Thursday, 5th December

I've got myself a list of Tamil music to buy in Madurai, most of which is written by this bloke called A.R. Rahman and is all film music. Apparently Mr. Rahman is a sprightly nineteen year-old who is just excellent. He wrote the music for Indian, which is fantastic. It still sounds like it has all been written on a dodgy keyboard at home, but I suppose that's the price we pay for trying to develop the world. Not many tablas involved, but a lot of strings and carnatic scales. Speaking of which, here is the carnatic scale in C:

ShaReeGhaMaPaThaNisSha C DbEFGAbBC
 

It's the Schwartz Matriculation Christmas Bash tomorrow, a nativity in the morning and afternoon for the juniors and seniors respectively. I am playing guitar in four songs now, I learned another one today! I've got the words in English letters for the church choir now, so at least I can make a feasible pretence of singing on Sunday! Nic's coming to Ramnad tomorrow! Arun is going to take us to Rameswaram on Saturday, which should be excellent. We'll introduce her to the girls tomorrow evening. The Rev. has been making a big fuss about getting her a room. She would be fine here, but he has insisted that she sleep at St. Andrew's because there is no fan here. It'll be good to show her around, now that we've settled in.

I went to a choir rehearsal tonight and missed St. Andrew's so C. will have done some more bonding with His Girls to oust me out a bit more. I guess now I'm just being paranoid, but I think it's gone to his head. He has begun to come out of his shell (at last) and I think that my being ill when we were supposed to start teaching has helped. It threw him in at the deep end and being forced to cope with crisis is always a good way to induce change. I'm not sure it's a change that I like, but I suppose I'll have to adjust accordingly. He can't read or write and have music on at the same time. So he just works in the kitchen. Today it was 'am I going to have to go into the kitchen or are you going to be nice and turn the music off?' Why can't he just say 'I'm going to work now, so can I switch it off?' Why does he have to whine his way around the point? Why, why, oh why Mr. Stevens do you always have to pretend?

He's really worried at the moment because he has accepted a place at Cardiff University for a course that he doesn't really want to do. They don't do English and Art, so he's doing English and History. There's no point in doing something that you don't want to do, so I said he should phone round and see if he can't get some other offers by June so he can do something that'll give him a sense of purpose. He isn't brave enough to go and try again, even though his A and two B's would probably get him in anywhere. I think I managed to alleviate his misdirected resignation to a life of tedium by giving him hope. UCAS isn't law, we can always change.

We tried to get Japanese chicken masala for lunch, but they didn't have any so Kumar brought plain old chicken masala (burn baby, burn) instead. It was all right really, with our boiled vegetables it actually tasted good! C. doesn't agree with masala and potatoes, it has to be rice, or it isn't right. A slight disagreement ensued, during which I said that C. was opinionated and narrow-minded (my actual words were: 'that's just the sort of narrow-minded, wrongly opinionated thing I'd expect you to say'... Ouch).

Mr. Gnanaraj's wife's mother's sister's son was at the choir rehearsal tonight, and he told me that his cousin was very worried about the food she gave us the other day and hoped that it hasn't made us ill. Nah, just tasted like it had already been through several people before we got to it... She was very nice though, so I just spouted lots of platitudes and hoped he understood. His English is very good and he is studying engineering at Coimbatore, I think. He said that we should visit him on our way to Ooty in March.¹

I wasn't lying when I said that the food didn't make us ill, in fact, as I announced triumphantly this afternoon, 'squidge probability factor 1:1, we have normality. I repeat, we have normality!' I hope for all our sakes that this is true because I'll be very upset if it isn't... anyway, we've found some loo-roll in Ramnad so nothing can worry us now. Apart from dysentery, that is...