Racist aunty-ji !!

Recently I had the opportunity to go and check out an apartment along with a guy who is my current apartment mate. This apartment was in the area of Jersey city commonly referred to as Journal square and probably also officially referred to as the same. I went along since I had nothing better to do and I thought that seeing the places around would help me get adjusted to the new state faster, little did I know that I was in for quite an experience.
We met her on the street near her building and first off was an admonishment about how we had not followed her optimized directions which she implicitly claimed were better than those offered by Google maps. My friend argued, I smiled and nodded in a sagacious fashion. We walked on and entered into this compound where we had some kids cycling at breakneck speeds around some obstacles which would most certainly have obliged their desire for bodily harm. We walked into this lobby (I suppose that it could be called that) which had a peculiar smell and then into an elevator which also had a peculiar smell in addition to water on the floor. The aunty looked at me with a critical eye instantly disapproving of my south-indian origin, at this point I dared not mention to her that I was one of the dreaded legends come to life, a malayalee.
We finally got to her apartment and by this time I had already used a whole bunch of eye signals to ask my friend with varying levels of incredulity "Are you honestly thinking about staying here?". Her apartment looked like a bomb had gone off in it and the survivors had pieced together something resembling a domicile in the aftermath. She asked me if I knew Hindi to which i replied in the negative only to receive the full weight of that judging stare. As I reeled from the strike and struggled to regain my poise she dismissed me from consideration by observing that it was my friend and not I who was thinking about staying there (ref: incredulous glances). She pointed out a plastic bookshelf like device and started as if mumbling to herself but it was surely for the potential tenant's benefit. It was as subtle as an elephant letting out a gigantic fart and then blushing and shuffling from foot to foot.
She started running through some hypermath equations as to how she was going to partition the space on the shelf for the new guy and so on. The shelf in question looked to be in serious danger of collapsing if even a mote of dust were to settle on it.

Shelf: Spare me oh mistress..

Aunty-ji: You shall obey my commands!

Shelf: Noooooooo..

Audience question: Author, was that really necessary?

Me: Nope, but here's what you should really be asking. Do I give a shit? Nope...not at all.

She took us into a curtained off section of the hall/kitchen/part-time bathroom and pointed out two bed like structures which seemed determined to resist reality imposing upon them notions such as centre of mass, gravity, physics, etc. Once here she imperiously remarked that it could be occupied by one person or by two with a suitable rent being paid by the person(s) in question.

Up we went on a rickety staircase.

Once here we were shown the room which she was thinking of renting out to my friend. It was currently inhabited by a guy who was to be downgraded to downstairs living (I wonder if the poor sod had any idea). She pointed out the bathroom with a lengthy description of cleaning schedules, usage schedules and usage length metrics going so far as to explain why she would take as long as she was planning to take while using the facilities.

At this point dear reader (I use the singular since I am sure no two people will be reading this at the same point in time) I found myself thinking about contrasts. I was working at a normal job in florida with a normal apartment room and normal friends and acquaintances and suddenly I was standing in a dingy jersey apartment listening to an aunty-ji talk about her bowel moments and their regularity or lack of it. How far had I fallen!

One thing I have not described properly in my above rant is how racist she was. This lady was Indian though she vehemently claimed not to be. In fact, at the end of every sentence or breath she was talking about how she was not "the" indian. She said she was Gujarati at one point and since my ex roomate and close friend is also from Gujarat I committed the super sin of asking her where she was from in Gujarat. My question was met with a stare which could have curdled milk and then would have gone on to vaporize the resultant fluid. She then launched into how Indians were horrible, smelly, not trustworthy, did not have manners, and a whole lot of other things. At one point she was talking about how Indians did not use deodorant and once again my mind contrasted my past and present. It would have been simple racism if she had not been so blatantly Indian. Her obvious ethnicity made her not only a bloody hypocrite but also in most ways a traitor to her own roots. She then launched into an account about south indians which was anything but complementary. The funniest part in this entire thing was when she started talking about her visit to Kerala to see some ayurvedic doctors about her knee or something. She seemed to think that since I was a malayalee I would automatically know all the good doctors in my state and also that I would take responsibility for the fact that the place she had gone to did not have many english speaking staff. I forgot the specifics of what she said but suffice to say that it was horribly offensive, so much that it was funny in a way.

She was just this horrible, fat, lady who seemed to hold herself in supreme regard and looked down on everything and everyone else.

Anyway, my friend did not end up living there, and now him and this other friend of mine are living in this 3 bedroom apartment with yours truly. So that worked out.

I never considered myself a patriot but it is when I see people like this that I take solace in the knowledge that while I may be no patriot, I do love my country and my people in my own subtle way, I respect them.

Magus.