The Highs, The Lows -- That Ever-Present Contrast

After camp at the Institute for Gandhian Studies, I spent most of the month of January visiting the homes of my previous Rotary GSE hosts from 2011 since I was conveniently in Maharashtra for the camp.  No doubt that one of the more exciting opportunities my scholarship presents is to be able to reunite with such incredible people who became instant family to me in the midst of a pretty life-changing experience.  I spent time with Ishwar and his family in Beed, the Sheths in Latur, Dr. Pankaj and his family in Latur, Fahim, Anand and their families in Solapur, Pankaj & Vibha in Solapur and the Gopalkrishnan’s in Ahmednagar.  

Rotarians in WI may remember these funny faces :)  It was so incredible getting to meet their families back in India.

It feels like a dream to be in the presence of all of these lovely people again.  I’m constantly thinking, “Wow, how did I get here?” - reflecting on how fortunate I am to not only once get to visit India and enjoy incredible experiences and create deeply caring relationships, but to return and reconnect, hoping that all of these wonderful people can sense how much they mean to me, more deeply than my words communicate.  They certainly do a good job conveying how much they love me - I can only hope they realize the depth of my love and gratitude for them, as well.  

Reuniting with Rotarians of Beed

Rotary Club of Kaij

I visited schools, historical sites, Rotary clubs, met more family members, played with all the adorable kiddos, observed the makings of delicious Maharashtrian, Malayali and Rajasthani & Gujarati Jain foods, and got fat.  Yes, I gained some kilos in a few weeks.  Jeans became uncomfortably tight.  But damn.  There is so much incredible food and it is offered every five minutes of the day and there’s absolutely no exercise.  And if you say that you remember eating such-and-such delicious food from the last trip or you ask what a particular food is that you have never had before, moments later it will appear before you.  

Delicious Maharashtrian breakfast

A cow enjoying her offering

A couple of experiences I particularly want to share - -  (Sorry, Mom.  You won’t like hearing about these things.)

There is a family that I visited that I did not list above.  It was a husband and wife who I stayed with in 2011.  It was a fine visit in 2011.  The husband treated me in a fatherly manner.  He enjoyed talking at the end of each day and imparting career-type advice to me.  They were a nice couple and we stayed in touch from afar via facebook.  The day I returned for a visit in January, we were invited to dinner at their friends’ home.  The friends wished to say farewell to the man and his wife as they would be moving to Mumbai.  After dinner, I offered to take some photos since I had my camera with me.  During one photo that the wife took, the husband’s arm came around me and his hand landed on my left cheek (not my face cheek).  I have never seen myself looking more awkward in a photo than in that one.  What a disturbing memento.  And in such moments, I have a tendency to do whatever I need to do to get the moment over with without issue rather than responding confrontationally, but often later regretting my subdued response.  <<Oh no, this is not the first time that someone has played the old hand-on-the-ass-photo-opp-trick on me here in India.  I’ve also heard other foreign women share this experience.  I wonder if fathers hand it down to sons.>>  But, what does one do when having to stay at this person’s home for the next two nights?  I have other friends in that city so I should have slapped him and made arrangements to stay with someone else but, I did not.  I let it go, hoping it would be the only incident of such a nature, and I made sure that the bedroom door locked from the inside before I went to sleep that night.  I found myself feeling tense and afraid in his company during the remaining two days of my visit, particularly when we were alone.  On the last day, he took me to his factory.  He picked up another man on the way and I really didn’t know where we were going.  My mind raced with paranoid possibilities and mental preparation of how I would defend myself if needed.  Luckily we made it to the factory.  After the factory tour we went to lunch together.  Another moment alone in the car, mind racing again.  After lunch, he was to drop me off at my next host’s home, but the next host had not yet returned from an out-of-town engagement.  We had arranged that I would be dropped off and have the next host’s home to myself so I could rest after so much traveling.  I was looking forward to that as well as to be out of creepy host’s company.  A caretaker let us in the home.  My previous host (Rtn. Ass-Grabber) had spoken to the caretaker in Marathi and then in English said something about staying for tea.  I presumed that the caretaker offered, but then the caretaker left without giving us tea so I confusedly made the tea in an unfamiliar kitchen where I found some green tea bags, a lemon, some honey and a microwave.  When I handed the cup of tea to Rtn. Ass-Grabber, he walked away with it to the bedroom which was equidistant from the kitchen as the living room was (where platonic male/female friends would normally sit to have tea in cultures spanning the globe). Once again, fear arose as I realized that we were alone and he was behaving inappropriately.  I stood in the hallway, “admiring family photos” with my tea to avoid entering the bedroom.  He called me in at some point I guess because I finally went in.  He was sitting on the end of the bed and patted the spot next to him and suggesting that I sit.  Instead, unsuccessfully attempting to hide my panic, I walked across the room and started switching the dials of the air conditioner, complaining of how it was too cold in the room.  Eventually I “gave up” and suggested that we sit in the living room where the windows were open, offering a more comfortable temperature.  I darted out and he followed me.  We had our tea in the living room and talked about I-don’t-know-what because I was preoccupied with trying to hide my tension behind a poker face.  Finally he left, and I was exhausted.  I took a nap.  When I awoke, I saw a text message from him saying he was coming back at 8pm with another man I had met before who wanted to visit me while I was in town.  Panic once again.  My new hosts were not returning until 10pm which he knew.  I didn’t trust that he would really be coming with this other man so I called for back-up.  I explained to my other friends what had happened.  They were disgusted, confirming that I had not misread the situation, and ensured me that they would keep me safe.  One of them came over with his wife and child to be present during the time that these men were planning to visit, feigning a reunion between them, as well.  Eventually everyone left and my new host came home with his wife, unaware of what went down during the day.  I wasn’t sure if I should tell them what had happened and I guess I just wanted relief from it all and since I was safe in their care, I just let it go at the time.  So that’s that.  I’m thankful for the love and support of other Rotarian friends here who are encouraging and assisting me in reporting this behavior to the district so that it doesn’t happen to anyone else in the future. In the end, I doesn’t seem that this guy was intending to force anything on me, though I couldn’t have known that at the time, but he was just testing the waters and being hopeful.  Disgusting regardless.

So why stop there?  Why not get all of the inappropriate male behavior I’ve been subjected to here all out in the open in one ugly blog post?  I’ve debated telling these stories because they’re so negative, and I haven’t trusted myself to not just spew rage onto the paper as I convey them.  But at this point, I’m not feeling the rage I once (or many times) did.  I’ve had many moments where all I could do was generalize about men of this country but I’m moving past that (not to say that there isn’t indeed a problem in this vein, but it doesn’t help to man-hate all day everyday).  I will just share my experiences and try not to draw conclusions or comparisons between countries/cultures.  The reader can take the information, my perceptions, and put them in whatever compartment they fit into in your mind.  

So next up is my trip to Ahmedabad.  After Gandhi camp and touring Maharashtra I decided to embark on my first ever solo travel in India and explore Gujarat.  I’ve traveled alone, bussing a couple of hours away in Kerala, taking a 5-hour train in Maharashtra, but I always had someone to receive me on the other end or some non-tourist destination to get to.  But traveling alone as a tourist in India is a very different thing, especially for a woman.  I was inspired to check out Gujarat for a number of reasons.  I could visit Gandhi’s birthplace in Porbander, his ashram and the annual kite festival in Ahmedabad, an incredible Jain temple, the beautiful desert of Kutch, and enjoy the unique textiles and scrumptious foods known to the state.  I heard so much about how developed and safe Gujarat is, but was certainly warned of traveling alone.  But, you know.  I was being stubborn.  I’m an American woman.  I can go anywhere and do anything.  One friend, in all seriousness, suggested that I wear a burka to conceal that I’m a foreigner so that I wouldn’t be hassled.  

So I embarked.  And perhaps I should remind you that I was already exhausted by so much travel and a traumatic experience with that one host by this time (and that one time a few weeks earlier that I had to ditch a creepy guy from a cab who was “helping” me when I got bumped off the train, and a time that a drunk man was following me home on the bus, and that time a kid grabbed my ass in the crowd of boys on the beach, and all the times I had heard of my friends being grabbed, and the time a guy grabbed my butt during a photo opp in 2011, and the blog post my friend back home wrote about a man’s aroused body pressing into hers on a bus in India, and the time I befriended a neighbor who turned out to be completely misogynistic and self-righteous, and the time a guy cornered my friend and asked for a kiss, and, and, and...).  First, I was seated by some overly-friendly men on the plane who wanted to give me a ride to my hotel.  I lied and said that a friend was picking me up at the airport and after we landed, I hid out in the bathroom and called a cab while they collected their baggage.  It’s such a seemingly un-problem but after awhile it feels like you’re always being pursued as you run and hide and think up lies and escapes.  You just want to not talk to any men ever, avoiding all eye contact to assure that you don’t have to later deal with the hassles of getting them off your back.  And the nice ones get little opportunity to even BE nice because it’s not worth finding out who is nice when you have to deal with so many of the not-nice ones in the process.  So I eventually got to my hotel in Ahmedabad and locked myself in for awhile.  For many hours, in fact, despite the noxious fumes of 15 moth balls found in the closet giving me a terrible headache.  Finally, guilt motivated me to get out and see what the kite festival had on offer.  I walked there and endured some cat-calling from passing cars as I crossed the bridge.  Some sweet teenage girls who spoke about 5 words of English guided me to the festival and then sweetly escorted me through it and bought me a pakora before they had to catch their train back to their village.  Within ten minutes I was molested.  The crowd was not so dense that bodies had to squeeze past each other but a man walked by me and extended his arm out a couple feet from his side so that his hand could graze a part of my body that he certainly should not have been touching as he passed by.  I was shocked.  All I could think was, “Really???  That’s exciting for this guy???  Wow.”  I’ve replayed that scene so many times in my mind since then, imagining me clenching his wrist and shouting at him, creating a scene, and throwing down some martial arts moves I do not actually know.  But instead, I kept walking, and so did he.  I was in no mood to be polite any longer so when a couple of teenage boys asked for my photo I shot them down and decided to always shoot unknown males of any age down when they ask for my photo in the future (it’s a common occurrence for children, and sometimes adults, to request photos of foreigners).  I took an auto to a temple which was uneventful in the way of harassment but not very enjoyable in the mood I was in.  Then to the hotel for the night, skipping dinner, avoiding.  The next day I again stayed in the hotel much too long but eventually ventured out to visit Gandhi’s ashram on the river.  I had read online that it’s such a peaceful place where the presence of Gandhiji can be felt.  Ahhhhhh.  “Won’t that be nice,” I thought.  I got there an hour before it was closing so when a man approached me and told me he worked there and began rushedly guiding me through the museum and grounds, I thought he just wanted me to see all there was to see before it closed.  Of course it occurred to me that he did not work there really, but I thought that perhaps he just was trying to get a tip out of me, which I didn’t mind at the time (or have the energy to mind at the time).  He took me into Gandhi’s temple which is the size of a kid’s play house.  We had to crouch down to crawl inside.  He prayed, gave me a marigold to place as an offering, blessed me, called me his sister and wrapped his arms around me for a hug.  Oh, religion - How many times have you been abused by creeps wanting to cop a feel, or worse?  Countless.  We exited the temple and I was heading for the exit of the ashram when he told me that there was a garden next door that he wanted me to see.  It was nearing the end of daylight so I said I had to go to my hotel.  He offered me a ride on his scooter which I declined.  He offered to get me an auto-rickshaw which he did by hailing someone from across the street.  As I got in he leaned in for another hug and said the word “kiss” to which I shoved his face away.  As we drove away, the auto driver informed me that he was a “bad man.”  For some reason, I wasn’t ready to believe that the auto driver had any right calling the kettle black and I was proven correct moments later when he tried pulling back deep into the dark alley behind my hotel in order to intimidate me as he ripped me off with the pay-what-you-want-to-pay-game which ended with, “no, no, that’s not enough” after I gave him certainly more than enough, buying into his psychological scam.  Again, too exhausted to fight.  Back in my hotel room, I worried that Creepy Auto Driver might tell Creepy Not-Gandhi-Ashram-Employee which hotel I was staying in so I pushed my coffee table and chair up against the door after locking it for the night, and slept with my eyebrow trimming scissors under my pillow.  I mournfully decided I would not go to the beautiful desert and instead booked a flight to Mumbai for the following morning.  I thought I could spend a couple of days there with two girls I had met at the Gandhian camp to ease me back into a state of psychological normalcy before returning to Kerala.  It was a good idea because I got to get their take on my experiences and also spend time with their families and get a new boost of Indian family love which fuels me through all of this.  Yet I still came back to Kerala a twitching, gnarly mess after so many run-ins with unsavory characters.  

But to be honest, I have had a really hard time with all of this since I came here.  It seems to affect me more negatively than my other female foreign friends.  Perhaps it relates to the particular time in my life (I’m in a less energetic, outgoing phase these days).  Maybe it’s difficult for me because I’m always criticizing the way I respond to such situations.  I don’t react impulsively as I’m busy pondering the other person’s intentions, often giving them the benefit of the doubt, at least for awhile.  I am a flighter, not fighter and sometimes I feel disappointingly cowardly about myself.  But whatever the reason, these experiences have (or I have allowed these experiences to have) caused me a great deal of avoidance and shut-in-ness.  Instead of interacting with the curious world around me, I spent more time than I’d like to admit just feeling safe and calm at my home.  But I also tend to be a bit hard on myself, feeling guilty that I didn’t take full advantage of things and forcing myself to do things for reasons that I “should” do them, ignoring my true feelings and instincts.  So perhaps I can instead applaud myself for actually heeding the voice telling me to just stay in and rest and not have to take on whatever onslaught lay ahead.  But whatever the analysis, these are the things I have experienced.  

Oh yeah.  Here's the damn kite festival.  ;)