As A Second Class Citizen

*[Unapologetic] Warning: F-bombs flying around.  Duck.

I have never, in all my life, been treated as objectively as I have been here, daily, hourly, constantly.  The depth and breadth of misogyny is both overwhelming and startling.  And I know that with my white skin and pocket money, I still have it better than the majority of Indian women.  At any moment I can choose to book a ticket and get the hell out, which I consider daily.  I can question the man who tells me to get off the empty car and go to the one of the bursting-at-the-seams women’s car, of which there are 3 on a 12-15 car train.  I can cause a scene in hopes of publicly shaming the men and preteens who believe women are objects for their fondling pleasure.  It rarely works.

I know that not all Indian men are guilty of this behavior or mentality.  I’ve met a few older gentlemen who are relatively respectful, and want to know about my experience here so far.  I tell them as patiently as I can that I am harassed, and groped, and grazed, and scammed all day long, every single day.  That I am struggling to relax enough to learn all their country has to offer because I can’t afford to let my guard down for even a moment.  Their responses have started to run together in their similarities, but include “Oh no, Indian men aren’t like that”, and “Well you know, they can’t help it, you have such a beautiful figure,” before they too start to look me up and down, unashamedly.  I try to explain why that is no excuse, try to explain how degrading it is from my perspective, try to enforce that it is, in fact, total and complete bullshit, but I don’t know if they can understand me through my clenched teeth.  

I’ve met a few other solo women here, and together we commiserate, try to sort through all of the cultural and historical imperatives that have created such an abominable environment, try to support one another as much as we can.  And once in a while, a woman will clarify “I’m not an angry feminist or anything, but…”  And for a moment I feel like hanging my head and giving up.  Because to me, it’s far more troubling that someone, man or woman, wouldn’t be angry at the reality of most women around the world.  Female infanticide?  Child brides?  Sex trafficking?  Rape correction?  Rape as a primary weapon in war?  Victim blaming? Female genital mutilation?  Dowry murder?  Domestic violence?  Maternal health?  Education inequality?  You’re not angry?  I’m not either.  I’m disgusted, and enraged, and and appalled.  And fucking shattered.

Here in Rajasthan, per the 2011 census, the literacy rate between men and women is 79.19% to 52.12%.  In the newly-democratic Burma, uniformed soldiers and police officers rape women and children to cleanse ethnic minorities of their faith.  In Cambodia, per the 2014 census, nearly 2/3 of the population was under 30, and at least 40% of girls were not receiving an education, putting them at a higher risk for being trafficked and exploited in any number of ways.  The premise of a new documentary produced by Gloria Steinem is the following harrowing truth: “Polarized gender roles are the mark of terrorist groups and violent societies.  More than poverty, natural resources, religion or degree of democracy, violence against females is the most reliable predictor of whether a nation will be violent within itself or will use violence against another country—and gender violence has become so great that for the first time, there are now fewer females on earth than males.”  Lord, have mercy.  

We in the west are not immune.  In my own country, a tyrannically racist, chauvinistic narcissist is not only running for the most powerful office in the world, but he has garnered, by my last check, the support of 50% of his party.  Are you fucking kidding me, America?  And speaking of America, we remain solidly on the top 10 list of highest rape crimes in the world, year after year: we share this mark of dishonor with several of our "most advanced" allies, including Canada, Australia, and the UK.  Our trusty Webster’s dictionary defines adventurer as a “person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures”, and adventuress as “a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or position”.  As recently as 2015, men back home made on average 21% more than their female counterparts, and we are still, in 2016, advocating tirelessly for the reproductive rights of all women, regardless of  demographic or socioeconomic status.

Do I think as a feminist that women are greater than men?  Of course not.  I love men, have many in my life, and frankly, have a hard time even justifying that antiquated argument with a response; my patience is waning for willful ignorance.  I am as concerned for my nephews as I am for my niece.  I think until our world understands the inherent, fundamentally equal value and worth of both genders, it hurts them too, overtly and insidiously.  Until we teach our boys to embody "feminine" traits like compassion and empathy and emotional intelligence as much as we do aggression and dominance and strength, we all suffer.  We will continue to lose out on the wholeness we were endowed with when we were mysteriously created in the divine image, that is, incidentally, both male and female.  

Today I took an interminably long bus ride across the barren landscape that watered my overburdened eyes and lashed me in the face through the window, seasoned with intermittent spittle and litter being dumped from the window above.  I was befriended by the young man beside me by way of the gift of a popsicle, and I was humbled; perhaps he could soften me.  I made a valiant effort to be friendly and answer his questions about my giant imaginary husband and even managed to relax a bit.  And then the sun went down.  And like too many men before, he stole his liberties, not nearly as subtly as he believed himself to be: my two minutes of relaxation were over, and I was back to bleeding my palms.  

I know shouting "FUCK OFF" a dozen times a day is no kind of lasting solution, as much as I know that hiding out in a blue room in a blue city and crying angry tears isn't either.  I know too that this anger, however righteous, will eventually erode my cowering hope that we can do better, we can be better.  Somehow I need to figure out how to leverage my heartbroken outrage into action, one fluffy-headed popsicle bearer at a time.  Gloria says, "...One of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak."  So I'm speaking.  Are you?

Floating in the Desert

My instinct is to write, but I can’t find my words.  My instinct is to smile, to say hello.  But I can’t do that here with the men, because it’s taken as an invitation to “tease Eve,"; semantically innocuous, it's simply a rosy way to say sexually harass, verbally or manually.  My instinct is to talk it out, respectfully, with kindness.  But I can’t do that either, because a woman negotiating with the average rickshaw driver has little leverage and no voice.  My instinct is to treat myself on a good day or anesthetize on a bad with a frosty beer.  But I won’t do that here, because as much as I want to, I’m determined to stick this out, to absorb India, and allow her to absorb me.  People ask me if I love it or hate it, like it has to be one or the other, like those two very active verbs are mutually exclusive and not two parts of the same whole.  Yes, I answer.  Both.  All.  India is everything, all at once, from a million different directions.  I read somewhere that it’s the heart of the world.  But I don’t think I agree; I think it’s the guts.

The digestive system of our little planet, where everything that passes through begins in one form and ends in another, where the good is pulled apart, separated from the bad, and you learn what you’re really made of; there's no room for pretense in the guts.  Where your healthy bits are saved and refined and built into your whole and the sticky parts that weigh you down are strained and chemically altered into waste you didn’t know you didn’t need.  People underestimate the magic of the guts, the revolutionary physiology of churning and transforming that renews our bodies and sustains our life.  I’m sure of it: I’m tumbling around the guts of the world, being sucked into the bowels of the earth.  But it’s a hell of a show.

Entire worlds expand and contract, here in the guts.  Swirling around with me are hundreds of ethnicities, and thousands of languages, and millions of gods.  Bedazzled wedding processionals clog the street seven nights a week and hundreds of bats as big as dogs artfully duck and weave under the fireworks that shower smoldering ash onto me and my computer even as I type.  I hold my breath during the traditional Rajasthali folk dances, and savor the breeze that blows off the Thar desert, almost cooling the air.  Almost.  My tongue sprouts new tastebuds under the chilis and curries and paneer, and my ears search and plunder for connection to what I’m hearing.  There’s a distant thunder, a startled resonance as my prehistoric memory awakens to the beats and blasts and strums from these instruments I’ve never seen before.  This music lights up quiet little corners of my soul.  It’s the language of the desert, and the language of our ancestors, and a hallowed reminder of our humanity, and our divinity.  And it shoots sparks.

So that’s India to me, in this moment.  Crawling home at the end of the day, fighting to unscramble what I’m learning from what I thought I knew.  Treading without the life vest of my intuition that I've always relied on but no longer applies.  Drifting rudderless on invisible currents pulling me deeper into the subcontinent of my imaginings and farther from the west that raised me.  So I press further into the fathomless depth of the desert at the height of an Indian summer.  Counterintuitive, you say?  Welcome to India.

To the Brownest Green Village Ever

The thick red dirt clings to every available inch of my surface.  Freckles, cuticles, the new friendship bracelet adorning my wrist, an extra-special gift from my 6-year old South African bestie.  This is a self-sustaining little nook of a place, 2300 meters above the nearest village.  Using only horses and people-drawn rickshaws for transportation, surrounded by mountain peaks and overlooking a river cutting through the valley, it’s a respite for Mumbai locals looking to escape the crush of the city.  It seemed the perfect solution to my emerging I've-gotta-get-the-hell-out-of-this-city disease. 

10 days into Mumbai, I used the vestiges of my energy to disallow my bitchy alter ego from snarling at the hundreds and thousands of stares, the strangers lining up and surrounding me with their cell phone cameras.  Indians have perfected the art of the stare.  It’s an absolutely immodest, head craning, eye bulging gape.  Every.  Single.  Time.  It’s tuk-tuk drivers twisting their head exorcist-style to see us riding the tuk-tuk half a dozen lanes across from them.  It’s entire families kneeling backwards in their booth to improve their view of me sipping water 2 feet away.  It’s a dozen giggling men peeking through my window as I read a book.  I rummaged for the vestiges of patience buried beneath my vexation; there’s neither a pretense of subtlety nor a pretense of malice, so why should I be so disgruntled by their curiosity?  That said, I was precariously close to snapping out, and jumped at the invitation to join Justyna.

I met Justyna at our dirty little hostel in a dirty little neighborhood in the thick of the city.  A Polish yogi of my own generation, she was warm and chatty and as it turns out, a beast navigating this city, and an expert at refuting the constant efforts of seemingly everyone to scam us at every turn.  Her strength was contagious and helped me believe I too would eventually relax and learn how to do this country without killing someone.  In the meantime, we sought our next adventure together, and headed out of the city to this reputed little haven.

After a brutally hot day riding trains jammed with hundreds of people and goats and cucumber vendors, we finally arrived in the village atop the mountain.  We were, putting it mildly, underwhelmed.  This reputedly beautiful village was deep in the heat and drought of summertime; green and lush it’ll become yes, but not until it receives the much needed rain that will arrive with monsoons in June.  Our timing was impeccably off, but such is traveling, and we made the best of it.  We rode horses to lookout points and feigned being impressed as we tried to discern the cracked, bone-colored riverbed through the brown clouds of dust kicked up by our tread, and the pink cloud of smog that followed us from Mumbai. We trekked through the dehydrated jungle, and shot sweet chai from our favorite vendor, a handsome man with a magnificent mustache and a soft pink shirt.  We sucked down coconut after coconut hoping to restore the vitamins and minerals we were surely sweating out, even as we laid under our fan in our underwear.  And ardently, fervently, vigilantly, we eyeballed the perpetually encroaching monkeys.  

In a single day, we managed to avoid a certain rabid fate several times over by no more than a hair, thanks to the respective protection of a man, a slingshot, and a mama dog.  Because here, there aren’t a few monkeys, or even a hundred: there are thousands, crawling the metal grates on our windows, and climbing ladders, and tumbling around on the playground.  They are spritely little goblins and I'm determined to find their kryptonite.  Or at the very least to learn to use a slingshot without hopping and squealing like my toes are on fire.  So off we'll go, armed with the unsolicited advice to temper the heat by eating lots of onions, and a new determination to perfect my impersonation of a monkey barbarian.  If they’re going to stare, I may as well give ‘em a show.

Through Mumbai

I’m so brain-tired, but can’t sleep.  I’m awestruck and horrified, overwhelmed and captivated.  This is a city birthed from the jungle, with new limbs and appendages emerging all the time.  On the Arabian Sea, Mumbai and her slums rise above the murky brown shoreline a dusty mirage of rainbow-colored shacks and crumbling imperial mansions.  From the back of my rickshaw, I try to shrink into myself, to be as inconspicuous as possible.  I want to be in the middle of this steamy madness and breakneck shuffle, but just as much I want to curl up in a ball in a cool, dark, sanitized hiding place.  I feel the weight of a shame I didn’t expect; I understand nothing.  So I try to be present in all my senses, to yield to the sweat streaming into all my nooks and crannies, to unclench my fists at the always overt, occasionally lewd stares.  To dredge through the translucent fog that burns my throat and bleeds my nose, beneath the smells of hanging animal carcasses and a shit-filled ocean, and to breathe in the marsala and cardamom and curries, the burning incense that wafts from the millions of shrines across the city.

Gateway of India

As far as the senses stretch, the horizon is full of gold-shellacked dreams and dazzling despair.  Ethereal street babies crawl along the sidewalk fence, barely separating them from the mayhem that is Mumbai traffic.  Their toddler caretakers wring filthy water from blankets, as the eldest among them, not older than 8, rakes heaps of trash equal to her bodyweight from the sidewalk; the sidewalk is their home.  There are packs of feral dogs and cats, I can’t tell if they’re living or dead until they subtly flinch under the weight of too many flies swarming their hiding place under cars parked on the street.  I wonder how they survive until I see a man butcher a still-bleating goat in the midst of a crowd; his goat siblings look on, tamed by their fate.  The nearby dogs and cats however, perk up considerably.

I feel like a fake.  Am I exploiting this ancient history, the streets lined with maimed and disfigured "untouchables” because I'm too determined to draw conclusions, to make sense of things that are far, far beyond my scope?  I see beauty everywhere.  Soiled, unkempt, astounding beauty.  Skeletal slum grandmothers washing and laughing together in their jewel-toned saris.  Men sharing tobacco and dough balls over a gutter as jaunty street kids playfully and purposefully hustle what they can to share with one another.  And the people.  Old and young, poor and wealthy, the people.  So, so beautiful.  With luscious hair cascading to their waists and gold embroidered everything, I can’t stop staring.  Wealthy families enfold their little ones in outfits embroidered entirely in gold, accentuating their enormous kohl-lined mahogany eyes: extraordinary measures to protect little ones from the evil eye.  Can't.  Stop.  Staring.

Yesterday, I almost fainted on the train.  I knew it was a risk when I hopped on in the morning, suffering the previous day or two from a circus of flaming-nunchuck jugglers in my stomach: I felt like a big white raisin, cavernous and dehydrated, in this land of juicy red grapes.  Seeing stars, I mentally slogged to the conclusion that if I didn't do something quickly, it would be lights out.  Through my fading periphery I saw the humor: there was no way I would have fallen, as tightly packed as we were on the female-only car.  Before I realized what was happening, I was surrounded and shuffled by no less than 4 women into the seats that each of them, simultaneously, were scrambling to give to me.  A young Muslim woman kindly ordered me with gentle pats on the arm to sit and rest, assuring me that it happens to everyone: it's a million degrees here.  When I was finally able to open my eyes, the English-speaking nationals checked in verbally, while from others I received shy smiles and the Indian head wiggle of greeting that I'm coming to love and trying to master.  It was the grace I needed in the form of an undeserved kindness, a sweaty, humbling reminder: I'm here, I'm finally here, and if I surrender and allow myself to be enfolded into their world, I think I'll be okay.

Across the Universe

Besties

The Cape of Good Hope is where the two oceans meet.  Or perhaps more accurately, crash into one another.  The Indian Ocean crashes to shore full of mystery from the far east and the Atlantic is icy with the arctic current that renders it impossible to swim for all but the bravest of children and wetsuit-clad surfers.  Not that I’d be swimming anyway; having a shark flag alone, as all the beaches here do, is enough for me to remain parked on the sand, I don’t care which color threat blows in the breeze.

It seems appropriate, the crashing of these two oceanic worlds in a place of so many other worlds crashing together.  South Africa is a place of tremendous wealth behind barbed wire home security fences, and townships without running water, where the horror of poverty rivals what I saw in my beloved Kenya.  This is a land of eleven national languages where everyone uses words like whilst and whereby and pleasure, and it tickles my old fashioned ears.  Where the races of Black, Colored, White, and Indian still maintain distinct cultures and languages, and it matters to which you belong.  Here in Cape Town I’ve delighted seeing biracial couples of every combination and their rainbow babies, strollers full of plump hope for a new South African reality.  But I’ve also experienced the not-too-far-post-apartheid discrimination while out with a proud Colored man, when he received fist bumps from those of his own demographic and offensive insults from men of my own.  Here in Africa I often feel like I’m sculpting sandcastles with bones. 

Hasta la vista, Arch Nemesis

I arrived here in Cape Town nearly 6 weeks after arriving in the country.  It seems as if this is the city where all of my other South African experiences and impressions are suddenly in high definition, like falling into one of the African oil paintings that line the stands of nearly all of the street vendors.  This is a city where carnival means parade, and parade means thousands of people from every race and neighborhood converging to celebrate the unique diversity that is this city.  Where Colored floats feature artists spraying live graffiti to local township music, and Indian mamas dance in their saris, and painted Zulus perform warrior dances with their spears on a cloud of balloons.  Cape Town reminds me more of Chicago than anywhere I’ve been on this continent, perhaps because of the sparkling waterfront full of foodie shops and craft markets; though nobody, anywhere, rivals the craftsmanship of Africans.  The city centerpiece is a brilliant public garden built in the 17th century by the East India Trading Company, also known for importing slaves from Western Africa, Indonesia, and Madagascar; the same slaves who built this city into what it is today.  The garden is home to foreign trees, tropical plants, and scores of homeless people curled up in any scrap of shade they manage to find; lives flourish and wither on their respective vines.  I can’t help but wonder how much has been invested in feeding the flowers while the people sleeping beneath go hungry.

My last few weeks here have been spent as a guest of a most delightful family.  And it’s been fun, and cozy, and holy-moly-loud, full as the apartment’s been with little kids and medium kids and young adult kids, and on holidays and weekends, grown-up kids.  Lindsay has been a tremendous source of refreshment and encouragement, and my spirit feels lighter and braver having spent time with her.  Her kids have generously shared their laughter, and hugs, and countless performances of show tunes and home-choreographed dances.  Really, they’ve enfolded me and invited me into their version of normal.  Because of Lindsay's generosity
here on the Cape Town peninsula, I've had a home.

Elephant's Eye View

On one hand, sometimes I feel like a South African baller: I have girlfriends to meet for coffee, and kids to play with, a proper kitchen in which to cook without dozens of European college students, and even a sweet South African beau.  But then I acknowledge reality, and realize that even after more than two months in this country I know I am not even minimally scratching the surface of this South African universe.  Because a place with eleven national languages and even more distinctly unique ethnicities would take a lifetime to learn even a little bit.  So once again I'll bid goodbye to a place that's shown me so much, and confronted me unapologetically with what I believe about race and class and privilege, including how each contour the lenses through which I see and live in the world.  So to Mandela and his rainbow nation, a heartfelt thanks: I'll take the gift of enhanced personal responsibility over the roiling Indian Ocean to where your curries came from, and where the Indian mamas, if I'm lucky, will teach me to wear a sari.  It has been, as you say, my pleasure.