My Daily Battles

Apparently the woman who envisioned this community proclaimed that all inhabitants must be warriors. She was on to something.


Life is almost perfect at the farm. Almost.

Each morning greets me with sunlight and bird song. The bed is large, soft, comfortable. The bathroom is clean. Mine. I even have a fridge and modest kitchen, and I have a desk at which I work. The Tamil neighbors and workers are friendly even if we can’t communicate; the Aurovilan leaders are attentive and charming and try to meet my many needs. Life is good.

But not perfect. There are five main battles I wage every day, and I spend long hours in the afternoon devising new strategies to win the wars.

These are my enemies:

• 1) The smell of cheese. An obvious foe: I do live above a cheese factory. Still, the pungent scent of warm dairy and the occasional whiffs of the workers’ B.O. fill my apartment and settle into my senses. I fear it will seep into my sheets, my clothes, my hair. My current weapon of choice: incense. Current scent: Mattipal, a gift given weeks ago and finally put to use. Progress: As long as I’m here to burn the precious sticks, I’m winning. But the number of precious sticks is quickly diminishing…


• The onslaught of ants, 2)large and 3)small. Upon arrival I noticed a very sweet heart near my bed in white powder, which I assumed was a misplaced kolam or other well-meaning decoration. “No, no,” the cheese man said as he settled me in. “It’s poison. For the ants.” Boric acid, to be exact. He told me to sweep it up, which I promised to do.
  
  Until I saw the ants.
  
  For those of you who’ve seen Indiana Jones IV, consider the scene where the man is eaten by giant ants. That scene slipped into my dreams the first several nights.
  
  I’ve bought more acid and am filling whatever holes I can find and drawing lines with it wherever I see appropriate. But the weapon is weak; they burst through my barriers with relative ease. The most I can do is delay their arrival every night.
  
  Luckily they keep to themselves, marching in one solid train from window up wall across ceiling to a safe warm place where they will build a new nest. As long as they stay out of my bed, I’m learning to live with them. And as long as their stinky eggs take longer than six weeks to hatch, I don’t care.
  
  The little guys, on the other hand, are getting to me. Small, red, and quick, they pile up on my computer and chew away at my pillow. I unmake my bed every morning so I have clean sheets to sleep on at night.
  
  These guys, apparently, are after food. Yesterday I made the mistake of leaving my cookies (tightly bagged!) on the counter. After a few hours I noticed an increase in ants around the desk area and quickly threw the cookies into the fridge. Last night when I arrived home at 2 a.m. and wanted a snack, I immediately thought of the baked goods.
  
  Pulling one out, I noticed a few ants fell from it. I examined the disk carefully. It looked fine. I bit in slowly and chewed. Inside I identified dates and nuts, but no ants. So I ate with relatively little hesitation.
  
  But then I reached into the bag for cookie #2. The plastic was lined with frozen, dead ants.
  
  Now I keep everything in my fridge.
  
  And I’m seeking some magic chalk, which apparently keeps all bugs at bay.
  
  At least I have a plan.


• The non-functioning shower. The bathroom is beautiful. (Pics available on Facebook, ladies and gents.) In the corner stands a large shower with a shiny metal head, begging to be used and lingered in. It even has two knobs, one of which boasts a red sticker… a promise of hot water, perhaps? The trouble is, I can’t tell. I turn the knobs, I twist the head, and nothing emerges but a pitiful dribble. I have a shower I can’t use. And it’s torture.
  
  I have been nagging the head cheese maker since arrival. First it was because the tank wasn’t full. A worker filled it. Then it was the connection. Someone resecured it. Today it’s blocked, and a man will come to fix it later. This is a battle of persistence, a battle from which I will eventually emerge victorious.


• The lack of a western toilet. Again, the bathroom is beautiful. But my toilet is a hole in the ground.
  
  Maybe it’s pride. Maybe it’s culture. Maybe it’s both. But every time I have to pee, I look long and hard at the hole in the corner and wonder if I can hold it until I make it to Le Morgan, the French café with fancy toilets and toilet paper.
  
  A spider lives in the hole, and sometimes it jumps around the pee area.
  
  But really, what can a girl do but learn to squat?


• The have-it-but-don’t internet. The other thing about La Ferme is it’s far from everything, including internet connections. The torturous part is not the distance, however, but the fact that every time I open my computer my airport bar eagerly alerts me to five full bars of high-speed wifi perfect for uploading pictures and chatting and blogging and facebooking and having fun—if only I can enter the correct password. And, of course, no one here knows the password. And no one knows how to shut the protection off.
  
  It will come. Once again, it’s a matter of persistence. And I will triumph.

These battles exclude the ongoing war with transportation (I’m now on my seventh bike, and I still require rescuing almost every other day.) and communication (The cell phone has a mind of its own, and it’s a lot sneakier than me.).

I’ve long been a fighter, but Auroville is making me a warrior. Just like "The Mother" hoped.