What happens in India

Unless you are rich, and can convalesce in a sanatorium estate (where visitors come down a tiered, oceanside lawn to find you at your easel), you have to keep going when you're depressed.

- Virginia Heffernan
A Delicious Placebo

In other news, there's a rumor that it's going to be 28 degrees in Vancouver tomorrow. I'll believe it when I feel it in my rheumatic bones.

In other other news, when the cable guy came by yesterday to see why my internet/phone signal was so weak, he confirmed that in the movie Iron Man they speak a version of Hindi-Urdu-Farsi-Mishmash. After I told him I'd spent most of my time in Rajasthan, he asked if I'd been to Jaipur, as 7 car bombs had just gone off there, killing several people near a Hindu temple and in the tourist district.

Later that day, my dad called, right on schedule to see if my phone was finally working. Dad called my roommate's phone my first day back and said "Thank God you're home. Tonight I finally gonna sleep good."

Out of my good Catholic girl guilt I apologised for causing him so many sleepless nights, "but you know there was nothing to worry about."

No, I'm not going to mention Jaipur, bombs going off in popular tourist zones, etc, and neither are you.

"Of course," my dad insisted, there was plenty to worry about. "Everything happens close to India. See what's happen in Burma? And in China now? Those places close to India, everything happen close to India."

Perhaps because the bombings in Rajasthan were a blip on the world news radar, he didn't catch it. But also, he didn't really know where I was in India, he never asked, I never clarified. I didn't even bother to say North. God forbid the man should pull out his atlas and take a look at the part where Rajasthan borders Pakistan, because then, somebody gonna get sleepless nights like you no believe and somebody else gonna get a talking to like she no need.

Like they say, what happens in India stays in India.