you can call me coconut water

Last night I went up to the roof where the wind was blowing and it felt simply splendid, a much need relief from the sweltering heat downstairs. The two neem trees adjacent to the house catch whatever scant breeze is available in the area and multiply it. Meenambalpuram is very arid and dusty and doesn’t have many trees, and I think if it did folks would be a lot happier. Well, at least they would be cooler, and for an American in India this translates to happier. Of course these trees would have to be mighty hardy, seeing as how this place is basically a desert.

In the evening hours while I usually head up to the roof for some heat relief, older gentlemen in the neighborhood usually pull a plastic chair out into the dirt road and just sit there in the evenings, relaxing. Most women around here come and sit out on their front porch, chatting for hours. Sometimes they brawl about money, but usually it’s friendly conversation and gossip. Last night the funny joke was that the ladies across the street couldn’t really pronounce my name and it ended up coming out as “coconut water” – which is what my name sounds like if you leave off the initial “m” sound. I told them it was no problem if they wanted to call me “coconut water.” There are worse names like “rat” or “pig”, which is how some American names translate into Tamil.

It’s nice to see folks sitting outside their houses, especially women. Because in my experience in middle to upper-middle class neighborhoods, women usually stay pretty much locked up in the house. They definitely don’t sit outside on the front porches idly chatting away with neighbors, I guess partly because there are walls surrounding their homes. In my own personal experience in such a middle class family, the woman of the house (or, I should say, the daughter-in-law) had nary an idle moment to spare whatsoever. In fact, she never sat down that I saw. Folks around here in Meenambalpuram don’t bother with such things. The women seem to sit down whenever they have a chance. This isn’t to say they aren’t working like crazy 95% of the time while their husbands mostly lounge nearby smoking beedies, but they do seem to have some free time around these parts.

I have finally started to recover from the dreaded mango disease. I noted that in 2 ½ days I drank 20 liters of water. Drinking that much water is supposed to kill folks, but I’m still thirsty. That evil mango pretty much knocked me slam on my ass.

Yesterday Tamilarasi took me to the town library. This was certainly a interesting experience. I've been to some of the local university libraries, which are quite good, but I've never been to a public library. First off, there were no lights or fans turned on, I guess to save money. So it was quite dark. The first room you walk in to was full of only men, all reading newspapers -- either standing up at special newspaper reading stations, or sitting down at three very long tables. It was pretty quiet in there. Then you walk up some stairs into the "library" section. This was full of mostly women, reading quietly or looking for books. The books were arranged by various topics. One such topic was "stories". The whole shelf was supposedly full of stories, which ranged from fiction to non-fiction biographies to poetry to religious stories. I say "supposedly" because there are no titles on the bindings whatsover. Furthermore, there is no classification system. There are just hundreds of books thrown onto the shelves, all looking exactly the same. When I asked about a card catalog folks looked at me blankly.

I met a very nice woman there who is doing her M.A. in Tamil. She was looking for poetry, which is what her thesis is on. She told me that you must just "take a risk" and grab a book, hoping it's something useful. I was pretty baffled, trying to imagine doing research under such conditions. Tamilarasi couldn't understand why I found the "system" a bit difficult. She just simply started taking all the books off the shelf, one by one, looking for something useful. While I wanted to jump on the tables and start screaming about the wonders of the Dewey decimal system, others simply searched for books with all the patience of Job. They would grab a book and walk to a window where some light was getting in to open it up and see what it was. There were plenty of avid readers there, and everyone seemed to find what they were looking for, so I guess everything is working out just peachy at the Simhakal public library.

Come on folks, is the Dewey Decimal System really necessary?