Moving to Mumbai from Bahrain for university brought some surprises that I had not bargained for.
I soon found myself battling not just the forces of nature, unexpected rain and shine, but also weird species I hadn’t encountered before, like crows that finished off our cheese balls, eagles and spiders.
My day usually begins with me waking to the cacophony of crows cawing their hearts out.
My room-mates often wake to hear me half-awake, pleading with the crows to “please, please go away”.
To my warden’s horror and my delight, we found a pigeon had laid an egg in one of our buckets in the first week of my joining the hostel. She told me to throw it in the bin, but not having the heart to do that, I named it Clare and buried it in the garden.
My three months in the city have led me to discover that just about everything in Mumbai is unpredictable.
Just when the scorching summer had set in and hopes of scanty monsoon showers faded, it started bucketing down out of the blue. Unfortunately that day the window next to my bed had been left open and when I went back in the afternoon, my bed was soaked, with a puddle of water underneath.
Tired after having answered an economics paper, I just spread newspapers on the floor, switched on the fans and went to have a bath. When I got back, I was told my warden wanted a word with me. I went down to her office to find her ballistic “Jennifer, you’re going to be a mother some day. When your kids throw up on the walls, are you going to spread newspapers?
“When something of this sort happens back home, you wouldn’t spread newspapers, would you? Honestly, have you never swabbed?”
I couldn’t tell her we had carpets back home and I hadn’t swabbed a tile in my life.
She made me mop up the water and swab my side of the floor till she was satisfied, then I was given another bed to sleep for the night.
The next day I was told to dry my mattress in the sun and be on the alert to remove it, should there be another downpour.
Room No 1 has a reputation for being the messiest in the hostel, I was told the very day I joined.
True to form, it has remained so.
Our warden ordered a spring cleaning in our room just days before we left for our Diwali break.
I was dusting the window grilles standing on top of the table when I saw it, the creature, I loath, fear and hate – a spider, lurking in a corner. There was an almighty scream followed by a dreadful metallic crunch.
I had jumped in fright onto my room-mate’s bed and it collapsed.
When the realisation hit me that I had broken a bed I ran straight down to my warden’s office, expecting a roasting.
But she laughed and came up to see where the spider that had given me such a fright.
“It’s so small, I can’t even see it. You should learn to co-exist peacefully with the spider,” she quipped.
“We make bad neighbours,” I replied.
'Along Came a Spider', Gulf Daily News, October 30, 2009, Jennifer Gnana
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