We are neither here nor there.

The carpets are up and the curios down. The boys are packed and shipped off south for a week with Naniji.

A week from tomorrow the packers arrive. They’ll invade for 3 or 4 days to box up several categories of shipment: 700 lbs of air freight; 7k lbs of household effects, which will sit in a container for months at sea; thousands more pounds of furniture, wrapped and sent to storage for three years.

Then the guy will come and take away our Subaru for storage, useless to us in right-side drive India.

Headed to Mumbai at month’s end, we are—we have been for weeks—neither here nor there.

Today I read the following passage in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City:

All things modern in Bombay fail regularly: plumbing, telephones, the movement of huge blocks of traffic. Bombay is not the ancient Indian idea of a city. It is an imitation of a western city, maybe Chicago in the twenties. And, like all other imitations of the West here—the Hindi pop songs, the appliances, the accents people put on, the parties the rich throw—this imitation, too, is neither here nor there.

So, it seems, we should fit right in.

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