Shower kharab hai

My mornings are invariably spent pleading for some appliance to work. This morning, it was the shower. When we first saw our apartment, one of the most exciting features was the enormous shower head -- such a luxury in India, where my first "shower" was using a bucket and pail to pour water over my head. I still love our shower, but it seems to be completely random when it happens to work amazingly (all weekend), and when it's like the little engine that could (this morning).

When Tyler and I watched "Rome" this weekend, I smirked watching the characters plead to the gods to bestow curses on their enemies. Yet here I was this morning, literally talking to my shower head, willing it to work. As if heading my words, the water began gushing out of the shower head as though finally released, but then disappeared to literally two drops after the three-second outpour.

This past weekend, our pleading was towards our washing machine, which lately has been wavering between not working at all, and "working" at 1000x its normal speed -- resulting in the most violent shaking that's reminiscent of poltergeist.

One of the first Hindi words I learned through osmosis is "kharab", or "broken". "Meter kharab hai", "toaster kharab hai" -- the possibilities are endless. What always struck me was how passive these phrases are; as though the autorickshaw meter mysteriously just decided not to work. There's also never a sense of, "but don't worry, it will be fixed soon."

In thinking about appliances, I laugh thinking about a discussion I had with one of my colleagues shortly after I got here. He could not believe that I bought an iron to iron my own clothes, when I could easily have them ironed by someone else. When another colleague longingly remarked, "Americans have so many appliances!", this first colleague quickly pipped: "Yea, but then you actually have to do everything yourself instead of having it done for you." He ended the conversation with: "Ah, you weird Americans."

And that was before he knew I talked to my appliances...