Just go with it: On 2 years in India

Re-reading what I wrote this time last year, about the ups and downs of life in India, reaching the perhaps obvious conclusion that Mumbai is a hard place to live, I am enormously grateful that I wrote (and continue to write) it all down. I am grateful for the simple reason that I no longer feel that way and, had I not documented it at the time, I would undoubtedly have forgotten I ever felt so differently. 

For the record, I still believe Mumbai IS a hard place to live; its heaving, relentless racket rattles my nerves and tests my patience daily, but I no longer feel pushed around by this city. This time last year I felt as though I was caught in a whirlpool; swirling at a dizzying pace, fighting against the current, trying, and often failing, to find something to hold on to—something to anchor me in a reality I was happy to inhabit. I was outwardly enthusiastic, but inwardly disheartened at how long it appeared to be taking for me to properly settle in, and in desperate need of a moment of stillness to catch my breath. 

That stillness came in the literal and figurative breath of fresh air that was Jasper’s and my trip to Jersey last summer (British summer time, that is, in May and June). But, while I was relieved to be somewhere so familiar, so grounding and so peaceful, Jasper was loudly homesick for his life in India. Try as I did to make him love Jersey and to understand what a huge influence it has had over who I am as a nature-loving, prawn-guzzling, sea-swimming island girl, I had an epiphany on my return to Mumbai: this city is Jasper’s home. And that means I need to accept it as my home too: frustrations and all. In the months which followed that trip to Jersey, a lot changed for me in a very short time frame—I launched my book, found a full time job, turned 40 and moved house—and, as I look back over our second year, I can safely say that the changes were all for the better. 

I won’t go so far as to say I feel at home here, yet: I don’t miss it when I leave, I feel no excitement to return to it at the end of a holiday, and there are definitely many days when I am angered by how I have ended up living in such a dense metropolis when every cell in my body craves natural, open landscapes. But, heading into my third year here, I am comforted by the belief that I have at least as much control over this city as it has over me. 

A key factor in this shift of power between Mumbai and me is that I am now working: Monday to Friday, in an office. This simple act of coming to an office every day gives me three things: a salary, a community, and a far deeper understanding of India than I was ever going to get from Jasper’s less-than-detailed descriptions of what he learned in school on any given day. It’s not that I don’t trust his knowledge, it’s that I don’t trust his sharing of it, especially knowing how many words he makes up and how much it entertains him to do so. 

Before starting this new job, I didn’t appreciate how much of my feeling unconvinced by (and unstable in) Mumbai was due to my feeling peripheral. Jasper had his school life and his building friends; Dylan had his work life and his Sunday morning rugby crew. I had my household duties, my book and some yoga classes, but none of these activities gave me any sense of belonging or any insight into what really makes society here tick. I felt a bit uselsss, and not fully understanding the society and culture made it far easier for me to feel bitter towards it for not being what I wanted or needed it to be. (In short, for not being Yangon).

It wasn’t that I was completely isolated. I interacted with other mums, both at school drop off and in our residential compound, but conversations never really progressed past smalltalk. I could chat about what Jasper was doing right-this-minute, or about what we were up to as a family in the previous or coming weeks, but without any real context or depth to my knowledge of Mumbai, I found it hard to find common ground with these mums and I didn’t want to seem rude by grilling them on the ins and outs of their apparently very busy lives. 

In the context of work, however, I can ask anything I like, in the spirit of getting into the minds of Mumbai’s inhabitants. I am part of a team, which makes me a piece of a puzzle; I have a set role and responsibilities and a clear understanding of how my role fits together with other peoples’. I am absorbed into seasonal festivities, I am invited to try all kinds of different regional foods and I am slowly peeling back the layers on what makes Mumbai Mumbai. You are probably wondering what it is I do in my new job. I know I have alluded to professional commitments before but, until January, the visa I was on didn’t permit me to work and I was therefore too scared of the immigration authorities to talk much about my role. 

I work for a large real estate developer—a direct competitor to the client for whom Dylan is building his towers. That I have ended up in the same industry amuses Dylan a lot and our dinner conversations cover considerably more construction-related ground than they might have in previous years. Not that I know much more about construction than I did before; I am in the marketing team for my particular real estate company—brand marketing, rather than ‘this apartment is better than that apartment’ style product marketing. And my focus is on Environmental, Social and Governance, or ESG. This means that it’s my job to market all the good the company is doing towards reducing our impact on the environment and creating a positive impact on Indian society. I am helping to put sustainability ‘nudges’ in our sales gallery show flats to highlight to our customers how much we consider our environmental impact in our developments; I am helping to drive awareness for our women’s empowerment initiative which aims to bring more women into the formal workforce—especially in the construction industry; and I am helping to promote our annual scholarship programme for gifted maths and science students. It’s incredibly rewarding, plus I get to work with a wonderful team of highly motivated people, all of whom moonlight as my personal city concierges. 

If there is one critical thing I have learned from my colleagues it is the concept of a ‘jugaad’ (the ‘d’ sounds more like an ‘r’): a hack, a solution, a workaround, an innovative way to get what you want. There is a jugaad for everything and these hacks exist on a sliding scale from ‘ooh, creative’ to ‘OK, that’s downright shady’. To date, and to my knowledge, I have zero experience of the jugaad trade*. I don’t believe I have ever directly engaged or required a jugaad, which is almost certainly where I have been going wrong. Learning this word and laughing about it with colleagues has opened a door to a whole new perspective on Mumbai life: where earlier I saw an inability to follow the rules (traffic rules, for example), I now see creativity (creative responses to road markings, that is); where I used to cast judgement on mothers not doing the ‘baby work’, as it’s known, I now have a certain respect for them having the self-confidence to choose not to change nappies and wash endless onesies, by hiring someone else to handle those tasks. Not that I would change my experience of motherhood for the world, because it has given me not one, but two babies: one human, and the other in paperback, kindle and audio format. 

*For the record, Dylan has plenty. It goes hand in hand with getting work done on a construction site. Luckily, his jugaad-ing is handled by a proxy. 

A jugaad very often comes in the form of a person, or people, and, now that I understand this deeply ingrained cultural trait of seeking out and deploying workarounds for just about everything, I see how its influence plays out domestically, in the form of the many, many staff everyone seems to have. My Western can-do attitude and self-reliant ideals don’t allow me to become dependent on house help to the extent many Indian families do, and my poor command of Hindi (which is virtually non-existent) makes managing a houseful of help more of a hindrance but I can at least accept that it’s not laziness that motivates families to employ all the help, it’s craftiness and I am quite sure many people around the world would love access to this level of life hack. My colleagues have helped me see a self-awareness I didn’t realise was flowing so freely through Mumbai society: they know they outsource a lot of very simple tasks, and they know they can’t get away with it if they go abroad, so they embrace it wholeheartedly while they are able. And this has inspired me to take steps towards the same. 

Working full time has meant that I have had to relinquish considerable control over our home and Jasper’s schedule, to someone else: mostly, to his nanny and partially to our cleaner and most aggravating influence in my life currently. This lady drives me nuts with her rude manner and endless complaints, but I don’t have the energy or the time to replace her. Fortunately, for the most part, I am not home when she is clattering and sighing her way around the apartment and if I am due to be home, I give her the day off. I still can’t stand having other people in my home. 

You might be wondering (or judging) why I need the help badly enough to put up with someone I dislike, given that I only have an apartment to take care of, I have just one child and my work hours are decidedly reasonable. The trouble is, Mumbai’s infrastructure isn’t designed for a one-woman-band: grocery shopping is inefficient to the point of being a full-time job on its own and travelling around the city is so cumbersome that unless I worked, lived, shopped and educated Jasper within the same building, it would never make sense to try and do it all without support—no matter how much I want to prove that I can. 

So, here I am, inspired by Jasper, with his curious mind, open heart and enviable ability to belong, doing my best to embrace just the right amount of Mumbai’s social and cultural etiquette to start enjoying our life here, but without feeling like the city is bending me to its will. I am still the cook, but I haven’t chopped my own onion in months, having delegated the food prep to our helper; I am still the grocery shopper, but have turned a supermarket run into a fun weeknight activity for me and Jasper to do together; I am still the one who worries the most about Jasper’s sense of place, growing up in an environment as overpowering and unrelenting as Mumbai, but have accepted that for now, I am happy that he feels so at home here. 

And Jasper’s absorption into the Indian lifestyle at such a young age has given us more than just his funny little accent and a three-way cricket rivalry between Australia, England and India: it has given us a unique family vocabulary which now includes three different words for the same vegetable. What’s an aubergine to me and an eggplant to Dylan is now a brinjal to Jasper and I am just going to go with it. 

Here is a collection of photos from our 2nd year here: