Life at the office: drowning squirrels and twice-daily chai

For the past few weeks, the Patna Team has been happily settling into office-based life. To inaugurate the new space, we did a simplified version of a ritual called ग्रेह प्रवेश (Greh Pravesh), which literally means something like "to go into the home," but is referring to purifying a home before you go in for the first time. Nikhil, one of the project assistants, suggested that we should call it कार्यालय प्रवेश, Caryaalay (office) Pravesh. We only did a small portion of the ritual, but it was still pretty fun; check out these photos:

Basically, you smash a coconut at the entrance, and then everybody eats some- Episcopal Church take note - this is my kind of ritual!

We've now settled in enough that we're starting to get into some routines. For example, there's a rather surly fellow who brings us chai twice a day. 11am is "milk tea" (black tea with so much milk & sugar you'd swear it was a different kind - yum!) and 3pm is either lemon tea or coffee (again, sugared to the extreme). Unfortunately, I have the sneaking suspicion that despite how diluted the tea is, I'm developing a caffeine addiction - I feel all groggy and cranky in the morning, and I'm positive it's the fault of the tea. Jeff says that I'm always a little cranky in the morning, and he insists that, in my pre-chai days, I never leaped right out of bed when my alarm went off (codswallop, I say). So I'm going to try a week "off" and see if I return to my usual delightfully charming self at 6:30am.

In addition to our tea guy, our office also has a sweeper guy. He comes in at about 9:30am with a bristle broom to sweep the desks and floors. What this means in practice is that he chases us around the room, while we zoom off on our brand-new rolly chairs (so much fun!) dodging computer cables and trying not to smack into each other (too hard). He's taken to helping us out by giving us a little push to get going.

And to be honest, we need the sweeping - our building is still under construction (our little room with 8 desks is like an air-conditioned oasis), so we constantly track in dirt and dust. Also, it turns out that the construction guys cut corners and left too much space for one of the windows, so there's a gap that lets in insects during the night. Every morning when we come in, it's like there's been a small plague that's killed off (literally) dozens of flies, which are sprinkled across our floor.

I'm also personally settling into some routines in the office, which is always a nice feeling. I've been doing a ton of data entry and browsing through government websites (which is a bit tedious, to say the least), so I've taken to bringing my headphones and listening to music while I work. Unfortunately, it has a rather pronounced impact on my mood, since my iTunes is on shuffle, and it rotates between contemporary Christian worship music, Cuban & French rap (Orishas & MC Solaar - I don't pretend to be an aficionado) and the exercises from my Hindi textbook (plus whatever misc. stuff I accumulated in high school & haven't deleted yet). It would be pretty fun to watch me in fast forward, since I'm sure the little bit of dancing in my seat changes a lot depending on the tone of my music!

Sometimes, however, those routines are disrupted. Today, our project assistant Shruti summoned me into the bathroom with a nervous grin, mentioning something about a squirrel. Perplexed, I followed her in and discovered that some poor, hapless chipmunk (they call them squirrels here) had  managed to fall into the toilet bowl. At first I thought it was taking a bath and playing, but then I realized that it was frantically trying to escape the slick, steep walls of the toilet bowl! I looked around for something to help it out with, and grabbed a rag that belonged to one of the construction workers (oops). I threw that over the edge of the bowl and the chipmunk scurried out, ran around the room a few times while we all shrieked and jumped (honestly, what was I expecting?) and then dashed down the stairs and out of the building. Poor thing!

But that's definitely an atypical experience. In general, we're very well taken care of in our brand-new, delightful office and very happy to have separate home and work spaces! Even if the chocolate lives in our fridge at home...