Settled.

Vegan friends are the best! I have already done some looking, and found nice things... as a vegetarian myself, I am always on the hunt for tasty stuff online :) Thankfully, David has deemed that eggs may be used in the kitchen, but that they were being improperly mixed in the current recipes, and could only be introduced if they were done well. This adds a certain pressure, but I think we can rise to the challenge :)

The girls at Bandhavi remember me better than I had anticipated, and they are so aggressively friendly that it feels like the past two years were more like a few weeks. Jyothi has taken upon herself the task of teaching me Kannada – she asserts, with four or five other girls, that she received top marks in English this year :) Thank goodness for it, of course, because my “teach yourself Kannada in 30 days” book seems to be over-optimistic in my abilities. Alice, a girl from England working here, is reputed to have very good Kannada, and it’s not that I hate her for it, I just resent her :) But the girls love this Alice person, and she seems very nice. They say, “Aunty Lindsay, Aunty Alice, you are aka and tenge!” (older and younger sister). They test me on their names, of which I do not remember enough– I must work on that sooner rather than later. Thankfully, I have left myself a bit of a breadcrumb trail from the last time – a few photos with a few of the girls names- at least a study guide to start.

Last night was my first monsoon storm. It rained a bit the first night,, and I though to myself what a letdown it was. Well, then, last night really showed itself up. I skipped lunch yesterday because I wasn’t hungry, and while I wasn’t particularly hungry in the evening, I thought that Rathi would come find me if I missed another meal. It has just started to threaten rain, so I hit the road over there- taking my flashlight but leaving my umbrella (the banyan and the palm trees cover most of the way, how much do I really need an umbrella?). It would seems that I needed it a great deal, and I only avoided the real downpour by a few precious moments. But my did it storm! The water rushed over the roofs, flooding the central courtyard by several inches; the power went out almost immediately and stayed out for several hours; and the girls just danced and danced. Akshaya has the grace of a dancer, and the talent—it was beautiful, watching her teach the younger girls in the candle light, in the flashlight, though the rain drops splashing in under the roof. The lightening was hardly visible through all the rain, and the thunder became another person in the room, rumbling just out of sight.

Oh, and, my roof leaks.