Spoiled

I've said it many times, I can make a life and a home and have fun anywhere, literally anywhere on this planet, as long as I'm with my darling. I don't care where it is or what the conditions are...I'll manage, because the truth is, if someone popped in and said, "I can save you from the things that are making you crazy (ie - India in general is really at odds with me these days), I can set you up in a brilliant house, with a brilliant life, and all the silly metropolitan things you long for. But you've to go alone."
I'd stay put.
The fact is, nothing would be brilliant without Hamid, and that's the end of that story.

However...
There are some days, every once in a while, that leave me in a fit of panic, which is usually followed by tears because sometimes I absolutely, positively hate being here.
The reasons are countless and are often arbitrary, it just depends on the day and the combination of challenges presented to me on any given morning. And it depends on me, of course.
We all have bad days - at least I think so. Though I'm not good at admitting to them publicly, I've just been smacked by the universe, which is what usually happens when I've spent a good five or six hours in a tantrum over things I cannot control and ironically have very purposefully chosen to participate in.
Today was one of those days. Nothing going right, too much rain to dry the mountain of laundry I'd coaxed through our washing machine, furniture biting me left and right (I've started drinking lemon juice to manage the bruises on my ankles which show up slow and green under my very pale skin), the hope of easy hot water in the shower dashed by the thick screen of purple-grey clouds hanging overhead...and whatever else I could find to be annoyed with - which was plenty.

After whining to my darling endlessly through the list (he as always sat sweetly by, cooing at me at the appropriate times and thoroughly loving me in spite of my raving lunacy) I wiped my tears, shifted the piles of still very damp laundry to under the ceiling fan and went out to the balcony, now dark with a rain-spent evening, for a breath of air.

Below me, in the yard of the house next to ours, the woman who had recently moved her family in was washing a pile of dishes larger than herself. They don't have a kitchen or a sink inside their house, and so she must wash her dirty pots and pans and such outside in the tap.
Tomorrow morning I will hear her wake up at six as she does every day to wash her family's clothing, by hand, in the same tap, smacking the clothes against a cement block set up for this purpose. Even if it is dark and cold she will emerge to this ritual - managing her responsibilities and her life without a single visible reproach.

She almost always appears well dressed in her sari, all flowing purple satin and polyester chiffon, hair neatly negotiated - whether there are dishes and laundry on her horizon or not.
I find it incredible and amazing, especially considering that their bathroom is all cold water all the time; it is not connected to their house (which is actually a single-room converted office space).

And her family is considered middle class for India.

There are also the people who live in tarp-tents all over the city, digging ditches around their sleeping families to keep the puddles from incorporating their meager living spaces into the mud - but I can't see them from here.
It was this mother of two, probably quite a few years younger than me, crouched in the rainy muck of her yard, scrubbing away happily at the previous meal's dishes that snapped me out of it - a big dose of reality, courtesy of the universe.