I always thought of San Francisco as a boisterous, cosmopolitan city. But today it seems strangely quiet. Though the Castro is busy, other neighborhoods seem devoid of people. The sidewalks are missing Delhi’s pan-wallahs and vegetable sellers. Motorcyclists don’t jockey for space where sidewalks should be. And no one is calling out that they will pick up your recycling or trash.

There is order here. And the order sounds eerily quiet to my Delhi-accustomed ears.

As I continue my wanderings, I come across a home that is selling off its old clothes and books. I spot Ender’s Game, an old favorite of mine with its childlike meditations on the darkness of competition and conflict.

My mind wanders back to another copy of the same book. This copy sits on a bookshelf in Panchsheel Enclave in South Delhi. It is a lovely bookshelf in a lovely home — where a kind soul lives. In another country, like so many of my Delhi friends.

That was because nobody here worked in the sun. I had gotten used to seeing thousands of people who earned their livings on Delhi’s streets: autorickshaw drivers, construction laborers, street vendors, hawkers. But these vast cross-sections of Delhi society were missing from the room.

One thousand rupees equals about $25 USD. And when you only earn Rs. 2,000 – Rs. 5,000 a month, you are unlikely to be found standing in line at an international departure terminal.

I was waiting to talk to the Indian immigration officials who would stamp my U.S. passport and give me permission to leave. As I scanned the room, I felt like I had stepped into a special kind of club.

Even a one-way ticket from Delhi to Dubai might cost ten thousand rupees ($250). And so every passenger in the room had to be a member of the club of first world societies.

Many were from the first world societies inside India — the professional classes and upper classes with good networks and good paychecks. Even if the traveler wasn’t paying for the ticket, someone they knew was. An employer, a university, a family member.

Other passengers came from the first world societies that were also first world nations — the U.S., European countries, etc. But either way, there were a whole lot of people missing from the room. And it occurred to me that this is what a room of prosperity looks like — far fewer faces carved by the sun.

I typed this up exactly as published today. I’m not sure who is coming up with the copy at the Times of India:

Times of India
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Back page (Page 32) / Sports

“Gemma’s new Carib adventure”

Gorgeous WAG Gemma Atkinson, 23, flashed her pair as she shot her sexy official 2009 calendar on a tropical beach. She showed off her 34E double-on-sand the rest of her booty in a string of skimpy outfits for pics her fans will treasure.

The ex-girlfriend of Manchester United winger Cristiano Ronaldo, now dating Wigan striker Marcus Bent, joked with the crew as they fixed her hair and spritzed her toned bod in the heat.

[Accompanied with picture of model]

I’m vacating my New Delhi flat, and I have a few items for sale. I live in the Arjun Nagar / Safdarjung Enclave / Green Park area. Easily accessible from main roads.

(UPDATE:  ONLY THE BED IS LEFT)

I’m leaving Friday night, May 30th, so everything needs to be cleared before then. Make me an offer.

Photos below.

Phone: 9811559220
Note: Please arrange for transportation and moving.

Bed: (still available)
- Dark wood finish
- 6 feet x 4 feet
- 3 months old.

Almirah / external closet: (sold)
- Roughly 6 feet tall.
- Locks for outside door and inside compartment.
- Attached mirror. Drawer at base.
- 3 months old.

Clothes drying stand:
- Metal.

Photos:

Perhaps as much as a year ago, I bought a roundtrip ticket to India. I did it using mileage points, and so I had to pick a return date that I couldn’t change. August 2008 was too far into the future for United Airline’s booking system, so I went with May 31st.

My logic? If I didn’t get into my summer Hindi program, I’d have an exit back to the U.S. I did get into the program, but the exit is calling anyways.

Nothing focuses your feelings on an experience better than the looming end of that experience. And as Saturday, May 31st, comes closer and closer, I feel sick. The challenging emotions in my mind are translating into the queasiness of my body.

It never occurred to me that the possibility of leaving India would be more difficult than the experience of leaving the U.S. But as I ponder the waves of emotion inside me, I realize why. When I left the U.S., I was leaving home. And I knew home would be a place I would come back to. I would have to learn to live without my family and American friends, but I would see them again. I would return home.

Over the past few months, I have made New Delhi a sort of home. But leaving India does not offer me any guarantees similar to those of my home in the U.S. I don’t know when my next return will be. A year? Three years? Five years? And on top of that, I am leaving friends who have become precious and dear to me.

How do you consider saying goodbye to people you care so much about? How do you move away from a city that is now filled with so many memories? The more I think about it, the more it hurts.

Instead, I took to surprise ambushes. I’d fling open a cabinet door, sweep the roaches onto the floor, and stomp on them. But eventually, I made a startling discovery — I didn’t have to worry about cleanup.

If I stepped away for five or ten minutes, a swarm of ants would emerge from the same cabinets and take the dead roaches away.

It was an odd arrangement. I did the killings, and the ants would do the cleaning (and eating). I suspect neither party ever gave a thought to trading roles. But secretly, I was looking to find a replacement and move on to new responsibilities.

Then one day, Bupinder showed up at my door. Or more precisely, on my ceiling. I suspect he was escaping the odd Delhi rains. But either way, the tiny lizard had entered my home. At just the right time.

It took me a day, but I finally caught little Bupinder. And with some deft maneuvering, I transfered him to his new room — the cabinet under the kitchen sink.

Bupinder is a bit of a vagabond, so I have no idea if he’ll stick around. But in the off-chance that his diet includes roaches, there will be plenty of culinary options to choose from.

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.”

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

Like most conferences, there is a certain pacing. The morning brings its slow gatherings and takings-of-seats. But by mid-day, old friends are reuniting, and battle-tested colleagues are saying hello.

It is a meeting of a national coalition to pass an HIV/AIDS law. There are NGO staff here. There are advocates from the Lawyer’s Collective. And there are many people from HIV Positive networks — Indians with HIV who have turned their life challenges into a source of energy and purpose.

I’m here to learn, though I officially come as a consultant with the Lawyers Collective. Such is the opportunity of my professional background. I have something to offer in terms of political strategy and “messaging,” while simultaneously learning even more just by being in the room.

You would never know that some of the women in this conference are survivors of family expulsions. They are HIV positive themselves, perhaps because their ex-husbands used intravenous drugs or visited prostitutes. But in the conservative extended families that they married into, the wives were sometimes blamed for bringing the disease into the home. And thrown out.

And so these women — as well as HIV positive men — perservere through the new families of their HIV-positive networks. And they play a key role in advocating for precisely the kinds of laws that might protect other HIV positive people from similar ostracism.

I feel secretly flattered, because as the conferees break up into subgroups, they are using my talking points and agendas. One team of people talks through a legislative strategy for Parliament. Another team talks through activist plans. And a third discusses ways to build media awareness.

The discussions bounce between Hindi and English. There are South Indians who speak no Hindi, North Indians who speak no English, and many who speak both. So political discussions are interspersed with casual translations.

The Lawyer’s Collective wrote the Draft HIV/AIDS law at the center of this effort. But now that the hard work of writing the draft law is done, the hard work of getting it passed must begin.

To stop HIV’s spread in India, people with HIV need to feel safe enough to come out of the shadows. They need to no longer risk family ostracism, job loss, or school expulsion.

A new law can help provide the rights and legal security that HIV-positive Indians need.  Now Parliament just needs to take action.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/15/BAGAVNC5K.DTL

05-15) 11:16 PDT SAN FRANCISCO — Gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry in California, the state Supreme Court said today in a historic ruling that could be repudiated by the voters in November.

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.

“The California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples,” Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in the majority opinion.

Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry “will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage,” George said.

In addition, he said, the current state law discriminates against same-sex couples on the basis of their sexual orientation – discrimination that the court, for the first time, put in the same legal category as racial or gender bias.

The ruling set off a celebration at San Francisco City Hall, where nearly 4,000 same-sex weddings were performed in 2004 before the state high court put a halt to the marriages while challenges to the California law worked their way through the courts. Today’s ruling has no effect on those annulments.

Outside the city clerk’s office, three opposite-sex couples were waiting at 10 a.m. for marriage certificates. City officials had prepared for a possible rush on certificates by same-sex couples, but hadn’t yet changed the forms that ask couples to fill out the name of the “bride” and “groom.”

City officials say they’ll probably be unable to marry the same-sex couples for another 30 days when the decision fully goes into effect. But they’re making appointments for those weddings now.

Ed Harrington, the general manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission, has lived with his partner for 35 years. In 2004, he performed marriage ceremonies for about 40 same-sex couples.

“You wait for this your whole life,” said Harrington, who said he planned to call his partner and say, “I love you. What more do you say on a day like this?”

He said he didn’t know if he would marry, but that “what’s important is to be able to (get married) if you want to.”

The celebration could turn out to be short-lived, however. The court’s decision could be overturned in November, when Californians are likely to vote on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Conservative religious organizations have submitted more than 1.1 million signatures on initiative petitions, and officials are working to determine if at least 694,354 of them are valid.

If the measure qualifies for the ballot and voters approve it, it will supersede today’s ruling. The initiative does not say whether it would apply retroactively to annul marriages performed before November, an omission that would wind up before the courts.

Liberty Counsel, which represented the group Campaign for California Families before the court in arguing for the state law, denounced the ruling and said it would ask the justices to stay its effect until after the November election.

George was joined in the majority by Justices Joyce Kennard, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos Moreno. Justices Marvin Baxter, Ming Chin and Carol Corrigan dissented – though Corrigan, writing separately, said she personally believes “Californians should allow our gay and lesbian neighbors to call their unions marriages.”

Baxter, writing for himself and Chin, accused the court majority of substituting “by judicial fiat its own social policy views for those expressed by the people.”

Both he and Corrigan noted that California voters reaffirmed the state’s ban on same-sex marriage in a 2000 ballot initiative.

The court “does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice,” Baxter said.

But George, in a 121-page opinion, said California has already recognized, in its laws and public policy, that gays and lesbians are entitled to equal treatment in every legal area except marriage. He also noted that state laws and traditions banned interracial marriage until the California Supreme Court, in 1948, became the first court in the nation to overturn such a law.

“Even the most familiar and generally accepted of social policies and traditions often mask an unfairness and inequality that frequently is not recognized or appreciated by those not directly harmed,” the chief justice wrote.

The legal case dates back to February 2004, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered the city clerk to start issuing marriage licenses to couples regardless of their gender, saying he doubted the constitutionality of the state marriage law.

The state’s high court ordered a halt a month later, after the nearly 4,000 same-sex weddings had been performed at City Hall. The court annulled the marriages in August 2004, ruling that Newsom lacked authority to defy the state law. But it did not rule on the validity of the law itself and said it would await proceedings in lower courts.

Some of the couples immediately sued in Superior Court and were joined by the city of San Francisco, which said it had a stake in ensuring equality for its residents. The case that ultimately reached the state Supreme Court consolidated four suits, one by the city and three by 23 same-sex couples in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer, ruling in the San Francisco cases, declared the ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional in March 2005. He said the law violates the “basic human right to marry a person of one’s choice,” a right declared by California’s high court in the 1948 ruling.

Kramer said the law also constituted sex discrimination – prohibited by another groundbreaking California Supreme Court ruling in 1971 – because it is based on the gender of one’s partner.

But a state appeals court upheld the law in October 2006, ruling 2-1 that California was entitled to preserve the historic definition of marriage and that the state’s voters and legislators, not the courts, were best equipped “to define marriage in our democratic society.”

The appeals court also said California is not discriminating against same-sex couples, citing state laws that give registered domestic partners the same rights as spouses. Those laws provide such rights as child support and custody, joint property ownership, inheritance and hospital visitation, and access to divorce court.

But domestic partners are denied marital benefits under federal law, which means they can’t file joint federal tax returns, collect Social Security survivors’ benefits or sponsor one another as immigrants.

The suits before the court relied on the California Constitution, which state courts have long interpreted as being more protective of individual rights than the U.S. Constitution. The initiative that California voters are likely to consider in November would write a ban on same-sex marriage into the state Constitution, a step already taken by voters in half the states.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed same-sex marriage bills, citing the 2000 ballot measure that reaffirmed California’s opposite-sex-only marriage law. That initiative was not a constitutional amendment.

The governor issued a statement today saying, “I respect the court’s decision and as governor, I will uphold its ruling.” He also reiterated his opposition to the constitutional amendment that is likely to be on the November ballot.

Suits similar to those that went before the California Supreme Court have been filed in other states, but only the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that the state’s constitution gives gay and lesbian couples the right to marry.

Courts in Vermont and New Jersey have found their states’ marriage laws discriminatory but left the remedy up to state legislatures, which opted in both cases for civil unions for same-sex couples rather than marriage. A similar ruling by the Hawaii Supreme Court in 1993 was overturned by a ballot initiative.

The California case is In re Marriage Cases, S147999. The ruling is available at www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions.

Chronicle staff writers Cecilia M. Vega and Heather Knight contributed to this report. E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.