Little bit of a weird Welcoming

Margarita is the pigeon that sleeps outside my bathroom window. The first days when I came, she used to get scared every time I would step in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Now, after 3 months of my stay, she has gotten used to me being around,  and in my opinion she even likes the company.

The day I landed on Mumbai (16^th June 2009) everything seemed so alien. I’ve never been in a country so different to mine, I guess it’s because I’ve never set foot on the eastern hemisphere of the globe. I’ve never seen a rickshaw, women wearing sarees, men wearing lunghis or jungle animals strolling candidly in the middle of metropolitan roads.

The first night I slept in my new bedroom I couldn’t even close my eyes. I still cannot decide if the reason of my insomnia was jet lag, the unbearable heat, the insufferable stickiness of an air with 90% humidity, or just the newness of it all.

After an hour that I had finally managed to close my eyes, I woke up again startled at the sound of some water falling somewhere near me. In reflex, I jumped out of my bed. But apparently it was nothing; same as the distant echoes of chants, crackers, call to mosque for prayer. I don’t know how many hours I lay there in bed, eyes open, trying to identify all the different sounds in this new environment and wondering how could home’s sounds could be soo different in Mexico, Canada, France, and India…

Morning came and while I was still in that bridge between dreams and the real world, I started hearing some noises, soft, low whispers in a language unknown to me.  Drowsily I opened my eyes just the little bit enough to identify the source of the sounds. You can imagine my shock (the kind that comes right before a heart attack) at finding right in front of my face, two women in bright-colored sarees, looking intently down at me, speaking softly but intensely, I still don’t know about what and, to be frank, I didn’t really want to find out.

This welcome was just my introduction to the complete cultural shock that I was about to receive.

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