Indian Samurai इंडियन सामुराई

It all started a few months after I arrived in Mumbai…

I had been hunting a rat in my flat, without success, when this horrid smell started. Shit, it must be dead in an impossible place to find!! I started looking anyway, without success again.

I then stepped out of my flat, only to realise that the whole neighbourhood smelled of dead rat!

To be accurate, of dead fish.

And here we are, 3 years later, when I finally decide to look into it. The thing that has “bothered” me the most is that this is not a constant smell. It will someday come, stay the whole day and then disappear. So I wondered why…

After some research, I think it depends on 2 things: 1. when the fishermen go fishing which is linked to the moon, 2. the way the wind blows when the fish is drying.

To go a bit into details:

One of the first questions when I settled down in India: hey, how do we do with the trash? Instructions from my landlady: you put it in the trash can and you leave the can outside your door every evening. And every morning, magic, the trash is empty!!

And sorting out the trash?? No?? Okay okay…

A few months later, looking for my bike downstairs, I saw two women crouching in the trash of 4-5 big containers. So here is how the waste-sorting is done… 

In India, nothing gets lost, everything gets transformed; Indians are the kings of recycling (at least at an individual level)...

In French, we have this expression « to cut a short to someone ». Which means to undermine someone’s integrity (physical or psychological).

And there is this Bollywood movie, Tashan (which has no interest but for its dances) where Kareena Kapoor literally cut herself a short!

She is in a truck, in Ladakh, with goats bearing their winter coat (hence we can assume that the weather is cold) and what does she do?? She takes out a huge knife and cut a short in her jeans! Awesome!!