sent from: GPO, Bombay, India. destination: Victoria, BC, Canada

CHALTA HAI 

You hear this a lot in Bombay – ‘Chalta hai’ ~ ‘as long as it works, it’s fine’, or ‘good enough’. 

So what if there are entire sections of road dug up, if the water might make you sick, if the police work against you, if people take your money, if bureaucracies demand ridiculous things of their people, if your phone/electricity cut out intermittently, if you are told that you cannot do ordinary things (“not allowed”), if you cannot marry the person you choose, if your signature doesn’t quite match your passport, if you refuse to give your father or husband’s name to get a mobile phone, if you wish to practice your own beliefs and are outcast by your community, if you cannot kiss your wife in public, if you are forced to put up pictures of your leaders in order to confirm, if the person who rams into your car then threatens you with violence, so you back down and drive off. 

It’s ok, things still work, it’s good enough. 

Chalta hai.

Just after this, we entered the Post Office to see if we could buy some of these official cards. The woman from whom we bought the stamps and the cards, a job that literally has her sitting in a little booth doing nothing but that, as we peppered her with questions about it said – you’re done buying, move on, don’t ask me questions. There wasn’t a queue, there wasn’t a back up, but her job was done and that was that. She looked at me with the kind of officious blank-eyed certainty that only a bureaucratic job-for-life can give someone, and I returned it with as much disgust as I could. Complaining would have changed nothing.

In the meantime we received a call from a local restaurant where we had at one point planned on having a party during this trip, and had even left a deposit for said party. We had to cancel the party months ago and the restaurant was insisting that they could not return the deposit, even though they re-booked the space and we wanted to come and spend that deposit on a meal that would have netted them that amount of money and a lot more. Sorry, we cannot. You made a commitment, and then cancelled. We cannot let you use that money in the restaurant now. No matter that they will never see another rupee from us now.

Later we received a call from Vodafone saying that they couldn’t re-activate the sim card and give us the number. We insisted that they return the paperwork and the deposit to us. One more thing we need to fight today.

As we relayed these stories to Maria’s family, they say but you don’t understand. That is how things work here. They don’t care.

Don’t rock the boat.

Chalta hai.