The BirdSpeak Blogs-Accommodations 3

Back to bitchin’ about my current quarters—so no one thought it was terribly important, pertinent, or timely to inform me there would be construction going on in the building while I’m there. So there was early morning banging, mid-afternoon banging, night time banging, banging banging BANGING! I thought I’d lose my mind, not for the second or last time. Between the constant honking of drivers outside & the infernal banging, walking in the street with the madman drivers because there’s no @$%^&*! sidewalks & being stared at constantly, I found my usual good natured self slowly sinking into one of a hag with hemorrhoids. Oh & there was the constant being dropped in upon by the caretaker. It seems that I have inherited yet another switch monitoring duty. They have water tanks on the roof & when those puppies run out THERE IS NO WATER. Oh I found that out the hard way. So every morning at 7:20 & every evening at 9:20, the caretaker would RING MY BELL to remind me to either turn the switch on or off. Now, he doesn’t speak English either so I didn’t know what the heck I was really doing this for & I certainly didn’t understand why the switch had to go off. But it was only when I had a hissy fit one morning & told Sagar the driver to tell the caretaker to stop ringing my DAMN bell is when I found out exactly how the switch comes into play. Now wouldn’t it just have made sense to have the caretaker occupy the apartment with the switch in it instead of transient tenants? THAT’S TOO MUCH LIKE RIGHT! [I have since found out that each apartment has its own water switch, which cancels out the previous line but it was so much fun to vent I thought I'd leave it in LOL!]

AND THE GRAND PRIZE WINNER OF A CRAP PLAYIN’ SITUATION is: this place is a fire trap. One day I go out into the hall on my way out & it smells as if the building is on fire. There are 3 small motor type gizmos prior to exiting & one of them was burning. One man told me it had overheated [probably because I forgot to turn off the stupid switch] & it had something to do with the water tanks on the roof. Now had it kept going, the place would have been on fire & I realized it behooved me to do some checking in the apartment. I hadn’t bothered to really look at the windows since all of them were covered with drapes but when I did I saw that EVERY SINGLE ONE HAD BARS ON THEM THAT WERE BOLTED IN. Ok. Not exactly something you want to see. I quickly realized if there were a fire I, a) wouldn’t smell it before it was too late because of the location of the bedroom, & b) I wouldn’t be able to get out if I did smell the smoke.

Now I wanna see if there is an exit to the roof just to humor myself. That’s when I saw because all the doors were open that the building was abandoned & that each apartment [2 per 4 floors] was in some sort of decay. They were working on the one directly above me but man oh man, was I shoc’-ke-dead [a Brazilian friend says it like that]. Then when I got up to the roof I saw I’d be trapped if I did get up there because there were no adjoining buildings. Not a one. No ledges, no trees to grab onto & of course you know there were no fire escapes anywhere.

Guess if I had to jump I could always land on a cow.

Later when I was walking the neighborhood I saw that no buildings had fire escapes. I guess someone figures there’s so many people here [I’m told there are 15 million in Delhi alone] what difference does it make if a few million get killed? Safety is not a priority here in no stretch of the imagination. Once again, I had to say,

Welcome to India, Bird. Actually, I said something else but I'm not going to put it into print.