Look here for part 1 and here for part 2. I have been in the United States for about four and a half years now. I came here as an exchange student in January 2016, moved on to pursue my Masters and graduated at the end of 2017. I moved to Seattle to work for Amazon in 2018 and have been living there since then. The move to Seattle was the last step in being an independent adult, from a financial viewpoint. I decided to stay by myself instead of finding flatmates as I had always wanted to try that out. Days turned into months and here I am two and a half years later wondering where all the time went?
Even after all this time, there are always things that amaze, surprise, or shock me here and the Indian in me can’t help but draw parallels. Things like throwing garbage in a chute or bins instead of someone coming to your doorstep, ringing the bell, and taking it away. The large food portion sizes here which means I always have leftovers, the insanely high prices of salon services for someone who still compares it with Indian currency, the difficulty of finding white light bulbs, buying milk in a 4-litre container which lasts for a week, using a coil or induction cooktop instead of the gas cooktop and not hanging the clothes in the balcony to air dry. The things which leave me awe-struck though are people doing their flooring, re-modelling the entire kitchen on their own or even painting the walls themselves. It does make sense though considering a plumber here costs $80 or more an hour. That’s more than what I get paid hourly. The most unbelievable thing for me was finding that cutting a tree here costs $10,000 or more. To put that in perspective that’s about 7 lakh rupees. I can think of hundreds of things that I could do with that money least of all spend it to cut down a tree. But all of that said, some things I’ve grown so accustomed to that it feels different when I go back to India – like not drinking water straight from the faucet and bargaining while buying clothes or with auto and rickshaw drivers among other things.
This one time, I was flying back to Delhi and wanted to get a bottle of wine for my parents. Alcohol isn’t something common at home, so this was a new thing. Here, in the US, you can buy wine, beer, and alcohol in grocery stores. So, for some reason, that’s the idea I had in my head. But when I started thinking about where to get the bottle of wine from, I couldn’t come up with anything. A little while later I realized there is no specific shop or grocery store to get the wine from. There are these wine and beer shops called “theka” in India which is where you get the alcohol from. Also, these shops aren’t thought of positively which is why nothing popped up for me when I was thinking about it. It was funny to me that the idea of alcohol is so normal here in the US, but it was totally opposite for me growing up in my family.
Coming back to 2020 and the whole world coming to an almost stand-still in the past few months and the pandemic still raging on, I have had more than enough time to introspect on my life here in Seattle and how it would have been if I was in India. I have immensely missed the comfort of having food cooked for you while staying in India, especially in these past few months. Trying to avoid take out and deliveries in the first few weeks in March, I had to cook all my meals at home and that was a nightmare for me. It’s not that I hate cooking or don’t know how to do it but the pressure of having to cook for 14 meals a week (yes, I don’t eat the most important meal of the day) was more than I wanted. I tried to do it for a month, I believe, before giving up and realizing that it wasn’t something I could sustain for a long time. I needed a change of cuisine and taste every once in a while and started getting food delivered. There was also the moral dilemma of helping restaurants keep afloat which swayed me in the direction of deliveries, not that I needed much convincing anyway.
With work from home beginning in March, I suddenly had a lot of time to do all the things I wanted to – read more, exercise at a time convenient to me, do meditation on a daily basis and write more frequently. The first few weeks were calibrating to actually working from home and not work “for” home. It also involved adjusting to life primarily at home. Instead of doing the things I listed above I spent more time doing chores and watching TV in the time that was left. My google news feed or Facebook would show everything that was wrong with the world – people not wearing masks, people licking the produce section in a grocery store, COVID-19 parties etc. All I felt like doing was not use my brain and just lie on the couch watch something funny to take my mind off the world. Be a couch potato, check. Silly me at the time didn’t know what the future held and that this was going to be the new normal. I eventually did get around to reading a book but after finishing that I’d be at a loss of what to do. I ordered colouring books and pencils in the hope that it would be therapeutic but found out that was not the case. I ordered an art subscription box hoping it would be something like colour by numbers but instead it turned out to be drawing using your imagination, which wasn’t my strong suit. The only constant in all of this has honestly been the TV. I have watched multiple shows in these past few months for the lack of a hobby. I even finished the entire eleven seasons for Modern Family which was a great show to watch during this time. Sometimes I feel guilty about wasting all this time watching TV instead of doing something more productive. At times like these, I remind myself that it’s not for the lack of trying. Also, if it keeps me sane in the midst of a pandemic, I’m all for it.
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