I miss Balla
Saturday night, I found myself sitting in Jaipur’s Kamat, eating a masala dosa. Naturally, as Kamat (the TGIF of South Indian food) and dosas were key repeated elements of my Hyderabad-Gulbarga summer, I was seized with feelings of nostalgia. And of course, I remembered Balla. Balla has had a starring role in this blog for a long time. I believe he is mentioned more than any of my friends, significant others, coworkers, or relatives — possibly more than all of them combined. I’d like to say this is because Balla is the future of India. Or better yet, Balla is a metaphor for modern India: whimsical and deeply enigmatic yet endearing (and marvelously entertaining), innovative, subject to innumerable systematic obstacles, always changing and learning yet somehow still firmly conservative, one foot in the past and one foot already in the future. I might make that claim — but it would be awfully pretentious. Instead, I’ll leave it at the following anecdote. Think of this as an epilogue to India Summer I.
Last summer, there used to be an ICICI bank office in the same apartment building as the CMF field office. When the office was renovated, some lengths of used industrial carpeting were sitting in the building’s otherwise unassuming lobby. At some point, Balla and the questionable character who lived in the building elevator (seriously he lived there; though he also sometimes slept on the floor outside our office door, and we paid him 200 Ruppees a month, mostly because everyone else in the building did) had a lightbulb moment. Balla disappeared for a day. We thought little of it. Then we noticed that a rough trapezoid of industrial carpeting had been placed haphazardly on the floor of the tiny elevator. Balla and the elevator dude had classed up the joint, pimped the elevator so to speak, with stolen, used ICICI bank carpeting.
Without Balla, in the confines of the State Department’s and my host family’s benign embraces, India seems so much less chaotic, less.. Balla-esque. That’s kinda a shame.
