Two New Yorkers spend six months 18 months!?! in Bangalore and other places in India.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

I'm Always Breaking Things

India is a land of hard surfaces. There's lots and lots of stone
available, so counters and floors tend to be granite or something
equally unyielding. If you drop something glass, it's gonna break --
you don't have the fighting chance you'd have with a wooden floor or a
plastic counter. In my time in India, I've broken a large Kingfisher
beer bottle by tipping it over onto the counter, a jam jar (it fell out
of the fridge), a watch crystal, and countless glasses (I also dented a
cell phone, but since I lost it soon after, that doesn't count).
Undoubtedly I'd have broken lots more stuff if most things weren't
metal or plastic.

And all that stone on the ground can be a little scary to walk on. Big
fancy malls and office buildings feature highly polished, slick,
head-busting granite stairs and entrances, and they also often have
someone energetically mopping away and making sure the stone's a little
wet. I'm always expecting to see lots of wipeouts, but I guess people
are nimble and on the lookout for potential spills.

My favorite recent breakage was when I was shopping for a dinner party
last month. I had a bunch of stuff, including two bottles of wine. I
set them both down in the small parking lot of the schmanzy Home Stop
store, and immediately one bottle tipped over and broke at the neck.
Oh, the stares from the rickshaw drivers and passers-by I attracted as
the red, red wine stained the pavement and rolled down toward the
street. The store guard very kindly got me a new bag to put my as-yet
unbroken bottle in, and took the busted one off my hands. I thought
he'd throw it in the garbage, but instead he hurled the bag into the
drainage ditch/open sewer that flows right by Home Stop. Handy! And off
I went.

1 comment:

SeriouslyNoWay said...

Those head breaking, wet stone surfaces almost always have well camouflaged steps on them too. I've already tripped over more of these hidden steps than I can count, usually with my hands full of breakable objects.