Good Neighbours
11 September 2004 12:12 am
My neighbour, May, lent me her vacuum cleaner a few days ago.
At this point I have to confess that up until that day, I had not vacuumed my apartment since I moved in. Last December. And I happen to be renting an apartment that has wall-to-wall carpeting except in the kitchen. (I just know I'm going to lose some brownie points with the Queen of Clean, Serena. *sheepish grin*)
The carpeting is a shade of industrial grey and of a texture that makes you not want to remove your footwear when you enter the apartment. But of course I do. This is Asia, where shoes belong on the shoe rack or outside the house. The one good thing about the carpeted floor is that you can't see any shit that's fallen on it, so you can walk around with a false sense of pride about your housekeeping abilities. And that's exactly why I never came round to buying a vacuum cleaner.
Anyhow how May's vacuum cleaner came to be in my grateful hands was because we had a neighbourly chat while I was watering the plants and she was doing laundry out in the back. (We share the same back area and fire escape.) I wanted to know if she had a cleaning lady coming in every week or month to fix her place and I unwittingly confessed about my floor getting nasty and before I knew it, I was vrooming away for the next hour, gleefully letting her machine suck up 9 months' worth of floor shit. God bless her soul, amen.
Her neighbourliness got me thinking about the way things were when I was a kid. People really were better neighbours then. My family and our neighbours were friendly, but we also respected one another's privacy. My mother used to send me and Sister 1 out to our neighbours' with offerings of home-made cookies and cakes or festive dishes on religious holidays. We in turn received oranges and candy during the Lunar New Year, and home-made muruku and chocolates during Deepavali, the Hindu festival of lights. I played with my neighbours' kids all the time. When my mother needed to go out on an errand while we were in school, she would leave the house key with the next-door neighbour for us. Of course she could put it under a flower pot, but she felt it was better to put it in the hands of a trusted person.
These days most of us shut the door quickly behind us and walk briskly once we're out of the house to avoid talking to the neighbours. The less we know about them, the better, it seems. When I was living with S, we had next-door neighbours, a young couple and their two kids, who were heavily in debt and constantly visited upon by loan sharks, who would knock on their doors very loudly and persistently every other week. The next day you could be sure that the husband's name and address would be scrawled on the wall of the staircase leading to our corridor with the trademark warning words, "Owe $ Pay $". We did do a mutual food offering thing once, but S and I kept our distance for the most part, especially when I heard about the husband trying to get S to be the guarantor in his car loan. Ridiculous.
"Good fences make good neighbours", so goes that Robert Frost poem. Sadly so. But sometimes you get lucky. You get a generous one, like May.
Older entries
Ramadan - 08 October 2006
Where I Have Been - 03 October 2006
Baby Talk - 10 August 2006
6 Weeks of Separation - 16 July 2006
Unacceptable Rudeness - 21 June 2006