^ Jonah and Aidan having a minute of sitting like lotuses in the Dubai airport.
How have we changed?
I will write about this from time to time as we reflect on this experience ending. We have been changed and will probably remain changed forever.
It became clear to me that we had changed during a few key events.
The first time it was clear to me that we had changed was through a somewhat humorous event in Singapore. This vacation was the first time we were out of India since our arrival. We had been in India for about 8 months by that time. It happened as we walked out of our complex to a local coffee shop that was about 5 blocks away. I noticed something was different, but I couldn't put my fingers on it.
Then it hit me....
We were all walking on the street. We were next to a perfectly good, intact sidewalk. Immaculate, in fact.
We had become conditioned to the fact that no sidewalk is intact for a significant distance in India. If there is a sidewalk, which most of the time there is not, it usually degrades into a pile of rubble every 100 feet or so. And/or the Indian sidewalk is a place where people sit and do their business - I mean "do their business" in both senses.... They are either releasing bodily waste on the sidewalk *or* they are doing their job on the sidewalk, be it the fixing of shoes, selling of chai or food, making spare keys, reading tarot cards or any other such street-based trade.
In short, there are extremely few sidewalks in India that you can walk on for a long period of time. So, we got used to walking in the streets.
When I noticed that we were doing this in Singapore next to a perfectly good sidewalk, I started to laugh.
I asked Tara, "Why aren't we on the sidewalk?"
She looked at the sidewalk and said, "Well, I don't know." And on the sidewalk we walked for the remaining few blocks.
Since that time, I have noticed a few other things.
Jonah's mode of speech has changed slightly. He says the letter "h" like this "haych", with a small aspiration in the front of the sound. Certain UK accents say it like this. This is instead of the American "aych". Jonah also says "trousers" instead of "pants". And he has sometimes called his friend Hanna by the pronunciation one would hear in England - with the first "a" sounding like "ahh". Haahna. Not the nasal American way of saying Hanna. We think he is young enough that he is more susceptible to this kind of thing.
Aidan calls soccer "football" now. No other changes to his language.
Liam, Tara and I have no changes to our speech. But every once in a while our mannerisms will change. I think answering "yes" by moving one's head side to side instead of front-to-back is actually more clear in some situations here. I do it from time to time.
Another change - It is sad, but our manners have coarsened. "Please", "Thank you", "May I", "Excuse me"..... these more or less are absent in most conversations where someone is performing a task for you. If you are being polite in Hindi, you use a different verb tense, but there are not many extra words for politeness. So, if you the English politeness words, it can cause some confusion.
For example.....
If you answer someone who is offering you another drink with "No, thank you..." they often focus on the "thank you" and bring the next drink. This happened many times, early on. It is much easier to say "No." It works and the discussion is clear.
But, we cannot return to the US like that.
So, we will have to quickly focus on reclaiming good manners as a family.
Also, we won't have domestic help, so this will change many of these impulse to speak in basic ways. Soon gone will be the day where I can say "Padma, coffee digiye" and get a steaming hot cup within a few minutes. This will quickly be replaced by "Sweet heart, would you please make some coffee?" which half of the time will result in "Sure" and other half of the time "No, you do it." ;^)
Finally, we are accustomed to the unbelievable. This is a change from the shell-shocked group we were 20 months ago. We see guys riding camels down the street, herds of buffaloes walking in traffic, cars driving down the street in the wrong direction, immense piles of garbage covered with foraging wild dogs, men peeing freely on the streets, each car at an intersection utterly ignoring their respective light (red or green) - we don't give any of it a second look anymore. Two years of seeing these things is plenty of time to start to think of it as "normal". It makes sense that these practices will be hard to correct here in India, as these have been the only thing many/most Indian people have ever know.
More observations to come.
