A Rough Night for Some Guy

So, I went out a little before 8am this morning for my weekly trip to the grocery store.  I got down the steps and found this guy passed out in the vestibule between our apartment building's two doors.

I opened the inner door and called out, "hey, hey man!" and "can I get past you?" and stuff, but he didn't stir, not a twitch.  I managed to hop down and around his outstretched leg and out to the sidewalk.  The vestibule reeked of stale cigarette smoke.

While getting around him I saw clutched in one hand was a glass pipe with scorch marks at one end, probably a crack pipe (or some other kind of drug, I'm not expert).

When I got back fifteen minutes later he was sitting up.  I asked if I could slip past him and into the inner door and he shifted a bit to give me some more space.   He said a few things, but his voice was rough and raw and slurred, so I wasn't able to figure it out.

I sent a message to our building superintendent, including the above photo and his reply was "Omg".

A couple of hours later I had to make another trip out, and I got down the steps to find him propping himself up.  

Again on my way out I asked if I could get by him, and he didn't respond in any way I could detect, no movement, no words, nothing.  I managed to get by him and go out to take care of my errands.

On returning another neighbor was just exiting the building to take his dog for a walk.  We discussed the passed out guy, and the neighbor snapped a photo from the outside and sent it to the superintendent, then left to walk his dog around the neighborhood.

I got upstairs and thought maybe if the guy is dehydrated some water might help him feel better and get a move on.  Maybe he'd just had a rough night of overindulging and wasn't able to get home.  So I filled up a large metal mug with fresh, cool water from the tap (my wife and I only drink tap water, we don't keep bottled water around).  

When I got downstairs with the cup of water the guy appeared to have a hand inside his shorts and was moving it about, masturbating...

As soon as I opened the door he stopped.  I offered him the cup of water and he didn't react, didn't turn, didn't say anything, didn't move, nothing, like he was as passed out as he'd been earlier.

I made the offer about a dozen times, "hey, man, I brought you some water," and "I have a cup of water if you'd like," and so forth.  I tapped the cup against the tile walls a few times to see if I could make some noise to wake up, but no luck.

Going back inside, and being sure to close the inner door, I saw his hand get back to work inside his shorts, doing what he'd been doing before.  That just pissed me off, he wasn't passed out, he was ignoring me and I was trying to do the decent thing by offering him some water.

Fuck 'im...

I went back upstairs and dumped the water down the sink and messaged the building superintendent again.  Then got back to what I was doing on the computer...

Neighbors Having Loud Sex

So is there some kind of etiquette for when your neighbors are loudly having sex?  And you're not?  Turn on the lights and let them know you're there?  Clap (like teenagers in the college dormitory)?  Mimic?  Or just keep quiet?

Not long ago a young couple moved in across the hall, let's call them Marisa and Nolan, to protect the horny.  While our doors are on opposite sides of the stairway landing, our bedroom windows face each other, about five or six feet apart.

Neither of us has an air conditioner window unit in the bedroom and both of us normally keep our bedroom windows open for ventilation.  While they've covered their window with a sheet to block the view, mine has a vertical blind the previous tenant left there, but they'd cut off the bottom half for an air conditioner that they took with them.

Marisa and Nolan frequently get home in the evenings at some point after I go to bed (usually in the 9pm time frame, but I have a lot of trouble falling asleep).  They come back and after banging up the stairs and slamming their apartment door (not unusual, almost everyone in the building except me does that) they turn on the light in the bedroom and if I'm not very deep asleep, that usually brings me further up in consciousness...

Then many nights I hear the obvious sounds of clothing being removed, with unbuckling a belt the most prominent specific sound and the light only flickered on quickly, sometimes long enough to light a candle, judging by the flickering (like I said, the previous tenant cut off half the blinds...).  Sometimes Marisa telling Nolan in a sing-song, "I'm waiting for you..."  It might be followed by kissing, might not...

Then within a few minutes Marisa starts yelling pretty loudly, "Oh yes!  Oh yes!  Oh god!  Oh YES!  Fuck Yes!  FUCK YES!"  Once she starts getting louder and faster, especially after the "Oh" turns to "Fuck" I can hear Nolan's grunting beginning and then it goes for a few minutes.

And then they're usually finished within about ten minutes, maybe fifteen...  Marisa sometimes winds down, post-coital, with some quieter, but still ecstatic "shit yes, oh shit yes..." On Friday evenings afterwards they often wish each other a Shabbat Shalom (or translated from Hebrew, "peace on the Sabbath," in English (nice that I have neighbors using the Sephardic pronunciation after spending all my time at work with Ashkenazi Jews who use their pronunciation, making me feel I'm losing a little bit of my heritage)).

They make enough noise that I see people stopping and listening at their door sometimes...  And they got started before I got to bed this past Friday night, while I was still brushing my teeth and getting ready, and I could hear their noise coming from the building hallway without even going into the bedroom...

I don't go out of my way to listen or be a voyeur, but our windows are simply that close together and on work nights I go to bed early and get up early...  I hear them loud and clear just going about my normal routines.

Over Memorial Day weekend there was another couple in the building.  I don't know who they were, possibly both were just hanging out with residents and partying.  The man I'm sure was, a Marine with shore leave for Fleet Week, and the girl I don't think was living here either, based on their loud, drunken conversation under my window.  They were making enough noise I could hear the slap of flesh on flesh as they had sex...  And he was enjoying slapping her by hand and asking "you like that, don't you?" and she'd say "yes".

Then there's another couple on another floor who've recently started making some noise.  It's similar but the woman yells out "Oh Baby!" as they work towards a climax.

It's not all fun and games for Nolan and Marisa, however...  At least one night a few weeks ago they came home around midnight, and Marisa was somewhat drunk.  Nolan said "you're all fucked up" to her and then they went to bed.  Then there was a loud *thump* and Nolan cursing at her that she shoved him out of the bed.  He said he was going to the other room, but Marisa said she would go, and then she did.  After they settled down again I heard Nolan say, to nobody but the dark, "I hate this shit."

The only other place I've stayed with such "thin walls" was the Old Palace Lodge in Dunstable, England where Tieto put me up on a couple of two week business trips.  Both times couples stayed in the room next to me.  One of them put on the TV, but if that was intended to mask the sounds of their lovemaking, it didn't really work, because the TV was all tinny and ineffective compared to the rich, full sound of human voices.

Oh well...  Compared to the noises I used to hear in India while trying to sleep, barking dogs, rickshaws, car horns, car backup alerts, yelling watchmen, jackhammers and so forth, the sounds of a couple making love, in pure ecstasy and happiness is much, much more pleasant.  I find myself smiling with a good feeling instead of cursing and swearing.

Night Time in 8th Street Apartment...

This is what my apartment looks like at night when the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses across the street has their outside lights on.  The lights are evenly spaced, so the window frames cast dramatic shadows inside.  It completely changes the shape of the room, making the ceiling feel sloped.

Apartment Building Monthly Dues

Our apartment building here has monthly maintenance fees that everyone pays into every month to handle the common, shared expenses.  The standard formula is one based on the size of the apartment, which at first glance might sound fair.  But it's not...

The architecture of the building is that the largest apartments are lower down and they taper to smaller sizes as the building gets higher, this way everyone gets an uncovered balcony.  That means, of course, those of us lower in the building have the highest monthly payments.

However, thinking about it differently, I can see one alternative formula that would most likely be more fair, basing the monthly payment on the floor of the apartment, the higher up you go, the more expensive.

Two of the major expenses are the elevator and pumping water.

Those of us lower down in the building, especially the family on the ground floor, benefit less from the elevator than those higher up.  Similarly, it costs more to pump the water higher up, so again, the distance the water has to go is based on giving water to the higher up apartments and doesn't do much for those of us lower in the building.  If the building was lower we wouldn't need to pump the water so high.

So, those higher up in the building get more benefits for less money, get better views, more quiet as they're farther away from the parking, and to top it all off (pun intended) they get to throw their trash down on our balconies.

Sun Down

When I got home from work, around dusk, I found this on the balcony... What to call it?

Day break? Night fall? Sundown?

It made me think of the saying, "day breaks without having fallen, but night falls without breaking."

Coincidence?

Last night, after I went to bed I was woken up around 11:30pm by Leena yelling...  I opened my eyes and saw she had the front door open and was yelling out into the stairwell at someone.  After she closed the door I groaned "HUH?" and she told me Mrs. R's servants were out there drilling and hammering something, so she yelled at them to not make noise like that so late at night when people are trying to sleep.

Then this morning when she went to go out running errands, one of her car tyres was completely flat.  One that was completely full yesterday evening when she and the watchman cleaned the car, after which the car didn't move an inch.

She got the car to her family's house, after lots and lots of people stopped her on the road to tell her not to drive it that way, and had one of her family's servants take the tyre to be repaired.  He came back with it fixed and a broken key that had been stuck into the tyre to its full length!

And this isn't the first such coincidence.  Most of the times if Leena asks any of the neighors' servants and workers to make less noise, at hours reasonable enough to ask them to make less noise, usually late at night or very early in the mornings, then there's usually new scratches on the car.

It's just one more reason I want to get away from here, someplace where this sort of thing doesn't happen, where neighbors, even if they don't like each other, at least have a bit more respect for one another.  And there aren't a bunch of uncouth assholes who take petty revenge against reasonable requests.

A Small Building in Kalyani Nagar

Maybe part of why I'm having such a bad experience living in Kalyani Nagar is because of which part of it we live in... I don't live in one of those fancy, new complexes, like Fortaleza or Marigold (although before moving here, we booked a flat there, but then I started getting nervous about the idea of borrowing money from a bank and spending my future paycheques, paying interest and all that (but now that I've worked on mortgage software for a few years I do understand it a little better)).

Instead we live in a big flat in a relatively small building near the top of a sloped, dead-end side lane, one parallel to East Street that connects Nagar Road to the bridge to Koregoan Park.

Our building, Keshava Chotani Mansion, has just eight flats, owned by seven families (the one who owns two also owns a third in the next building). About half the people who own flats here didn't buy them here, they bought ones in a fancier building the builder was making a decade or so ago, but he ran out of money to finish that and gave them these flats as a "take this or lose all your investment" sort of deal. One flat was given to the plumber in exchange for him finishing up the plumbing in the building.

Unfortunately, the builder didn't have enough to finish all the legal paperwork for the place, so there are no completion certificates, no legal society, none of the usual stuff.

None of us flat owners can agree on how much to pay a month for maintenance (hardly any of us even speak to each other). Some want it to be a flat fee for everyone, others want it to be based on square footage, and everyone thinks a different amount either way is reasonable. The few times we do come to an agreement, though, half the flat-owners simply don't pay it at all, one says he'll only pay it if we agree to repaint the building (but he won't agree on an amount high enough to afford that!). Consequently, our building is crumbling, our water pump breaks frequently because we get the cheapest repair, the elevator can't be maintained, the building is filthy, we're in arrears with the electric company, and we can't afford an even borderline competent watchman.

On either side of us are two slightly bigger buildings, Madhusudan A and B, built around the same time by the same builder, with the same architectural style. Both are set back from the street a little further than ours, with a wider parking area at the front, so our bedrooms line up with the parking lots and balconies of of the first floor flats in those buildings.

Madhusudan A is slightly farther from us, so there's space in the middle for the driveway leading to Peacock Palace, behind us. And Peacock Palace about the size of all three of these first ones. It's much newer and blocks the view from the back apartments in our building of the famous Aga Khan Palace.

Across the street at the end of the lane is Siddharth Enclave, a big, blocky building in some sort of vague, fake neo-Roman architecture style. I think it's ugly and doesn't fit the area, and looks even worse after they knocked off the triangular bits at the top to make flat terraces, which fit the area but not the rest of the style of the building itself.

Maybe things would be better in one of the big societies. But since we own this outright, with no mortgage or anything, moving out isn't a trivial thing. And given how homesick I am at this point, that wouldn't really make me happy, just a little less unhappy...

Here's the front of Keshava Chotani Mansion, with Madhusudan A in the background. That's our flat on the first floor with the wide balcony. The nose of our former car is just barely visible near the right inside our parking spot.

And here's Peacock Palace behind and Madhusudan B to the left of us, and our watchman on the ladder cleaning the debris dropped on our air conditioner from renovation by our upstairs neighbors... Leena supervising and the stupid maid probably just doing anything to avoid her own work. The gulmohar tree is one of many planted up and down the street by my mother-in-law years ago, when she first bought this flat for an investment.

And here's Siddharth Enclave from our driveway... The metal wall is visible from East Street when the gates of the construction next to Bishop's School are open (usually for people to dump garbage in the open pit some construction crew dug for a foundation of a building that's not being built).

Mrs. R strikes again... Noise, noise, noise...

Ug. I'm on the verge of collapsing today, migraine and a loss of sleep... I can't even see the computer screen clearly, it's wavering in front of my face.

Unfortunately, it was our neighbor, the horrible, wicked, nasty, bitter Mrs. R. again...

The 12 days of mourning rites are still going on in her apartment for her recently deceased husband. Last night was some big event and in the afternoon the caterers came in one of the loudest Tempos I've ever heard. I tried to scream over its noise, but couldn't hear myself.

They made noise cooking till pretty late, or at least, later than I stayed up. I slept in the bedroom on the other side of the apartment, and closed all the windows so it wasn't too bad. The Tempo never came back again in the night, otherwise I don't doubt I would've woken up.

But then at 4am in the morning they started making noise in the stairwell, bringing the gas cylinder down to the elevator, banging it on every step outside our door (our elevator only goes to every other floor, since the front and back floors are staggered).

Then under our master bedroom the caterers and the guests' drivers started hollering, ordering, banging, clanging, scraping, pounding, grinding and almost any other cooking sound imaginable. A deafening racket with no escape on either side of the building.

A couple of times when they were yelling to each other I opened the window to "sssshhhh" them (which was a sign I was really pissed off, I'm normally too shy for that sort of thing) but either they never heard me or the one time one looked up, shook his fist at me and yelled a nasty vulgarity (one that one of my friends taught me before my first trip to India, which others said I'd better not use unless I was armed to defend myself...)

When I left for work and opened the bedroom door, Leena was wide awake and looked awful, not having had a wink of sleep for hours, due to all the noise, and not having gone to bed as early as I did...

Many other neighbors (or at least the ones we're on speaking terms with...) have complained to Leena about Mrs. R. and her guests taking over the building. People come out of their flats to find drivers and servants sleeping by their doors, in the lobby, in the parking area, on the roof, all over the place. The ones living below Mrs. R. mentioned that all night Mrs. R. and her guests, other family, probably, talk and shout and fight late into the night over Mr. R.'s will, everyone believing they're entitled to more and everyone else entitled to less...

Back when Mrs. R. ran the building society she called the police if other people's guests parked inside the premises and she hated anyone else's people making noise. Now that she doesn't, it's her staff that are some of the most obnoxious around. We sent her a note a couple of years ago politely asking her to ask her staff not to drink, smoke, play cards and talk loudly late into the night in her garage, which is right under our master bedroom. She didn't reply directly to us, we got a letter from her lawyer telling us if we persisted in false accusations she would sue us in court.

I'm tempted to ask her, if I see her, "who died and made you queen?". It's easy to riff on death-oriented jokes when you've been betrayed, offended and insulted by the widow, for whom you've lost all respect...

Kalyani Nagar Sucks

I've come to the conclusion that the neighborhood where I live, Kalyani Nagar, is the worst place, the noisiest, the dirtiest and the place where the neighbors have the utter most disregard for each other than any other place I'e ever lived.

The noise is virtually nonstop... Ever since we moved here, into our own flat, in 2004, there's been virtually nonstop construction of nearby buildings, and nonstop renovation of flats near ours. There's been a few days, very few, when there isn't the sound of jackhammers, diggers, grinders, saws, drills, hammers and workers yelling.

And vehicles, vehicles, vehicles... So much noise, all the time, any time, day and night... Almost every individual vehicle here makes more noise than a freeway full of them in the U.S. and on our narrow, little street they just go up and down. Just describing the vehicular noise is plenty for another post...

And workers yelling up and down the street to each other, the watchmen yelling across the street to each other instead of just meeting up somewhere and having a normal conversation. The loudest of the door-to-door vendors are the broom salesman and the knife sharpener, just yelling, yelling, yelling as they go up and down.

This street is filthy... Litter everywhere. The worst is probably the yard with the swimming pool, directly across the street from us. It's a small pool and pool house, using less than half the yard. Before it fell into disuse all the construction workers nearby tossed their debris, concrete chunks, bricks, etc. into the yard, so it looks like a quarry or something. But since they stopped cleaning and filling the pool, maids from nearby apartment have been throwing bags of household garbage over the wall into the yard, the workers from the nearby auto garage have been throwing their garbage, used tired, old parts, food wrappers, etc. into the yard by the entrance.

And to top it all off, if it wasn't ugly enough, the workers from new construction on the street have been using the yard as their toilet. I'm sure it's not their fault their employer doesn't give them proper facilities to use, but still, it's what we see all day when we look out from our balcony, people using the yard for a toilet. When I walk to the rickshaws in the mornings, I have to hold my breath from when I get near our apartment building's gate till I get past that yard on my way down the street. It stinks of sewage, it's sickening.

And, to add to it, between the feral dogs and the few herders who bring their cattle, goats and sheep up and down the street to graze wherever there's grass, the street is often covered in animal waste. Ick!

I often see elegant ladies walking on the street with dainty sandals and wonder how they can do that? Aren't they disgusted?

Never have I lived in a place where the neighbors were so inconsiderate of each other. Not just the lack of thinking about things, like honking the horn to wake the watchmen at 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am or whenever. But more willful inconsideration...

We live on the 1st floor, right above the parking, and regularly our 4th floor neighbors come down to their vehicles but forget the key and yell up to whoever's in their apartment to bring the key down. We asked them if they could avoid doing that, especially in the middle of the night, but they said they can't stop, they must do that. We asked, them, too, if they could possibly not honk their horn in the middle of the night when coming or going but they simply said "that's the only way we can wake the watchman".

Of course, those are some of the nicer of the bad neighbors... And more is another story for another rant...

How the Neighbor Says "Good Night"

Got woken up around midnight by honking horns, almost asleep again at 1am when the neighbor's daughter came home with some friends in a four door car. Their good bye in the driveway was like: *talk* *talk* *talk* "bye" "bye" "good night" *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *talk* *talk* *talk* "good night" "bye" "bye" *rev* *rev* *rev* *rev* *honk* *honk* *rev* *honk* *honk* and stop.

Then *talk* *talk* *talk* "bye" "good night" "bye" *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *talk* *talk* *talk* "good night" "bye" "bye" *rev* *rev* *rev* *rev* *honk* *honk* *rev* *honk* *honk* and stop.

Then *talk* *talk* *talk* *talk* *talk* "bye" "bye" "good night" *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *slam* *talk* *talk* *talk* "good night" "bye" "bye" *rev* *rev* *rev* *rev* *honk* *honk* *rev* *honk* *honk* and stop.

How they can slam doors in a four door car so many times, I don't know... But they do it frequently...