Reflections on Things at Hand: Mr. Gary's Apartment

OK, just real briefly - and I guess this should be a part of my on-going series on the Glamorous Life - here's a few pictures of the apartment where I stayed in Mumbai, India when I spent the summer of 2004 teaching there. For the longest time - even when other professors or students would be housed in that place - they would refer to it lovingly as Mr. Gary's Apartment. It only had a couple rooms, but I didn't really need more than that. The back door, through the kitchen, opened out onto a courtyard. It was a hostel for working women and college students - and me. It was located on a fairly quiet (especially by Mumbai standards) tree-lined street, right off of a much busier and noisier streets. There were several schools nearby, and every day little Indian boys and girls, in uniform, would walk by on their way to the local Catholic school. The community was gated and very safe. The bed was not particularly comfortable, but serviceable. I was there during the moonsoon season and one night I woke up to find that most of the local ant population had moved in out of the rain and settled on my chest (my landlord wasn't too concerned after I described the ants because they were not poisonout, but, being Christian, had no trouble with me killing the ants with extreme prejudice - unlike our driver at school who was of the Brahmin caste and an important member of a local Hindu temple, and who scolded me once, gently, for trying to swat a particularly nasty looking mosquito [it was a soul in the process of becoming something else]). They had also gone to the trouble of putting in an air conditioner the day before I moved in so that I would be more comfortable. The shower was pretty primitive, and usually worked best with me using a bucket to dump water on my head - which is one of the reasons why I joined the local gym: I like to work out, it gave a nice structure to my day, and they had great showers.