Tristan has been in Bombay with me for almost three days now. He is doing great, and we're both having a lovely time.
Its fun for me to see his reactions to aspects of Bombay that I have become accustomed to by now. And actually, since I was familiar with Karachi before I got here, many things about Bombay didn't seem that new to me at all-- I expected them. Like how persistently people try and get you to buy their stuff; the traffic patterns, and the fact that you have to be quite assertive to cross a street; or just the much larger quantities of trash and varieties of animals on the streets.
So walking around with Tristan these past couple of days, I have sometimes felt like I'm seeing things with new eyes. Yesterday, he stopped for about 5 minutes to watch a couple of cows munch on banana peels in the middle of a busy market. And now I find myself over-paying for services like cab rides because Tristan always feels like giving people more money than they ask for :)
Today, among other things, we spent a chunk of the day at Peter and Indira's apartment, ate yummy food, visited a Jain temple, and walked around a place called the hanging gardens. All of these things are located in a really pretty area of the city called Malabar Hill, and we had a nice time strolling around the streets. One of the things we saw was a tall building-- about 15 stories-- outfitted with very dangerous looking scaffolding. The security guard below the building told us that the workers climb up on it to do all their work. We asked if people got injured much, and he replied, "if someone is fated to get hurt, it will happen anyway." People generally talk about fate a lot.
Despite this activity, we have also spent plenty of time relaxing at home. And Tristan gets extra time to rest when I go off for fieldwork related things. We both think we're going to have a good three weeks together here... the pattern of life is working out so far.