Teizeen's Kota family

Ryan:

We spent the last few days in Kota where Teizeen met some of her native Indian relatives.  If you followed our Kenya blog a few summers back, the food part of the experience was much the same as having dinner with Shafiq Uncle’s family: intense family pressure to consume unnatural quantities of super oily food.  Here in Kota, however, the family’s insistence to consume bordered on the annoying and resulted in physical pain to my abdomen and intestines.  It should be noted that my honeymoon with solid stool and stable stomach came to an abrupt end last week in Udaipur (the illness, I suspect, came from the cilantro we used in an otherwise excellent cooking class).  We let the family know ahead of time that I was not well but they did not relent.  As a result, I had a series of loud and embarrassing experiences with eastern style toilets. 

The houses of the family in Kota were, as they were in Kenya, shared communally by multiple generations - elders, the kids of the elders – and the kids of the kids of the elders (the youngest generations were bone skinny, getting progressively rounder with age, until becoming quite fat in their middle ages).  The basic composition of a house: kitchen, toilet room (eastern style), bathing room, and a multifunctional living area that covered dining, tv/entertainment, and sleeping.  

At a basic level, I found myself able to follow some of the Gujarati conversations between Teizeen and her aunts and uncles.  I could not, however, speak enough Gujarati to hold a conversation myself, and very few of the older generation spoke English.  The youngest members of the family had not yet learned English, were just beginning to learn English, or were too shy to exercise what English they had already learned.  For conversation, I therefore found myself leaning heavily on Moiz and Mustafa, two of Teizeen’s college aged male cousins (unmarried as of yet) with good English skills.  Moiz and Mustafa were fantastic hosts, shuttling Teizeen and I all around Kota and showing us the local sites.  Both had many questions for us about work opportunities in the US and Canada since employment prospects in India, even for qualified college graduates, were looking pretty grim.  Moiz’ brother had recently been granted admission to Canada, providing Moiz himself with hope to join them in a few years.  Mustafa, was still looking for opportunities. 

All in all, the family was mega-hospitable, welcoming, and never stopped reminding us that their home was also our home, and that the three days we spent with them were totally insufficient.  However, Teizeen and I are somewhat relieved to be back by ourselves continuing further north on our travels through India – we will be viewing the spectacular Taj Mahal by the end of this week after a brief visit to one of India’s more famous bird sanctuaries.