Bagar 4th of July ended up being an affair of biblical proportions. First, there was a flood. Well, there would have been a flood if we didn't live in the desert, where the parched earth drinks up the rainfall with the same panache Joan Crawford exhibits at an open bar. It rained and rained and rained until mid afternoon. We were bummed! Us Americans had made big plans to go to Jhunjhunu and buy some supplies for a jugar-BBQ. All morning, we tried to stay dry and ate a ton of mangoes, because nothing says rainy day fun like curling up on a plastic chair clutching a mango. Meg and I watched Thank You For Smoking, which is a clever look at that all-American of industries, Big Tobacco.
Once the rain subsided, it was time to cut the BS and get down to some USA!USA!USA! business. We needed to listen to patriotic songs. For some reason, it was decided that my ipod had patriotic music, and Lindsay turned on the two songs I own with a vaguely country-specific theme: Counting Crows' "American Girls" and Green Day's "American Idiot", both of which are horrifically embarrassing holdovers from my middle school years as an alternative music-enthusiast. After listening to Canadian rockers, it was determined that Beyonce was the best bet for the rest of the day, because is there anything more American than Beyonce? No, and if there is, there shouldn't be. Beyonce is Queen.
With the music in check, it was time to make a delicious, all-American meal. A new jugar monster was born in the process of making this dinner. Lindsay, Meg and I toiled in the kitchen for hours, making french-excuse moi, freedom fries and mango salsa (you know, to represent Arizona) and kidney bean burgers that depressingly resembled meat burgers. There were no burger buns or cheese, but there was Indian ketchup and Mountain Dew and it almost, almost! felt like home.
Burgers and fries, burgers and fries!
Posing, all patriotic:
Lindsay flipping burgs:
But then, the plague happened.
The locust invasion, the Black Death, the killing of all first born sons. Whatever you want to call it, it really dampened the festivities. After it rains, all is nice and cool for a couple of hours, but then these demonic giant winged-ant/beetle things invade in droves, swarming towards the light and up my nostrils and into our delicious burger heaven. Really quite rude. Also, I have no idea where they come from or how they grow so quickly. The only nice thing about them is their 10 hour lifespan. So we slept peacefully, like lambs with colic, knowing that in the morning we wouldn't have to have a finger permanently shoved up our nose scraping out these bugs. What we weren't expecting was the open mass grave of all these bug bodies, silver wings crushed to oblivion, bodies twisted from deathly convulsions, resulting in a rather um, creative carpeting. The night before, Kamal-ji had successfully lit fire to a couple thousand of them, and their charred bodies lay in the outside sink, which, incidentally, was my safai's team turn to clean. We also found a hard-shelled, vertebrae insect with giant pinchers that was actually the size of my face. Sahil identified it as a cockroach, and proceeded to throw a giant brick on it to kill it. Come to think of it, our 4th of July invasion and subsequent massacre was not unlike the colonies revolting against the invading British. No taxes without representation! Hear that, bugs??
Battle of Lexington:
Hocus pocus, locust:
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