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They haggle with the autowallahs, lick baingan bharta off their fingers and launch into Billo Rani. Okay, they can’t get past the first two words of the song, but so what? How many Delhiites can claim they discovered, at the Sunday book market near Delhi Gate, that Major League baseball player Bob Uecker had written a book? And how many can navigate old Delhi’s twisted arteries to locate a poster painter by “finding the Daryaganj fire station, taking a right, walking a hundred yards and asking the paan wallah for Vijay”? Dave Prager and Jenny Steeves, authors of the blog Our Delhi Struggle (ourdelhistruggle.com), look just like their Eastman-colour Hindi film avatars in the poster Vijay has painted of them—they’ve put it up on their blog and sent postcard copies of it back home, New York. “Dave aur Jenny: Delhi struggle. Pyaar mein khatron se zyada taakat hai,” it reads. They admit the ‘struggle’ part is somewhat misleading. Dave, creative copywriting head at an ad agency in Gurgaon, says, “We were trying to be clever by punning on ‘daily’.”

After 14 months in their cosy flat in south Delhi, the couple has learnt to exchange pleasantries in accented Hindi, take stares from shop attendants in their stride and get over their fear of the traffic turning them into a “road parantha”. The blog gushes over the small luxuries of India: the doctor will make house calls and reply to your SMS, cheques clear in a matter of hours, the beer shop owner will arrange for the bottles to be dropped home, and you don’t have to throw away your toaster that doesn’t toast—you can actually get it fixed! And, like many other blogs written by expats in India, Our Delhi Struggle is as much a diary of the couple’s great Indian adventure as it is a practical guide, for curious foreigners, to everything Indian.

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