I needed an apartment in Ahmedabad.   When I first came to the city, I couchsurfed with a very nice family, and they were happy to host me as long as I needed, but I knew that if I wanted to really get a feel for the city, then I’d need a place of my own.  I’d started looking for apartments while I was in the states, calling landlords and real estate agents over skype, but I couldn’t find hardly any apartments with pictures, and nobody was willing to confirm a rental with me over the phone.
So after a couple days in the city, I called all the people I’d spoken to in the states and my couchsurfing hosts introduced me to a few apartment brokers they knew.  The hunt was on!
My couchsurfer’s father introduced me to someone he knew who owned a flat and was renting out the rooms in it individually.  We drove across the city in his SUV to a run-down apartment building and took a rickety lift up to the sixth floor.  The owner banged on the door, and a shirtless man opened the door to a scene of urban wreckage.  At least, that’s what I thought as I looked inside.  Clotheslines were strung across the room and a bedroll was spread out on the floor.  There was a sizeable pile of rubble in one corner, and the walls were streaked with black grime.  We crossed the room and the owner opened another padlocked door.  “Your room,” he grunted as he pushed open the door.
Things were looking bleak.  It was a 10′ x 15′ room liberally scattered with the requisite rubble.  The walls were covered, oddly enough, with boot prints, even up near the ceiling, and messages in English scrawled across the walls.  “FUCK OFF,” one wall said.  “FEEL THE PAIN,” said the wall near the door.  “Bathroom,” the owner said, pushing open a door adorned with a very artistically written “MANIAAAA” to reveal a dusty sink and rusted showerhead lit with a bare light bulb.  “I’ll get back to you,” I said.

The next day I filled up with appointments with brokers.  Ahmedabad, as I found out, has a whole ecosystem of people tied up in the apartment rental business.  First of all, there’s the owners, who generally live in another part of town from their apartment and maybe own one or two apartments in complexes scattered around town.  There’s building caretakers who are responsible for the upkeep of each apartment building, garbagemen and cleaning ladies for each neighborhood, water, gas and milk deliverymen, and finally, the brokers.  There are real estate agents in town, but the majority of deals, it seems, are brokered by random people who want to earn a little cash.  It’s their job to know the apartments that are available and the people that own them, and also continually look out for people who want to rent.  In return, they get one month’s rent for whatever deal they facilitate.  One broker, a twenty-four year old man named Vikas was a computer engineer at night, and from 9 to 5 he ran around the city, showing off apartments to various people and doing whatever’s necessary to make the rental go through.
I met Vikas early in the morning at Adani Petroleum (the address system in Ahmedabad is strange to me.  There aren’t really street names–there’s neighborhood names, and then landmarks in the neighborhood that everybody seems to know.)  He showed up with a fellow broker on the back of a motorcycle.  My couchsurfer’s father was having a slow day at his menswear shop, so he sent one of his employees to drive me around on the back of a scooter.  We met, shook hands, and zoomed off through the city to the first apartment.
All the meetings were very ad-hoc.  Sometimes the owner would come late, sometimes he wouldn’t want to come and Vikas would have to talk him into showing up.  There was a lot of waiting around for people to show and a lot of rapid Gujarati conversations on cell phones.  We’d get to one apartment, wouldn’t be able to get in, and then zip across town to another apartment while the first apartment’s owner drove over from across town.  I saw some a nice little apartment in a development by the river, built so recently that the road to the apartment was still a dusty dirt road.  I walked around, took some pictures, talked to the owner and tried to get a sense of what kind of houses I could get in the city.  Everybody was looking at me expectantly, as if they expected me to say, “I’ll take it!” and pull a bundle of bills out of my wallet.  I kept my expression neutral, and after fifteen minutes or so, we zoomed off to the next apartment.

The owner still wasn’t there, so we went to the corner restaurant to get some tea and kill time.  The four of us sat around a corner, talking, and eventually a waiter brought over two cups of tea on little china platters.  Confusedly, I asked the broker next to me, “are you not having any tea?”
He laughed and said, “No, no!  I am having some.  Cup or saucer?”
“cup,” I said tentatively.  He took a teacup, poured half of the tea into the saucer, handed me the cup and then drank from the saucer.  Noting my bemused expression as I sipped my tea, Vikas said “we share because it’s cheap” and flashed a smile before draining his saucer.
By that time, the owner was around, so we drove over to the next aparment.  I really liked this one, from the moment I saw the ornamental Ganeshes on the door. (Ganesh is one of the Hindu gods, a man with an elephant’s head who gets around on a rat.  Ganesh is very popular in India, and you see posters and sculptures in homes and businesses everywhere).  The apartment was huge by my standards, maybe 1,500 square feet with marble floors, three balconies, a guest bedroom and a number of bathrooms.  It also was a split level, and had a short flight of stairs separating the bedrooms from the sitting room and dining room.  The idea of having an apartment with stairs in it was, for whatever reason, incredibly exciting to me.  “This is luxury!” I thought to myself as I looked around.  All the apartments I was looking at were furnished, often with things I’d never think to get myself, like small divans and corner cabinets.

I haven’t talked about price yet.  By American standards, the apartments are incredibly cheap, about 12 times cheaper than I’d pay in Boston for a similar apartment.  I ended up living in the apartment with the Ganeshes, and I pay $240/month for rent.  It would easily cost me $3000 to have a furnished apartment like this in Boston.  By Ahmedabad standards, these are middle-class apartments.  My neighbors are a family of 8 or so.  The dad works in an office somewhere, the mom is a housewife, and then there’s a bunch of relatives and kids running around.  The well-off live in groups(called societies), of bungalows on the edge of the city.  I’m pretty close to the center of the city.

For the rest of the day, I met up with some people from a real estate agency and we drove around in a stuffy car, looking at apartments that were much less nice and much more expensive than the ones I’d seen earlier.  The only difference that I could make out between the proper real estate company and my ad-hoc brokers was that the real estate agents had crappier properties, weren’t as willing to show me different places, and had a printed card in English that explained exactly how much they charged.  At the end of the day, I made up my mind, called Vikas, and told him that I’d take the Ganesh apartment.
But the story was far from over.  We met up and drove to the owner’s house, where I shook hands with Ravi, the owner and talked about how long I wanted to stay.  I gave him about $80 as a deposit, and he said he’d have somebody clean the apartment so I could move in within a day or two.  I’m paying in cash, and there’s no lease, and in the back of my mind, I kept wondering, “am I getting scammed?  I don’t know any of these people.  Is this how everythings works in India?  This seems weird to me”  But I figured I didn’t really have any way of being sure, so there’d be a little leap of faith on my part.
The next day we met to draw up the lease and for me to pay.  The lease wasn’t ready, but Ravi handed me a kep and asked me to pay two months deposit as well as the first month’s rent.  Worrying a bit, now that I was handing over a chunk of money (about $750), I said I’d prefer to sign a lease before I pay.  This caused a bit of a stir, with everybody looking at each other and saying in Gujarati something that I assume means, “God, what a jackass!”  After a bit of back-and-forth, Ravi finally told me, “I’ve given you a key to an apartment that’s worth 25 lakh (about $50,000).  That is a huge show of faith on my part.  To worry that you will be cheated is absurd.”  I shrugged, agreed to pay half then and half the next day when we signed the lease, and figured that if he ripped me off, I could leave the balconies open and let monkies into the apartment in revenge.  That night, when I tried the key in the lock and the door opened, I was hugely relieved.  I walked in to my bedroom, flopped down on the bed, cranked the fan up to warp speed and fell asleep.
The next day, Vikas got a lease printed.  Reading through it, the only thing that really stood out was the sentence, “lessee shall not have meat or alcohol on the premises.”  When I asked about it, I learned that my building is owned by a Jain, and Jains will not kill any living thing.  The alcohol is partly from Jainism, but also because Gujarat (the state Ahmedabad is in) is a dry state.  We all met on on the side of the road somewhere and read the lease and then hopped on motorcycles and drove off to an old woman’s house.  The old woman was a notary and spoke perfect English.  We pasted pictures of ourselves onto the lease (it’s really cool–in India, whenever you sign a contract, you also stick on a picture of your face) and signed the lease, and then the woman covered with with stamps and seals.  I got a copy, paid my rent, and then somebody gave me a ride back to the apartment.  Finally, I was done!
There’s a lot about living in India that I don’t know, and this is where Vikas was a godsend.  He helped me arrange to have somebody come and clean the apartment, to get gas and water delivered, to get a fridge and plates and a tabletop stove.  His English was far from perfect, but I can say almost nothing in Gujarati, and it would have been impossible for me to get it done by myself.  I can barely buy bananas from the fruit guy in front of my house.
Unfortunately for me, I still wasn’t settled.  I got home to the apartment the afternoon after I signed the lease and tried to take a shower.  A thin trickle of water came out of the showerhead briefly before disappearing.  A little pissed, I called Ravi and asked him about the water.  He got the building manager to come over and explain to me, mostly using hand signs and scattered english, that the water to the building is only on between 6:30 and 9 in the morning.  You have to get up then and turn on a valve to fill a 500 gallon tank that’s attached to the ceiling in one of the bathrooms, and that’s your water for the day.

The next night, I came home with bags full of food, threw open the windows and made myself a dinner on my balcony, looking down at the cows and monkeys in the street and looking forward to living here in Ahmedabad.

I woke up at 5AM to the sound of a young child crying in pain.  “OWWWW!”   “OWWWWWWWWW!”
“Jesus,” I thought, “What happened?”
Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I went to the window and looked out, but saw nothing.  No sooner had I lay back down than the child started crying again.  It was only my third day in India and I had no idea what to do.  I tried to close my eyes, but the crying continued.  I decided to go to the weight room and talk to a friend of the family who came in early every morning to do yoga.  While we talked, I heard the crying again, and I ran to the window to look out.

As it turns out, this neighborhood is full of peacocks.  They fly (I didn’t know peacocks could fly!) to the rooftops in the morning and strut around, calling to one another with a horrible sound exactly like a weeping child.  This month is the beginning of mating season, so hopefully I’ll get to see peacocks doing their mating displays.

But peacocks aren’t the only neighbors.  Yesterday morning, another couchsurfer staying in the same house woke me up excitedly, saying “Mahnqui, Mahnqui!” with a thick french accent.  “What?” I said, staggering blearily outside. 
The trees next to the house were filled with monkeys.  Shy and excitable, the monkey stayed up in the canopy, avoiding us as they ate grapelike fruits and dropped the pits down onto us.  They also flung poo down onto the neighbors’ cars.
Later that morning, I was to catch a ride into town on my couchsurfer’s father’s motorcycle.  As we walked to it, Dinesh, the father, said “mohnkee!” disgustedly.  The motorcycle was covered with dusty monkey foot and tail prints.  They must have been sitting on it all night.  Even in a city like Ahmedabad, there are still some animals that are born to be wild.

(after a bit of googling, I found that the monkeys we’d seen were the Common Langur, also known as the Hanuman monkey in India)

It was eight at night when I landed in India, and it was hot.  Sweltering 104 degree air swept through the plane when the doors opened and I followed the passengers, panting slightly, into the New Delhi airport.  After going through security, I met a Sunjay, a driver from my hotel and followed him out into the Indian night.
America loves its lighting.  We’re afraid of the dark, and it’s reflected in our enthusiastic use of floodlights everywhere a human might walk at night.  India doesn’t share that enthusiasm, and I walked quickly through dimly lit streets and lots, trying to keep Sunjay’s back in sight.  Going through parking lots, I could see in the beams of headlights that there’s a haze of dust everywhere.  I tasted dust on my tongue a smell in the air that I couldn’t quite place, some mix of dirt and spice and automotive chemicals.
Driving in India is very much like being on an falling-apart amusement park ride where everybody can steer their own car.  The reflective bumps in the road have flashing lights in them, and the edges of the highway blink and shimmer, making you feel like you’re driving on a marquee.  Workers weld girders over the highway, sending a fountain of sparks down onto the cars speeding by below.  Cars swerve to avoid holes in the road large enough to fit a person inside.  Some families squeeze four or five to a motorcycle, which others sit in the backs of three-wheeled motor-rickshaws, everyone on the road honking and merging and braking in an improvised symphony.  On the side of the road men herd water buffalo and cows along, there’s bicycles, people walking, broken vehicles and constant construction.  It seems like anywhere where there’s not roads or houses there are workers putting in a new subway system or a high-rise hotel.  I’m charmed by the signs at the construction side:  “you are welcome to come in, but watch your step”
It struck me as we were honking and speeding through Delhi that the American system of driving is based on the beaurocratic process of making sure everyone follows the same set of rules.  Indians favor the liberatarian approach: “I am responsible for not hitting anyone else and making sure nobody hits me.”  It may looks chaotic, but it works, and it’s a wonderful thing to see in action.
After half an hour of driving, we got to my hotel.  It was a lovely furnace, with very tastful furniture and a comfy bed.  With the anemic air conditioner burbling and choking and the overhead fan revving up for take-off, I could almost lay naked on the bed without sweating.  I lay back and closed my eyes on my first day in India.

I don’t want to just repeat links from BoingBoing, but DAMN, this guy knows how to use his body.  I mean, DAMN!