Indian Time and Other Confusions

A Baffled And Confused Indian Child

There are many things here that baffle and confuse me, but none more than the different concept of time. I’m a little obsessive about time. In my high school marching band there was a saying, “If you’re 15 minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.” This is one of my mottos in life. Basically, I really “found my people” in Taiwan. In fact this post could be titled “things that I’ve found that annoy me and are the opposite of how they do it in Taiwan.”

I’ve noticed here that “15 minutes” generally means “1 hour, maybe 2, or perhaps in a few days or not at all.” Having a very specific plan to do something is the Indian equivalent of “let’s do lunch” or “how are you?” for Americans. You’re not going to actually be meeting for lunch, and you probably don’t really care about how the person truly is feeling. You really don’t have the time for either of those things.

When someone says “when can we do this big thing that will take planning and work on your part?” regardless of the details you just planned, pretend that never happened. There’s a 95% chance that they’ll be working, or at a 15 day funeral or at the 3 day wedding of their “cousin” who they aren’t actually related to and have probably never met. (Cousins are called brothers or sisters so the word “cousin” seems to be a sort of catch-all for anything from close friend to complete stranger.)

When I had 10 Indians over for Thanksgiving, the one person who showed up within an hour of when they were supposed to, went home and came back before 7 other people came… almost two hours late. I’m not really one to lose my temper, but if you want to see me lose it, come to the vegetarian Thanksgiving I cooked (with the help of two delightful girls) with a two burner stovetop and no grocery store then complain that despite making 7 dishes I hadn’t bought enough water.

It also didn’t help that I was seriously hangry from not eating all day for an 8 pm dinner. (My camera took pity on me and deleted all my pictures from this night… probably in hopes that I would just forget about it. I like to think my camera was looking out for me...)

But I did make a cute sign.

Saying Thank You

As far as I can gather if you consider someone a friend, you don’t thank him or her. Either that or I’ve just come across a certain segment of the population who firmly believes this.

Smiling

I smile, quite a bit. Now that I’ve had multiple random girls stop me to warn me to stop it, I’m going to firm my resolve to look miserable every time I leave the house. A fellow American I met recently wrote a delightful post, “Why India Turns Me Into An A**h****.” http://www.thebigfatworld.com/asia/india/india-turns-ah/ It’s exactly how I feel. I just hope it’s reversible.

 Smiling in The Acceptable Space of My Living Room

Light Switches

I live in a house with 2 bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom yet there are over 40 light switches. We also have multiple choices of loud indian women singing as our doorbell.

I wish my internet was strong enough to record them all for you…

Light Switches in My Bedroom

Lying

“Hello, how are you?” “Where you from?” “Are you married?”

This is the normal progression of questions here. First of all, I’m not a great liar. I can get the lie out if I plan it first, but if I’m questioned I break, fast. I never know if there’s a potential friendship or if I’m going to see them in the future. Let’s be frank, how awkward would the subsequent conversation be:

“So, you said your husband is coming next week, right?”

“Oh yeah, about that… I thought you were a creepy man I couldn’t trust. So, I made up a bizarre story about being married. By the way, I’m new to this country and in order to do my work I need to make contacts. I’m now going to ask for your help.”

One of the only times I said I was married was in Kathmandu. I ended up seeing that guy everywhere and he was very friendly. We sat together multiple times. My spur-of-the-moment husband was a weird amalgamation of my guy friends and two days later I couldn’t remember if my imaginary husband lived in Colorado or Connecticut (love you both) but my companion could.

There goes my life as a career criminal.

Interesting, I’ve had multiple cases of the opposite happen… after knowing a guy for weeks (he came to multiple dinner parties at our house) the fact that he was married, with kids, never came up.

Much love to you all and Happy Holidays!