This is the new little packet of laundry detergent I got the other day. Most laundry detergent comes in packages like this or slightly bigger. You can also purchase bars of laundry soap.
As the instructions on the packet suggest, most people do their laundry by hand. Or more accurately, most people (which is to say, most middle class people) have their maidservants do their laundry by hand. I’ve mentioned Poonam before, the young woman who has occasionally come by to clean my floor or wash my bedsheets. But I’ve discovered that basically, I’d rather just do my housework myself. (Not to cast aspersions — Poonam is very efficient.)
Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Unfortunately, yes. I care. And this is one of the main reasons I’d rather do my housework myself. Give me some time to explain how this all fits together. The picture above shows the wall clock on a friend’s wall, with my wristwatch in the foreground. Notice anything in particular about these two timepieces? I’m sure you do. Setting clocks ahead is a very common, perhaps universal practice here, a misguided or maybe I should say entirely disregarded effort to promote being “on time”. I haven’t written about the concept of “time” in India, which is very fluid. I haven’t written about it because it really is one of the most difficult aspects of functioning here. (It is difficult for me — I am an uptight person trying to pretend to be chill. I don’t think it is difficult for Indians.) I have tried very hard to stop caring about things and people being “on time”, and have tried very hard not to interpret people being “late” in any number of negative ways. How successful have I been? That’s for me to know and you to wonder.
One example will suffice, and then I’m not going to talk about it anymore. My class is scheduled to start at 10:30 a.m. By 10:40, some students start to show up in the outside corridor. By 10:45, the office peon arrives to unlock the classroom. By 10:50, I have hurriedly written my outline on the board and I turn around to say through clenched teeth, “Good morning class!” By about 11:15, most of the students have arrived. This system functions — I am the fly in this ointment — but I am basically not capable of making the adjustment of arriving for a 10:30 class at 10:45. I figure that in lots of ways I have to adjust my behavior to being here, but my class is my class and so I get to do my thing my way. So I told my students that I was going to run my classroom as I would run it in the US, and that in the US being “on time” is a mark of respect for your teacher, and I don’t care if they call me “ma’am”, and I don’t care if they stand up when I enter and leave the room, but I do care about them being on time — my time. (They’ve been pretty good, I will say that — they’ve made adjustments for this uptight American lady and made it easier for me to pretend to be chill.)
But this is the reason I’d rather do my housework myself — I don’t want to wait around for someone to come to my flat at “9:00 a.m. plus/minus” which is usually “minus” to the tune of 20-30 minutes. Okay — if I know that it is going to be 20-30 minutes, why don’t I just adjust to that? How would you answer that question? Arghh.
A Northwesterner in North Bengal 
I was waiting to hear about how when finally you could start class, the bell rings! Do instructors just start and end late, so that no one can stay on schedule? It would be interesting to know what sorts of things, if anything?, stick to a schedule? Banks? Stores? Dare I ask: trains? Would you find in say, Delhi, that people stick to schedules more?
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