Day 2

The next day (or the continuation of Day 1, I didn’t sleep). My cousin and I made chai in the morning and we sipped it on the terrace, enjoying the cool breeze. Bangalore was quite sleepy until about 7 or 8 at which point the amount of traffic and people in the streets increased exponentially. After having a second cup of chai with my uncle (chai sessions are sacred), he showed me the layout of Bangalore on Google Earth and I marveled at how much information Google had to offer about everything in the world. I realized when my uncle got ready for work that it was actually a Monday. I left with him and Naveen to hunt for housing as well as meet my other cousin, Sushil, who works at Infosys – another large company situated in Bangalore. We dropped my uncle off at work and drove to Sushil’s place in Adugodi (think of it like a district, too small to be a borough). We left from my uncle’s office at about 11 and reached Adugodi at 1 – a two hour drive to cover 20 km or about eight miles. Granted, we were driving through the busiest parts of the city, MG Road and Brigade Road are like Broadway in New York – everything is situated there. But the sheer volume of cars, trucks, bikes, cycles, people and bullock carts on the road was astounding. 

Sushil met us at the bus stop close to his residence and took us to his home a two bedroom flat shared by four people with hardly enough space for one person. You reached it by climbing up two flights of stairs with steps that were about a foot wide. Housing is scarce and people are plenty in India so a lot of newly employed people can be found living in such shanties. Within about twenty minutes we left since Sushil had to get to work by 2 (he works 2-11, also called a night shift). We dropped him off at Nagnathpura bus stop and he told us to take a U-turn to find a hostel where I could stay that was close to Biocon. 

We went to the hostel, called Woodstock Ambience although it didn’t remind me at all of the historic music festival. The place was clean, well-maintained and had a canteen. The room was about the size of my room in Philadelphia, except it’s shared by two people. The facility has a gym, a laundry room and wi-fi. All of these are pay-by-use of course. To rent the room and become a resident of Woodstock, it would cost me Rs. 6000/month ($136.36/month). After the conversion it seems a paltry sum but my stipend is Rs. 10,000/month ($227.27/month) so more than half of my income would go to rent. Naveen told me this is one of the most reasonable prices I’ll get for the amenities I’m afforded – security and the option of using all those pay-by-use facilities. I decided to stay at Woodstock and we head back to his house. On the way we stopped at a Chinese restaurant and I remembered why I liked Chinese restaurants in India so much – everything was about three times spicier and tasted much better to me that way. 

That night I went to a Punjabi restaurant (serves food cooked in the fashion of cuisine from the northern state of Punjab) with my family that was fashioned to look like a dhaba (a Punjabi name for a truck stop restaurant). The effect of not sleeping the previous night combined with jetlag hit me hard and I spent the evening dozing off at the table. However, the food was delicious as always and it woke me up and let me leave feeling extremely satisfied.