Creamy Layer

So, we're beginning to settle into our "empire" - that's what one of our P.I.'s (principal investigator, aka boss) called our apartment, and it's a fair assessment since it's palatial in comparison to typical R.A. housing and most of Patna. As you can imagine, there have been a few humorous hiccups. And now that my mother is headed back to Oakland, we're just going to have to figure them out ourselves…

Last night was our first night in our apartment, and we were very excited to settle in. We arrived at about 11:30pm (dinner is typically around 8 or 9pm around here) to discover that there was no electricity in the building and the generator wasn't working. Surprise! Luckily I knew where I'd stashed a headlamp, so we fumbled through the apartment to our pile of bags and hurray! Light! Unfortunately, no electricity meant no ceiling fans, and it was 30,000 degrees Celsius in our apartment - definitely not conducive to sleep.

Luckily, Jeff is a very curious fellow. We discovered, to our complete mystification, that in fact even without the generator, three outlets in our apartment worked: the plug for the fridge, the light in the Indian-style bathroom, and one other plug in the kitchen. Don't ask me why. We discovered this by running around with our one headlamp (and a cell phone) flipping switches and plugging things into sockets to see what worked.

Also luckily, Jeff is a very creative fellow. Realizing that we really needed to leave the fridge plugged in, Jeff dragged our standing fan into the kitchen and plugged it into the one other functional socket. Then he stretched the fan as far away as the cord allowed, and set our guest cot* directly in front of it (basically at the door, in the hallway in front of the kitchen). Then we collapsed onto it and tried to position ourselves on the cramped cot so that we got the maximum exposure to the fan without knocking each other off. And even though it wasn't the best sleep I've ever had, we were so happy to have that fan.

[*Our guest cot is a wooden board nailed to a metal frame that lifts it off the ground, with a 2" foam "mattress" placed on top of it.]

Unluckily, Jeff and I invoked the cardinal rule of "if you assume, you make an a** out of you and me." Knowing that the electricity was down, Jeff and I didn't even consider testing the A/C window unit to see if it was working. We woke up this morning and the power was still out, and for whatever reason I ambled over to the A/C and viola! Power. So last night, we could have slept blissfully in our real bed, in a cool(er) room, without the need for all that fanfare. Alas.

It is now Day 2 in the apartment, and since most of our P.I.'s left Patna today, we were on our own for dinner. Thankfully, mom had stocked our kitchen full of basic staples, so Jeff and I decided to start nice and easy with the very simple pasta + Ragu sauce meal. Of course, things are more complicated here so while that kind of "dinner" would require zero thought back in Cambridge, MA, it was a bit of an ordeal here. For starters, I haven't used a gas range on a regular basis since high school (and Jeff's never really used one), and I had fancy things like automatic starters and a gas line. Here, we have a propane tank connected to our little two-burner stove perched on the counter (see below):

In order to use the stove, you need to flip a switch on the propane tank and then briskly light a match, turn the stove on and light the gas. This is not a simple maneuver. I had heard of this special trick for lighting gas ranges in the magazine Real Simple, where you light a piece of long, straight pasta with a match and then use that to light your gas range, which gives you a bit more of a safe distance. But alas, apparently Indian  pasta is insufficiently flammable. So I leaned as far away from the stove as I could, with Jeff grimacing in the doorway, and was delighted when the stove lighted after only a few tries. I celebrated a bit, and then realized that I had been so focused on lighting the stove that I forgot to prep the water, so I grabbed a pot and plunked it on the stove with some water. Once it approached boiling, I realized a few key things I had neglected in my haste:

1. The pot was nearly full of water, and boiling water takes up more space than non-boiling water.
2. I wanted to add pasta, which takes up additional space.
3. I had plopped the pot down on the burner in an unstable position, so the now-boiling pot was slightly rocking back and forth.

So I basically backed as far away from the stove as I could while still being able to be considered as interacting with it, and crossed my fingers.

And as you can see below, everything worked out just fine!

P.S. The title to this post comes from the official Government of India website, which uses the term "Creamy Layer" to describe the uppermost castes (la crème de la crème?) in a compilation of demographic data. Totally bizarre.