I had hoped that all the posts I crafted during my time in India would exclusively be a chronicle of the wonderful adventures and experiences I had throughout the summer, but, for the sake of continuity and genuine preservation of my Indian summer, I feel the need to devote this post to recent events with a little more gravity. Before I begin summarizing the details, I assure you that the story has the happiest of endings. The very, very happiest.
In my last post, I introduced Lisa, a rising junior at Yale working with a development organization this summer in Delhi. Mary Kate and I met her at a Saturday morning frisbee practice and ended up using the shower in her apartment to clean up before spending all day Saturday enjoying street food and our first “sightseeing” experience with her. The apartment Lisa’s living in is owned by a wonderful woman named Sree who left India when she was 17 to study at NYU and returned to India about ten years ago to live with her father in the apartment building he owned. The place is absolutely beautiful. Mary Kate and I were in awe as Lisa explained the details of her rental agreement and even more surprised when Lisa mentioned that she may be moving out soon. Sree’s sons both live in New York state, and she was planning a trip to visit them for the next four months, starting yesterday. That would leave Lisa alone in the apartment, and she was afraid she would be too lonely without company. She half-jokingly mentioned that there was another room available in the apartment and Mary Kate and I half-seriously considered looking into renting it for the remainder of the summer. Half-seriously.
Throughout the previous week, I had begun having some security issues in the hostel Mary Kate and I had been staying in. The hostel is located in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi that’s considered a business district, and is affiliated with the Indian Institute of Public Health. It’s typically used to house students studying at the institute or people visiting for a short time to attend a workshop or conference. Before coming to intern at PHFI, I was told that living here was my best and seemingly only option, so I accepted the deal I was offered: 1000 Rs. a day for breakfast, dinner, a room, wifi, and a shuttle to and from work. Living in the hostel was challenging, but hadn’t been unmanageable. It was hot, but not unbearable. None of the hostel staff spoke much English, but we had been able to get by. The food was great. The wifi was hit or miss. It wasn’t ideal, but also wasn’t anything I was incapable of managing.
At the end of our first week in the hostel, we were paid a visit by the man who owned the place. He informed us that Mary Kate and I shouldn’t be taking any walks around our neighborhood and that if we wanted to leave the hostel for any reason besides going to work, we needed to have the live-in landlord call him so we could let him know where we were going. Understandably, this felt incredibly limiting and left me with an odd feeling, but we were more than willing to oblige him and did throughout the next week. However, most nights that week, I was kept up by noise being made outside my room. It appeared that some men had made their way onto the wall around my balcony, threw some rocks at my window, hit the outside door to my room, and, one evening, even shone a flashlight into my window. I tried to steel myself and rationalize what was happening, but even my relatively high threshold for sketchiness was being breeched. On Saturday night, the same day we had met Lisa, someone actually came down onto the balcony itself and began knocking on my door. Afraid, I moved down the hall to Mary Kate’s room and whoever was outside followed me over and began knocking on her door and whipping the screen with a rope. We ran downstairs to tell our landlord what was happening and were moved to a room on the other side of the hostel for the night, but both of us agreed that we weren’t going to be able to feel safe staying in the hostel any longer.
While all of this was happening, Lisa had sent me a Facebook message to tell me that Sree would be happy to meet with us on Sunday to discuss moving into her apartment. She agreed to offer us the room, equipped with an air conditioner and a standard shower, and all of our meals for 500 Rs. a day, half the rate we had been paying in the hostel. Meeting with her on Sunday afternoon was wonderful and we made plans to move in on Wednesday. Which we did. And our hearts have felt safe and full and overjoyed ever since.
Every time I think about it, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude that we so fortuitously met Lisa that Saturday. We were given an answer to prayer before we even knew we had it. God is good.
When we visited Lisa that first time, I took a bunch of pictures of the apartment, intending to write some snarky post about her wonderful home. Who knew it would be my home four days later?
Three cheers for quick connections made through ultimate, the generosity of strangers that quickly become friends, and the freedom that comes from feeling safe.
Happy Sunday.
