women's days

I have been working three weeks without a holiday, and yet I have found the time to visit India Gate at midnight and eat meetha paan while boys with accents played hotel California on out-of-tune acoustic guitars nearby and great shiny lights lit shiny construction sites; and I have found the time to take walks through the market during Tuesday haat with flatmates and drink bitter carrot juice at roadside stalls and be overcharged by fruitsellers; and I have found the time to be a Shoulder to people who told me and told me and then told me they felt better because they'd told me; and I have found the time to watch Slumdog Millionaire on somebody's laptop on a bed with people i had known for less than a week; and I have found the time to split a meal four ways with strangers when I ordered vegetarian and the others did not, and the time to complain to other strangers about it.

And today and tonight I met old and new geeks I would be a groupie for; and made hypocritical conversations on the bejewelled sofa of my landlady; and wandered the streets alone in the dark with clenched fists afraid that someone would step out of the shadows and I would be stuck in a strange city with nobody to turn to; and I called and called the one person whom I promised I would not, because I knew he would be the Shoulder I needed when I needed, and I needed him.

I am tired and sleep-deprived and overworked and underpaid and all I'm thinking is that I miss the one I love.
What does it mean to be a woman?

And I have to speculate that God himself
Did make us into corresponding shapes like
Puzzle pieces from the clay
True, it may seem like a stretch, but
Its thoughts like this that catch my troubled
Head when you're away when I am missing you to death

:) Ow.

tired.

I am alone and far away from home and I have gone a week without a whole night of uninterrupted sleep.
The only thing that really bothers me is the amount of money I'm paying to stay in Delhi.

sigh. I just cried a few tears at the unfairness of it all.
Well, and back to work, and work, and another Sunday of work. Isn't my life wonderful?

in delhi

Time! Time! I need more time! But I will make use of the little I've stolen, now. Oh constant reader (and at this point, that's certainly the adjective. Or perhaps manically optimistic? But there - I do not want to drive away the few that remained.), do bear with me while I attempt to talk of the drama, and drama, and melodrama (and perhaps a little light comedy) that I've been immersed in over the last few weeks...


The office I work for has two bases: one in Delhi (where the boss is from) and the other in Bangalore (where the boss lives). Seeing that I had been working in the Bangalore office for over ten months, I decided it was high time I learned what it was like to work in another city, and I firmly told my boss so.
All right, fine. She offered a chance to work in Delhi, and I grabbed it. The main reason I grabbed it was because the agreement was that I would serve out my term (which ends in June, and I do not use the term (ha ha) lightly) in Delhi, after which I would decide where I would go next.

I didn't get a raise, in case anyone was wondering. The office doesn't work that way. all I was promised was that any expenses incurred purely because of my displacement would be borne by the office. This meant rent, and food, and a round trip ticket by third AC to Delhi from Bangalore. Everything else I was taking care of at Bangalore, I had to continue to take care of. This meant a new Delhi phone number and all its attendant expenses, any medical expenses incurred, and all travel to and from the office. [This last is really not considerable (in that it cannot be considered), because I was either travelling with her, or staying less than a minute away from the office, as I am now.]
The initial plan included a stop-over at a site we were working on in Chhattisgarh. I was not very keen on this, because not only are there no direct trains from Bangalore to Raipur, but I was carrying with me three months' worth of baggage, and until two days before I was due to leave, I had no idea who was to accompany me, a lone female, to the State with the highest crime rate in India. (I'm indebted for this piece of information to the boyfriend - she expects you to stop over at the state with the highest crime rate on your way to the place with the second highest?)
The long and short of it was that I got out of the plan the easy way.
I asked my father to talk to my boss. (The repercussion of this is that she now says she won't send me anywhere, which is unfair because one of the reasons I wanted to be in North India were our projects here. Oh, well.)

Thus it was that, on the 11th of February 2009, two days after the T boarded the one-point-three-day-long Delhi-Bangalore Rajdhani Express with one suitcase, one handbag, one backpack, and one paper bag with items her mother insisted she would need. (She didn't really, none except one.)
But the rest in the next installment!