may be they were least bothered.

As of now life in england looks exciting …planning to travel around Europe and the English countryside. Read / surf regularly, join a part time course etc…etc…etc…sometime in the near future… but right now .. I am still struggling getting a broadband connection at home.

They say it is all very easy… just a phone call and you get the service within a couple of days … but not for me if you understand my problem …

It is very unnerving to call up those toll free numbers of broadband service providers … because I am mortally scared of the bubbly but undecipherable accent which probably says “hi..good afternoon … welcome to BT sales service … this is sarah here how may I help you etc etc etc…”and what they say beyond that is a nightmare… 80% goes above my head … I don’t know … they seem to take a paragraph to say something that can be said in a sentence …

Sometimes I wonder if we all speak the same language… I always thought English was the most comfortable language I knew… after all I don’t “think” in Tamil, hindi or Marathi. I “think” in English, write in English and apart from the folks at home I speak in English with everyone else.
Will it be blasphemous to say English is my mother tongue ?
Especially when you are in England and you cannot quite understand the “Native tongue”…

At the local Sainsbury’s where I shop for groceries I look out for an Indian / asian looking staff to ask for help… when I cannot find masoor dal or chilly powder … but then even that is very misguiding… salah desi log idhar aake accent pick up kar leta hai .

Ah… I hope I get over this phobia for the English’ English accent soon…( need to check up the web for a phobia word for “fear of accents” … after I get my broadband connection)
I prefer e-mail conversations with my non-indian colleagues … despite the fact that I can pick up the phone and call them up or go over to their desk…I avoid that . You know why.
Mmm…Should have watched more HBO before coming here.

I seem to have a lot of free time… work is not very demanding … it is infact a song compared to what it was in Mumbai …offices are empty by 6.00 – 6.30 … probably only the Indians work beyond that …moreover working late is not looked at as very positive…
Unless you have an Indian boss which unfortunately I have.

Hardly anyone comes to office on the weekends…most people travel out during the weekends . All shops are closed by 5.00 p.m . The high street which is the main shopping center in guildford– where I live is deserted at 6.00 p.m on a Sunday evening. There is just no one on the streets. Could have murdered any living creature around and got away with it… Compared to Mumbai where life starts at 8.00 p.m this place seems dead.

Last Saturday I had been to Greenwich park… the place that is the zero degree longitude and is used to calculate the GMT . I posed for a photograph with one leg on one hemisphere and the other in the other hemisphere . Not a big deal considering that it is only an imaginary line and the british decided to call it the center of earth in the 18th century to determine time. But then everyone was creating a big hype around it so I joined in …

That was last weekend . This weekend , I was at home without anything to read or surf .
I walked to office on Saturday just to go down and surf the net. But then there was not one living soul in the entire business park . Like many of my other learning experiences I learnt that unlike back in mumbai , there is no 24/7 security manning the offices. One has to use the access card and the password code to get into the office and true to myself I never bothered to note down the code numbers from the office manager- Julie. She did mumble something when she handed over my access card and keys to my drawer on the second day of my work here . But like so much else that goes above my head when Julie speaks, I must have just nodded my head when she explained the code number funda to me .

So here I am sitting at home and typing out on my laptop…my musings about my misadventures in England…

It has been a long blog … which I plan to upload tomorrow morning …
It is time for me now to microwave some of my aloo-gobi and Dal tadka that I made in the morning and eat it with basmati rice.



No comments:

Post a Comment