A View of My Neighbourhood

My room is painted a pale peach, pepto bismol sort of colour. When I lie down on my bed and look up at my exhausted ceiling fan, I see a giant pink star above my face. I have a door that leads out onto a balcony by our front gate, from where I can see a small park and the rows of similar three-story houses that overlook it. In the very early mornings a few dedicated people practice yoga there, and in the late afternoons I've seen schoolkids flying kites and playing cricket. Once in a while a sacred cow strolls down our alleyway, lodging her wide self in the sliver of shade between two parked cars.
A short walk out onto the main street and things get a little more hectic. We have everything from tiny street stands that sell steamed momos to a Levi's outlet, a fitness center ("Y2K Millenium Gym for He & She"), and a row of young men who set up their stools nightly and can draw some of the best henna designs in the city. It smells amazing to walk past them and get a whiff of that spicy, lemony paste. I like to buy ice from a nearby stand and plunge my hand into the cool bag, picking out a cube and crunching it loudly to the bewilderment of the old Parsee man I buy it from. But he still smiles and blesses me and calls me बेटी, which means daughter. Opposite the rather out-of-place French bakery, Birdy's, is a Bollywood cinema. It's pretty run down and for some reason always abruptly cuts the film off before it's quited ended, but it's also been packed every night for the past two weeks with cheeky, whistling audiences thanks to the recent hit, Love AajKal. In this one the two stars, Deepika and Saif Ali Khan, actually lock lips - I think the eruption of cheers from a few teenage boys who sat to my right when I went to see it might have damaged the hearing in my right ear for good.
Whenever I'm feeling hungry, which is too often for my own good, I pop out to Chawla's Fast Food for some freshly baked butter naan. And I mean straight-from-the-tandoor-into-my-greedy-hands fresh, all for the cost of about 25c. And on my way home, after I snake between the traffic of oncoming rickshaws, bikes, buses, and on one occasion an elephant, I always encounter one of our friendly neighbours. She's an older Punjabi lady, and perhaps a bit senile, I can't tell, because even though I stop and chat with her almost everyday, she's always surprised that I can speak Hindi and she always informs me that a group of American students live on the third floor next door, to which I smile and sweetly reply each time, "Oh yes, I live there too, you know..."
And occasionally, throughout the day, it strikes me, "I live here." Here, in an apartment without AC or internet or even a fridge, where I fall asleep on a hard mattress to the howling of stray dogs in the courtyard, and where I wake up to the morning calls of a door-to-door vegetable seller, here I am making my home. And I'm falling in love with it.