People Do the Strangest Things Here in India

Part 6 :: "Oh, Those Things Are Not Part Of The Scope?"

Recently, the streets in our neighborhood got paved. It involved a solid engineering effort with a steam roller and a small crew of people managing the act of applying the new pavement. It was a multi-day effort, in which the crew managed to sweep the street clean, then apply hot pavement in massive piles, and finally steam rolling it into an even surface. It was an impressive effort, and it moved the street to the next level. It was a good effort. A young boy, almost certainly below the legally employable age of 14, followed the steam roller around throwing cups of water onto the massive wheel. Two women from the rural villages swept in front of the steam roller without ceasing. And the man operating the steam roller managed the whole effort, orchestrating the whole team.

Then one day they stopped coming and the job was over. The streets of Whisper Valley looked nice. I had the deep sense that there must be a catch. It had simply gone too smoothly.

About a week later, we walked out front of the house one morning and saw that there were two guys in the middle of the road. They were squatting down in the middle of the street and chipping away a part of the new pavement with crude metal implements. They were the kind of guys that stop everything they do when they see a Westerner, as they were from the rural areas of AP. Their incredibly skinny bodies and their turbans told us that they were day labourers from outside of the city.

We stood and watched them chip away at the pavement. They stopped their work and stared at us. We smiled. They smiled, one putting his hand to his heart.

"What are they doing?" I asked Tara.

She shrugged. "No idea," she said.

We watched for a while longer, sipping our coffees.

"Oh, I get it. They're chipping away at the pavement to get to the manhole covers. Apparently the manholes were paved over by mistake when they redid the road last week," she said.

Then she started to laugh. I laughed, too.

"Oops," Tara said.

Oops, indeed.