27th September

The temperature has gone up again. It is back to the high thirties all this week. Bye bye to sleep. I hate not being able to sleep other than in the hours between 1 and 4 am. At least there are lots of other girls up at half four in the morning. We all suffer just the same. Especially Marie, who has now been having two hours sleep a night for the past two weeks. She says she will have to start taking sleeping pills. You can see the difference on her face as well.
Went to Kamla Nagar to get lunch at On The Go. This place is amazing. If you merely negotiate the building site next door to it, then you can enter a world of potted plants and bruschetta. I had the Italian tomato and basil bruschetta. I don’t think I have been that happy with a piece of food in long time. The bruschetta was crispy and garlicy, and the tomatoes were ripe and there were a lot of them. Perfection in an open sandwich. After lunch we went to see if we could find the elusive FabIndia that apparently exists somewhere in Kamla Nagar. After walking for ten minutes we came to a new row of shops that we have never seen before. And there she was: Fab India, the holy of holies, on a deserted street in a strange place. Inside the shop was not deserted. It was full of women and men trying to find a kurta for whatever occasion. We really shouldn’t be allowed in this shop. Ended up buying a piar of black cropped pants, a burnt orange oriental style shirt, some iridescent purple salwaar (to go with my green pair) and a purple and gold kurta that looks like something out of a scifi film. Not good! Did I need these things? Technically I needed the tops. Amanda and Lauren got a lot of new things as well, so I don’t know if I feel too bad about it. There was a beautiful purple and lilac patterned kurta with mesh sleeves that I really fancied, but it was 1200Rs. Too expensive for me, but perhaps not for mum and dad… The sarees in Fab India are beautiful as well. We have been told that you should wear a saree on Diwali. We already have some though, so we are well prepared. All the girls in the hostel are going to wear them. I have to say I am curious as to what the Sri Lankan saree will look like. It is draped in a different way to the Indian saree.
After our retail therapy, we made our way back to the hostel to work for a little bit before dinner. I have managed to nearly complete my essay on Swift, and begin my essay on Plato/Sidney. I am worried about the Sidney one though, as I just don’t know if my argument is going to come together in the way I want it to without going well over the word limit. I might have set myself too broad a challenge. But we will see what comes of it.
I finished reading Anita Desai’s Fasting Feasting tonight as well. I have to say, it is a very good book but it feels unfinished. I don’t know if the reader is meant to be left with a feeling of frustration and the sense of incompleteness, but I couldn’t help but think that the ending was a bit of a cop-out. The book is very interesting in that it explores the nature of female hysteria and different attitudes to food. The use of food to perform ritual, to soften your emotions, to punctuate your day, keep you alive, kill you and to keep you happy or angry. She gets to the heart of the weaknesses of middle-class society in India and America very well. Her characters, her protagonists anyway, are also very weak people. You don’t like them very much, although I did like one of the main protagonists in this book: Uma. Parts of her story were incredibly upsetting, and while the story of the other protagonist was also upsetting, I just couldn’t identify with his coldness and didn’t feel particularly much in consequence.
After dinner we tried to set up Cabaret on the projector screen for everyone to watch and failed miserably. It was a shame, as so many girls were up for it, but no matter how we tried we could not get anything more than the sound to come out. So instead we went to bed early in preparation for a not very busy day tomorrow, it being a holiday. It is Dusshera tomorrow, and there are huge effigies and tents up in readiness for the festivities along our road.