A Day (or two) In The Life
Riding big grief waves
same or different than joy?
Your guess good as mine
I broke my promise to myself. I wasn’t going to visit with Ama and Akka except before I’d eaten, knowing what would happen there. Well, we did visit after breakfast/brunch, and it turns out their son, a monk for some 50 years, and their daughter, a high school teacher in Sikkim, are visiting to help them out for a few days. Also their granddaughter, a student in political science at Delhi University, is here with her mom.
Apparently when we saw and waved to Akka on our earlier walk to check in at the monastery office, he knew that we would be coming to see them, and instructed the visiting children to make mutton momos, the Tibetan dumplings with various potential fillings, which they were doing when in fact we did show up a half hour later. It became a mutton momo extravaganza a bit later, and a wonderful sharing time with Lamo Tsering, the daughter, and with Lama Damcho, the son, while the lovely granddaughter (sorry, we didn’t get her name) was busy cooking the momos her mom had just fashioned and cleaning up in the little kitchen, while a seemingly endless supply of momos appeared in a continuous finger dancing stream off the production line in the tiny living area. In the mean time, both Ama and Akka sat in their respective corners of the little room and devoted themselves to the telling of their mala beads and muttering, or quietly singing, mantras.
All three visitors are of very sweet disposition, all there to care for the old ones, even if only for a little while. (Lama Damcho will be staying on longer as it turns out). I was also happy to see that since our last visit three years ago, a new electric oil filled space heater has appeared in the little apartment. I had noticed how cold it could get in there and had even suggested that Nancy and I would be happy to get a heater for Ama and Akka, but the offer was dismissed as unimportant. Their son has since provided this for them.
We are in a dream
waking up to where we are
chai joy seals the deal
There are a few Indian tourists staying now at the guest house for short visits, and the weather has been pretty miserable, hard late season rains, winds and damp chill air, precisely my least favorite climate. Today’s sky is still interspersed with clouds, but the sun has made more than a little return, and the air, when you’re in that sun, has become warm again. May it continue.
We made a trip into Bir today, a 15 or 20 minute slow-by-necessity taxi ride farther up the single lane winding road into the mountains. Our wifi internet connection here, in the rural northern mountains, is extremely unstable, and one of the things we did is get Indian sim cards for our old Asia travel phones in order to have much more stable cellular internet. Apparently the process of getting sim cards has become more complicated than it used to be, which wasn’t complicated at all, due to more government red tape (read: control). Tsering sent us with a driver who helped us find the right vendor to … ahem …. navigate the new burocracy without that new red tape.
Let’s talk about the cost of living here for a minute. Well, one example of the cost of living. While we were scrambling in the SFO airport to try to make our flight to Doha, one of my sandal straps decided to choose that very moment to tear out from its foot bed attachment. There I am, scrambling, rushing hither and yon, with my sandal flapping on and off my foot and against the hard airport floors with the attendant clapping sound you can imagine. A real slapstick comedy scene. When we made it up to the guest house I asked Tsering about how I could get this sandal fixed. No problem. She knows where to take it in Baijnath (a 15 minute taxi ride down the mountain). A couple of days later she presents me with my newly fixed footwear and of course I ask her how much I owe her. 30 rupees. We’ll just add it to our running restaurant tab.
Now the current rate of exchange for rupees to the US dollar is over 80, so this 30 rupees is about 38 cents. This is just one mundane example. Another example is our cost for rent and meals, two basic expenses. We’ll pay 26,800 rupees in rent for our 38 nights here. Even at, say, 77 rupees to the dollar, taking into account ATM fees and bank profits on these transactions, that’s $348. Our daily meals in the guest house restaurant might average maybe 700 rupees, or +/- $9. These together come to something in the range of $18 per day, or about $540 a month. For two people. Of course there will be other expenses (like our sim cards and taxi rides), but this is the foundation of food and shelter. Just one more (earthly) thing to love about being here.
