Excerpt from an IM to my mother after one week in India:
India is culture shock. It’s not the poverty – I was prepared for much worse. It’s what happens when the government is corrupt and too poor to provide services to a burgeoning population: trash everywhere, packs of dogs in the street.
I went to a party with Kiki’s brother last night in a nice three story house–rich even by western standards, but surrounded by rundown apartments (peeling plaster, rags in the windows), sewage in the streets, more dirt than pavement, at least 11 cows munching on paper garbage in a side street (yes, I counted). By US standards, the neighborhood looked like a desperate ghetto; however, inside the house, beautiful terracotta floor tiles layered the floor and granite slabs covered the counter tops and books, knickknacks, electric equipment, photos, etc. etc. filled the shelves. The owner (someon’es auntie) had purchased a full entertainment system complete with an expensive projector
I also have trouble adjusting to the fact that none of the public spaces are private, if that makes sense. No benches on the streets downtown, no parks (at least they aren’t very common – I finally found one today, across from the secretariat building). Vendors set up camp on the sidewalks so pedestrians share the streets with the cars and bikes and mopeds and auto-rickshaws. I spent an afternoon on the beach and about 26 men asked who I was and where I came from (I tell them Israel, because everyone thinks people from the USA are suckers. Israelis have a reputation for being loudmouths and relentless bargainers). One guy offered to teach me Tamil phrases, so I decided to talk to him. Bad idea. Even though I said I had a boyfriend – a long-term, very committed boyfriend – he kept winking at me and talking about how he loves girls and I’m so pretty and it’s really not safe on the beach for a girl, and why am I alone, anyway? It’s like that everywhere. I don’t look men in the eyes anymore, just stare straight ahead.
Even finding a restaurant is hard. There’s street food which I don’t tend to eat even though Kiki assures me it’s OK. Then there are cheap fast food Chinese and biryani places, but they are full of men, not a single woman. So I don’t eat there, either. Women (women plural) usually eat at trendy joints that look terrible from the outside (like I said, the facades of all the buildings are falling apart) but have marble inlays and cushioned chairs and a suave, Western feel on the inside. Even in these restaurants, the servers—all male—raise an eyebrow at a white girl dining alone. They give me the evil eye or wink and ask where I’m from (Israel, goddammit!).
Now, more than any other time, I wish I was traveling with a partner. India is a very very very communal society, so I feel like a pariah being alone and a girl and white. Oh, and the f-ing auto-rickshaw drivers are the worst. They always want to rip me and I’m still learning how to bargain with them, so I always end up paying too much. One driver had the audacity to ask if I wanted to go jewelry shopping – yeah right, like I can’t see through that scam. I talked to one of Kiki’s brother’s friends about it and he said the thing to do in that situation (this driver also tried giving me faulty change) is to get out, write down the plate number of the rickshaw and tell the driver you’ll call his manager. Next time.
After a week, I’m starting to get used to the fact that there’s order in the trash, in the beggars on the street, in the vendors selling everything from flowers for temple to coconut to fresh mango (and you haven’t lived til you’ve had Indian mango–not a hint of bitter, it’s just pure sweet juice, like the ripest yellow peach from the farmer’s market, but more flavorful). It turns out Kiki lives in a really upscale neighborhood, the equivalent of Galveston in Houston. I didn’t realize that until she took me to trendy restaurants that look like nothing from the street–and until I rode the bus across town and saw “low income” neighborhoods and, finally, the slums: shacks with banana leaf walls and banana leaf roofs, avenues of garbage, sewage in the streets, and bony children wearing shorts the color of sludge.
For all Kiki’s outrage about Indian government, media, and business downplaying poverty, she comes from a very privileged background. At University of Chicago, she made sure to tell friends and acquaintances that she spoke native English – a first language, not a second language – because her accent led people assume she was a FOB, low class, etc, etc. She didn’t exaggerate—English IS her first language, but I now understand the stereotype she fought against: in India, English is a mark of wealth, class, opportunity, power. Now, Kiki is a sexual rights activist and Chennai, and she brags about her Tamil skills. Many of co-workers come from disadvantaged homes or demographics (transgenders, sex workers, etc), and aside from “yes,” “no,” “come,” “go,” “madam,” and “thank you,” they don’t speak a word of English. Speaking Tamil makes her seem like one of the “people,” even though she comes to an airy apartment with posh light fixtures and marble table tops, a fridge full of food prepared by a personal cook, English books, and extended family who travel abroad, pay memberships to VIP clubs, and associate with the rich and powerful.
The cook is another uncomfortably foreign presence in my experience of India. Vassinta is efficient, obliging, engaged (although she speaks almost no English—and I speak no Tamil), but I can’t get used to her. How should I act? What should I say? Is it rude to insist on cooking for myself or washing my own dishes? (Yes to the former—the kitchen is her kingdom; no to the latter—saliva, even secondhand through a plate or spoon, is dirty, impure, polluted.) Whenever she prepares a meal (shaved pumpkin in yoghurt for breakfast, sambolina for lunch), I want to jump from my chair, to offer help, to shout out: “no worries, mate, I’m not worth it, – anything but serve me, please!” I’ve never before been served in a home on a regular basis, and it chafes against my sense of self-sufficiency and class equality.
All the same, I’m slowly starting to enjoy Chennai. Going out doesn’t scare me so much, even if it does take energy to fend off men, beggars and auto-rickshaw drivers who demand exorbitant rates. Today, I told a guy to get lost and successfully bargained with a driver – so there! I visited Fort St. George, the first British stronghold in Madrasputnam, and St Mary’s, a church in the middle of the fort where the faint strains of Mozart drifted through a quiet garden. The tall steeple with its bell and its cross and the quiet sanctuary within—vaulted ceilings and a gray monotone—soothed me, comforted me. As I watched a solitary Indian pray, his hands clasped in a palmer’s kiss, I suddenly identified with the colonizer who bends and forges history and culture to fit his own image. I understood why the British were so eager to import their clothes, their buildings, their food, their lifestyle: a familiar oasis in a sea of saris and jasmine buds and toothless beggars, crumbling sidewalks, mustachioed peacock men, garbage—blowing in the wind.
