Set Temperature to Bake

I will never ever take for granted the library and archival systems in America. (For as often as I schlep myself into the library, I do thoroughly appreciate its existence) I am floored by the inefficiency of the archives here. I didn’t necessarily expect to be able to order documents online and have them delivered to my carrel as in the British library but I also didn’t think that I would have dig way back into my old skool card catalog skills. That’s right—a card catalog. I just spent a little over five hours leafing through individual cards, unable to do a subject or keyword search. My little brown fingers simply aren’t made for such nimble, repetitive work and cramped up in my second hour of fruitless searching, so I had to resort to pawing through with my fists like a subnormal chimp. But at least when I do find something, you might think, I can grab my book and get to work, right? Wrong. This is the promise land of bureaucracy. There is someone to watch me sign the archive register, another to hand me the index to search, another to take it back, another to watch me hunch over the card catalog until I am slobbery with exhaustion, yet another to hand me a requisition form, (I’m disappointed that no one will fill out for me, truth be told) and a mere 4 hours later, one more person to hand me the book. Efficient, yes? All of these people, while toiling away at their single menial task, will clump together to stare at me and comment loudly in Hindi about the length and gravity-defiance of my hair, the tragic hue of my skin, the malice of my scowl, the width of my shoulders and the futility of my academic endeavor. My Hindi is pretty poor but all of this is communicated beautifully to me by the sheer volume of the conversation and the ever-so helpful mimed gestures and mimicked movements. That’s right folks, I’m being heckled by librarians. I officially have hit a grad student low.

All of this might be easier to take if my brains hadn’t been scrambled by the heat. It is literally stupid hot in Delhi. The kind of heat that makes it hard to follow your own train of thought, let alone what other people are saying to you. Combined with the language/cultural barrier (I’ve been getting by with a mixture of Bindi—that is, unaspirated Bengali spoken with what I fancy to be a Hindi accent punctuated with “hai” and “yaar” when I feel appropriate, which is about every other word—and gesture-happy English), my heat-induced idiocy means that everything has to be repeated three or four times before I either understand or simply go catatonic from the mental strain of it. Other people seem to be coping with it so really India is revealing what some have suspected of me all along, despite all that jockishness, I have the constitution of a swooning Victorian woman.