Summer Travel to India – Part II – Indore

Continuing our summer travels, in less than a week we set off for Indore to visit my elder sister and her family. I have not been to this part of the country before. Visiting her was also another pleasant surprise. Both my sister and her husband are faculty at a dental college and live in faculty housing on the campus. The campus is about 10 km away from the city of Indore and set midst some fields.
Bombay is densely built and crowded, but it was a homecoming and had its own joy. Indore (at least where my sister lives) has wide open spaces and beautiful fields and campus. It was pretty hot in Indore so we spent a lot of time indoors – either at home, in cars or in malls/shops.
I decided to skip any sightseeing in Indore, as I could barely tolerate the heat. So instead we went shopping. One of the first shops we went to was a music store. I asked the store owner for recommendations and she would pull different CDs off the shelf. If I was unsure of her selection, she would ask one of the workers at the store to put it on their music system. So needless to say, I left with quite a collection of CDs. Am I soft touch or what? I also bought some fun jewelry and finally a beautiful saree.
To buy the saree we first went to a couple of designer saree shops. The sarees are priced exorbitantly and I couldn’t really determine the “design” part of them. The salespeople claim, their beauty is in the wearing, yet they don’t pull out a single saree and show you how it would look draped. I wonder how they stay in business. If you ever visit a regular saree shop in India, you know they open just about any saree you want to have a look at; they even encourage you to drape it on yourself to see if you like the color or they will drape it on themselves so you can see how the pattern shows. It is from one these shops that I found a beautiful saree for myself.
We also visited a mall (western style) in Indore, where you get a mix of both Western and Indian clothing where one style is available in different sizes. Just like shopping in the US. The malls are attractively built and I loved them for their air conditioning. Another great part of the mall for me was I could buy McDonalds or Dominos pizzas for my kids, who don’t eat Indian food – I know it is sacrilegious. (Pic: street view from the mall entrance)
On the last day of our stay in Indore my sister was going out of town regarding work and was happy to leave because by then, her husbands and daughters were all caught in rearranging some furniture in their apartment, which she hates doing. I on the other hand love rearranging furniture, so I was happy to lend a hand. After doing some work on their daughters’ room, we rearranged her whole kitchen. Here is a picture when everything was pulled off the shelves.

Copyright Kalpana Kanwar August 2009