The past couple of days that I've gone to collect Maya from nursery, I've found her half way up a palm tree. It's quite a small palm tree, but even so. Anyway, she seemed very happy up there so I left her to it while I chatted to the other kids. It turned out they'd been taking it in turns to climb the tree and the other little girls seemed quite impressed by Maya's tenacity to cling on. I was too - a palm tree is hardly the easiest tree to climb!
Life in Bangalore continues with its constant store of adventures, frustrations, delights and offerings in all its spicy and colourful guises. It occurred to me this morning that things we once would have baulked at are now part and parcel of our lives here. Maya, for example, is now a dab hand at hailing an auto- rickshaw. She sticks out her little arm on the roadside, waves it up and down and hey-presto, the yellow beast appears. As for me, I no longer fear my life may end prematurely every time I cross a road. In heavy traffic, you just have to step into it like everyone else, and trust that cars / trucks / cows / rickshaws are moving slowly enough not to mow you down. If I have both the girls with me, I have become very adept at having Lily in the sling on my front and hoisting Maya on to one hip when I want to cross a road. It's funny how accustomed we've become to this now - we approach a road crossing and Maya and I have an unspoken agreement at this point: without words, she reaches up her arms to me and up she comes. I know we're an unusual sight but again, this is something we're coming to accept.
Whilst talking about traffic, I'd like to share an experience that happened to us in the second week here. I didn't want to mention it straight after it happened as didn't want concerned grannies / aunties etc etc worrying! Maya, Lily and I were in a rickshaw going down 100 Feet Road, probably the busiest road in the area. We were hurtling along and I suddenly realised we were about to pass the turning (on the other side of the road) for our street so told the rickshaw driver where I wanted to go. Now, this is where I would have expected him to have continued and made a u-turn a bit later to come back to my road. But no, what he did was very suddenly and very violently turn the wheel at a right angle into the oncoming traffic without so much as a glance to see how many cars were coming our way. Hundreds of deafening honks later, it transpired that because he'd turned the wheel so rapidly it had got stuck. So there we were, on a massively busy road, stuck in the middle of it with hundreds of cars coming for us at breakneck speed. I don't normally get that scared by crazy drivers, after all I've had to endure my own driving for the past ten years. But this got my heart rate going, I can tell you. In the end, the driver had to get out of the rickshaw and push it to safety through the crazed oncoming traffic. This kind of experience, I'm sorry to say, now happens at least a few times a week and none of us bat an eyelid!
Flicking through Time Out Bangalore the other day, this is what one writer has to say about the traffic here which I thought summed it up pretty well:
... the one unambiguous message that Bangalore seems to send out nowadays with its new calligraphy of things bigger than you - flyovers, magic boxes, impregnable glass-and-metal vaults and faraway sky - is that you're a person when you drive a car, and all others can fuck off.
Scuse his French, but it's true. This ain't a city for pedestrians.
So, whilst the traffic here dances to a rather agressive tune, dancing of another kind entirely is going on at our little apartment. Today is World Dance Day which I think is very apt because in the past week, Maya has taken to dancing in a big way. Every day starts the same way now: With Mummy groggily dragging herself out bed, with Daddy getting the breakfast ready, with Lily burbling and chuckling and trying to crawl (she's sooo close!) and with Maya rolling out the yoga mat and asking for the music to begin! Music selected, she then jives, wiggles, struts and bops her naked little body up and down the length of the yoga mat. It is so, so brilliant to watch. Depending on her mood, sometimes she wants to dance with one of us, sometimes she wants her partner to be her own shadow on the wall and other times she just wants to dance alone. Her movements have definitely taken on an Indian feel now, with arms outstretched and hands turning in circular motions. I think this is as a result of the Kathak dance performance we went to last week and also the dancing which she does at nursery.
The photo above was taken a few days ago in the midst of one of Maya's energetic bounces, making her curls fly! Anyway, happy world dance day one and all and make sure you put the radio on at some point today and enjoy a bit of a boogie. It's good for the soul, even (or especially) if it's just in the kitchen!
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