So it’s been over a week since my last written post, and I’m attributing that mainly to several medical maladies that sprung up over the last week. First, it was a nasty abscess right at the intersection of my hip and butt, followed by getting sick in a more traditional sense, and ending with my current heat rashed state. None of these are all that harmful to me, but the first two things took me to the hospital to make sure they didn’t become issues than they were. Luckily my blood test came out negative for malaria (celebration!) and was determined to be another instance of what they just simply call “viral.” Yeah, I don’t think anyone knows what “viral” really means. My current state is that the parts of my body that are exposed the most — my arms and face — are turning pink/red with this slightly prickly rash. Sigh, one of these days I’ll be able to have a normal, healthy day again.
The word “firangi” means “foreigner,” and my coworkers taught it to me so that I would know if someone on the street was calling me that. The closest comparison in terms of connotation appears to be “gringo” as used in Latin America. As a firangi myself, I tend to pick out others of my kind whenever I walk around. Sometimes in the back of mind I exclaim “white people!” in a gleeful manner because just having some racial diversity around makes me feel more at home. There aren’t a ton of East Asians around, but there are actually some very Asian-looking Indian populations, mostly located on the eastern part of the country. Because of this, my coworkers said I could probably get confused for being just another Indian if I don’t show that I’m out of place. I decided to test this out at a cafe where we were meeting some new folk. One guy began asking everyone their names and where they were from, so when it got around to me, I introduced myself as Joony from Pune. Without flinching, he just moved on until my coworkers did a double take to see if they had heard me correctly. They knew I was from the US, but I had completely fooled the new guy. Success!
Sometimes it gets lonely as a firangi, so I met up with the Ahmedabad expat group this past weekend, and we all exchanged stories of adjusting to life in India. It was an eclectic mix of people from different parts of the world from different walks of life, but there was something about the solidarity from our firangi-ness that was refreshing for me and helped put my experience thus far into better focus. It was a fun time and I’ll be looking forward to our next hangout.
I’m going to go take care of my heat rash now, so until next time!