just your average Sunday afternoon

Sorry I haven't posted in some days. There wasn't very much in the way of excitement this past week, until yesterday that is! But before I get into that, let me report that I found out that karikkoddai is actually charcoal. Americans are slow like charcoal, which requires vast amounts of petrol, time, and attention to sufficiently catch on fire. But like I always say, better charcoal than the banana tree log which doesn't burn at all.

Yesterday morning some "rowdies" from the area showed up and started arguing with the neighbors in front of my house because the wife's younger brother had bought a plot of land abutting theirs (which they are anyways illegally occupying) and had built a wall on it which apparently was occupying some of their land (again, not their land in the first place). There was a lot of yelling but eventually they left and things were calm for several hours. Then around 5pm a fracas ensued, when they came back with more people ready to fight. I of course couldn't understand a single word of any of this. There are two kinds of speech I have a hard time understanding here: 1) shy children talking and 2) people fighting. The former mostly because I am half deaf and the latter because I don't know many bad words and cannot understand Tamil when people are screaming.

Actually I did understand a few words when the husband was lunging down the stairs of his house trying to beat the tar out of one of the rowdies, which was basically "BRING IT!" By the time the rowdies had left he was huffing and puffing on the front porch, yelling something about "RESPECT!!!" At the height of the conflict his son had run into the house and got a club (and thankfully not an arivaal -- machete) and came storming out, ready to do some damage.
The husband had rolled up his veshti and was ready as well, but the women were in the middle holding the men back. Turns out they were fighting with the guy who is my regular rickshaw driver, but I couldn't see him as I was peering out the window trying to get a glimpse of the melee. I simply couldn't imagine him fighting, as he is totally calm and quiet at all times, but according to sources he is like a cobra which goes along calmly one minute and strikes the next.

Today I learned that it all started when these rowdies, whom everyone is afraid of, came over here in the morning and started harassing the wife when her husband was not home. This got him pretty outraged, that and when they came back and went up to his door and ordered, "HEY, EJACULATE!!! GET OUT HERE." Turns out calling a man "ejaculate" isn't a very nice thing and is a good way to start a fight. Of course I didn't know this word and got Tamilarasi to tell me all the bad words that were exchanged yesterday, but they were so bad she couldn't bring herself to speak them and wrote them down instead. She was also nearly dying of embarassment and laughing hysterically, but I was of course pretty excited to learn some bad words as these are things one certainly won't get in the classroom. Apparently they were also screaming things like "I am going to rape your mother, sister, grandmother, etc." These things weren't so funny of course.

Once the police showed up, the rowdies got on their motorcycles and went home. Not sure what the next phase is going to be. The neighbors put a police complaint against them which was pretty brave considering most people here avoid the police at all costs, and certainly don't put complaints against confirmed rowdies. After the rowdies dispersed, I considered it safe to leave and I went to a big kan kadchi (literally "show for the eyes" or "exhibition") at Tamukkam. Turns out it was a good thing I left when I did, because there was a huge brawl directly BEHIND my house last night while I was away. Basically I won't get into the details in this forum, but someone was demanding to be able to pitch a tent on my roof so his family could live there. This person has clearly lost his mind.

Some of the highlights of this past week included getting my fridge repaired and getting darshan of Nasser, a big Tamil movie star! They were doing a cinema shooting at the Gandhi museum. Unfortunately I had missed the shooting the day before when Nasser had acted out a heart attack scene with some comedians, including Vivek!

Unfortunately all my Nasser pics turned out blurry, but here he is with a group of schoolkids.

Tamilarasi channeling a distinctly Rajasthani way of wearing a sari.