The Country Bumpkin Meets the High Life

Summary: Sometimes, you don’t realize what you’ve got until it’s gone. Other times, you don’t realize what you’ve missed until you get it back.

The past eight months in the heart of the cow belt has turned me into a country bumpkin; this past weekend, I finally saw myself for what I’ve become.

Xi, a friend from Monitor, was recently sent to Mumbai for a project, and we arranged for a fun-filled weekend in Agra and Delhi. She has a friend working for the Singapore High Commission in Delhi, who was nice enough to let us both stay with him. Preliminary email exchanges foreshadowed what was to come – there was talk about his two spare bedrooms, playing pool and foosball in his apartment, and cars and drivers. Reading those emails in our humble office, I found myself feeling a little uncomfortable, and it wasn’t (entirely) because I was sitting on a plastic patio chair.

Delhi itself felt deceptively new for the country bumpkin. The train station, NZM, had a 24-hour Vegas-like café with music next door. There were still many lights and cars (and people!) out and about at 10:30 pm. It was like being in a dream; everything I used to know but no longer remembered.

Then there was the Apartment. When I first stepped into said Apartment at 11:32 pm on Saturday, October 10, 2009, I felt like I entered a parallel universe. Seventeen seconds later, I took my first breath in this foreign place, and commenced the exploration process. There were many things that “first” caught my eye – the spaciousness, the cleanliness, the pool table, the big-screen LCD television, the cleanliness, the couch, the brightness, the white walls, the shiny floor, and, did I mention the cleanliness? (He is from Singapore, after all.) Now, unless you’ve actually experienced life here in Lucknow, it’s hard for me to explain exactly why I was so struck by each and every one of those items listed.

After almost an hour of jaw-dropping awe, I made it into the bathroom to take a much-needed shower. As some background information, I’m lucky enough to have a shower at home, though poor water pressure sometimes forces me to surrender to the buckets. In order to maximize enjoyment from the shower, however, I have to time it very precisely, given that I rely on the sun to heat my water.

So I step into his shower underneath the raindrop shower head, and I turn the hot water on. The water starts falling on me, and washes away any remaining sanity left on me. I laugh. Not just any laugh, but the guttural laugh of a madwoman who has lost her last screw. And I can’t stop laughing. The more the water falls, the harder I laugh.

I finally pause long enough to see the shower settings (because yes, there were settings), and, like any good explorer, I test them all. There’s the stylish removable showerhead spray, the lateral jacuzzi-massage jet spray, and the regular spigot. I tried them all, in every possible combination.

As I stepped out of the steam-filled bathroom onto the tile floor, I finally remembered what it feels like to be clean. To feel like I am at home.