If You Need It, She Can Find It

Surprisingly, in the first eighty or so days that we’ve been here, Lindsay has yet to reengage her Indian shopping addiction. Part of me wants to believe that it’s because we bought enough pashminas, elephants, scarves, and other random crap to fill a house last time we were here. The smarter part of me recognizes that she’s patiently planning for the big ticket items. She’s already learned of and romanticized a wondrous place that basically sounds like a furniture junkyard called Sharma Farm. Apparently, Sharma Farm is “the” place to go to get unique furniture pieces refinished to whatever level of repair suits your fancy. Fortunately, it’s located in five non-air-conditioned warehouses, so barring an unexpected cold front, we might be safe from the Farm until fall hits.

Somehow, Lindsay has transformed her pent up shopping energy into an uncanny knack for finding specific camera batteries in random shops. We’re headed to Nepal on Saturday and will likely not have the ability to charge batteries for 10 days. As a result, we decided that we would need three camera batteries for each camera hoping that a battery would last for three or four days (that’s about as scientific as we got in making that determination). The problem was that we only had one spare for each camera and didn’t have the luxury of any short-term visits by any co-workers to courier extras spares for us. The solution was letting Lindsay loose in the shops of Gurgaon. In only three shops at Galleria, Lindsay was able to find a spare for the Nikon.

For some reason, when we went shopping on Sunday, neither of us thought to go back to the same store and instead headed to Ambience Mall where I I knew there was a Canon display (actually a fairly large piece of real estate that didn’t actually sell anything and was more a marketing tool for Canon). While they don’t sell anything, they did call around for me and found a Canon shop in town that claimed to have the battery. We headed there but, not surprisingly, no one at the store recalled receiving a phone call and, according to them, that battery wasn’t available in India.

Lindsay, never one to be denied, stopped back at her trusted camera battery store at Galleria on the way to work today, and lo and behold, was successful in her quest. While we ended up paying import prices for both batteries, I was shocked that we were able to actually find them in-country.

While one spare for each camera may have very well been enough (I mean, it was four batteries for two cameras), I didn’t want accidentally forgetting to flip a power switch to adversely affecting my first trip to the Himalayas. With our current cache of battery power, I’m confident that we should last through the trip or, at the very least, have enough memories captured by the time we do run out of power that it will be the least of our worries; which frees us up to worry about more meaningful things, like an unlikely chance encounter with Maoist rebels on the trek.