A big day, in that the fridge issue was finally sorted, After weeks of promises of one being delivered, I went out and bought one, meeting Aparna at the Bhatti superstore (conducted there by Aashish, one of his tasks apparently being to look after me.)
They only had one model of small fridge, so no difficulties in choosing one. And efficiency itself from then on; by the time we had bought a few groceries and travelled back there in a tuk tuk, it had been delivered, and Bim, the building supervisor here, was setting it up. Mind you, I was confronted by a rather bemusing sight when I arrived in my room, for a number of senior student boys, taking advantage of the open door, were mooching around inside; judging by its rumpled nature, they had even tried lying on the bed. I was amused rather than anything, but they realised they should go, took a final picture or two sitting in the big armchair, and left. Hmm.
Much of the afternoon and early evening was spent selecting and rejecting ideas for a banner (their name for a poster) advertising Friday’s auditions. I thought we had sorted this yesterday, but that idea had disappeared, to be replaced by a succession of others, (mostly) becoming increasingly unsuitable. There were a couple of problems, I think. They were wedded to a soppy, overly romantic concept of Romeo and Juliet, and also could not understand that it had to look like it came from Nepal. And when I was assured that this was for the audition only, that we would have something different for the show itself, I became a little exasperated, wondering why we were spending so much time on it; a simple notice would have done. But this was their allotted task, so I could not blame them for taking it seriously. In the end, we settled on something I thought I had seen, and approved (with reservations) much earlier.
Returned to the room to find a distressing scene: people had obviously been in the room, and spent time there, treating it like a common room: bed and chair disturbed, glasses of water, a whole chess game played. Clearly I had not given the right message yesterday. I sent a pretty furious email to Aparna and Yogi; this was my home.
I was pretty depressed in the evening, not so much about the room, but production worries. I knew there would be a pushback from parents and teachers – there always is when there are apparent clashes with exams. I have tried to address this in a letter, but difficulties with translation, distribution etc have made this impossible. Besides, Aparna has told me that the parents here will always (think they) know best. Whereas I (think I) know better.
