(Some of the earlier letters I had written home from Bombay had found their way to a local school.\u00a0 The teacher asked if I could write about a typical day in our life in Bombay.\u00a0 Here is the result.)<\/p>\n
April 1998<\/p>\n
Dear Friends:<\/p>\n
I heard that you were interested to hear about my family\u2019s life in Bombay, India.\u00a0 I will tell you what a typical day is like.<\/p>\n
One of the first things I do in the morning is brush my teeth.\u00a0 I walk to the sink, take my toothbrush, and get it wet with drinking water from a bottle.\u00a0\u00a0 I also rinse my mouth out with water from a bottle.\u00a0 The water from the faucet here in India can make you very sick if you drink it, so we have to boil it first, then pour it through a filter so it will be clean and good.\u00a0 Our maid uses a big, big pot to boil water every few days.<\/p>\n
When the whole family is awake Our maid\/cook\u00a0 serves us breakfast.\u00a0 Her name is Patsy and she is from here in India.\u00a0 In the United States only a very few people have servants, but here many, many people have servants.\u00a0 Patsy cooks our meals, shops for food, washes the dishes after meals, does the laundry (she even irons my shirts!), and cleans the floors and bathrooms.\u00a0 My wife I are used to doing things for ourselves, but Patsy gets frustrated when we do the jobs she thinks are hers to do and she says, \u201cNo madam (this is what she calls Anita, and she calls me sir), I can do that!”\u00a0 Patsy is a very hard worker.\u00a0 She is also very nice.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
For breakfast we eat cereal (they even have Kelloggs Cornflakes in India), toast, scrambled eggs, fruit and coffee, all similar to what many Americans have.\u00a0 After breakfast our children ride in a van to the American School.\u00a0 Their classes have 9 to 15 students each with classmates from many different countries such as Japan, Korea, Israel, and Finland.\u00a0 My children have homework and tests and projects just like students in the United States.<\/p>\n
I also ride in a van to the place where I work.\u00a0 I wish you could see the sights we see along the streets of Bombay.\u00a0 There are many, many cars, with much honking of horns.\u00a0 In India it is not rude to honk, but it is a helpful way of telling other drivers, \u201cHere I am, watch out!\u201d\u00a0 We see Indian women dressed in beautiful saris and other styles of garments with lovely, silky scarves draped around their shoulders. You can also see carts pulled by oxen, poor people lying on the sidewalks, sellers of fruit, or magazines, or toys, or clothes with their wares arranged colorfully and beautifully on carts or in tiny shops.\u00a0 Colorful and large piles of bananas, oranges, papayas, guavas, and also vegetables like carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, peppers and more, for sale in stands along the road, are very pretty.<\/p>\n
One sad thing you see are beggars.\u00a0 Sometimes when waiting for a red light to change, little children, or women with babies, or men come to the window and tap, tap, tap, on it, begging for money.\u00a0 They look at you with big, pleading eyes.\u00a0 Sometimes they point to their mouths and then fold their hands together to indicate how hungry they are.\u00a0 Some of the beggars really do need help, but unfortunately, some of the beggars work for bad people who make them beg and then take the money away from them.\u00a0 Sometimes we give them money, but we try to give only to ones that look real.\u00a0 My daughter likes to have a few coins in her pocket to give to little children.\u00a0 Sometimes, people selling things tap on the window of your car.\u00a0 Sellers, of flowers, balloons, magazines, small decorative items and much more, try to sell things to people sitting in their cars.<\/p>\n
There are very few houses in Bombay.\u00a0 Almost everybody lives in apartments.\u00a0 Bombay is along the ocean which we can see from our apartment window.\u00a0 There are as many people in Bombay as the entire population of Australia,\u00a0 so many people crammed into a small place!\u00a0 Many people do not have a nice apartment.\u00a0 They maybe only have a small room for a family of four or five.\u00a0 Sometimes they live in a little hut made of sheets of metal or cardboard.\u00a0 And many, many people just live outside and sleep on sidewalks at night and beg or work for just a few rupees a day.<\/p>\n
One rupee is worth about two and a half cents. You can buy a banana or an orange for 1 rupee.\u00a0 You can buy a small watermelon for twenty rupees.\u00a0 Candy that would cost 20 rupees (fifty cents) in the U.S. would cost 10 rupees (a quarter) here.\u00a0 We pay our cook in one month what someone would pay a cook for two days of work in America.<\/p>\n
What do we do for fun?\u00a0 We can go swimming at the pool where I work or at a local club, even though the water is as warm as a bathtub in this hot, hot weather (it gets up to 95 or 98 degrees every day in the summer).\u00a0 We take walks or go shopping or see things like famous buildings or temples.\u00a0 At home we read, watch our collection of American movies, or play Life, Dominoes, cards or other games.\u00a0 Our family is learning how to play a fun Chinese game called Mahjong.\u00a0 We have cable t.v. here and can watch CNN, NBC, TNT, The Discovery Channel, MTV, and even ESPN (we have watched a Pacers\/Bulls game, but an evening basketball game is on live here at 6:00 in the morning because of the time difference).\u00a0 A lot of the other stations are in several different foreign languages like Hindi, Marathi or Gujurati.<\/p>\n
In the evening we walk in our neighborhood.\u00a0 We are so new here that we haven\u2019t walked everywhere we could.\u00a0 Often, we walk to a local park where many, many Indians take a fast evening walk for exercise and breathe the healthy sea breezes.\u00a0 There are not many other American or European people here and when we are in a crowd, we feel different.\u00a0\u00a0 Still almost everybody is very polite and friendly towards us.\u00a0 Also, many Indians we have met are very curious about America.<\/p>\n
I wish you could see Bombay, even for a short time. \u00a0My descriptions do not begin to convey the color, the sounds, the smells, and the whole atmosphere.\u00a0 There is always something happening. There area always people, people, people walking from here to there, sitting around talking, sweeping dirt into ever growing piles, eating, cooking, and doing whatever else people do.<\/p>\n
Feel free to write us.\u00a0 We\u2019d love to hear from you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Some of the earlier letters I had written home from Bombay had found their way to a local school.\u00a0 The teacher asked if I could write about a typical day in our life in Bombay.\u00a0 Here is the result.) April … Continue reading