My train to Varanasi leaves in a couple of hours at 9:30 in the evening…The last overnight train ended my long field trip with the group but opened new doors for next semester. A woman in a bright sari commented on my henna as I was passing her compartment. I was heading back to my seat after a friend and I had spied on a cute boy in a nice Kurta with chest hair. In our pursuit we ended up being followed by a drunken creep who ruined the whole endeavor for us. This woman though was not like any Indian woman I had ever encountered on my own, she was even more. She was the sister of a shopkeeper in Jaisalmer that me and the girls had gone to, her sister was so pushy though talking about how she was part of an organization to help local women by giving them equal share of the profit of their crafts. I was skeptical of her so we didn’t buy anything or stay very long.
The sister now told me all of what they were doing, that she had started the shop (the only shop in Jaisalmer run by women) and was helping the women that made their products to become more empowered financially and personally in their own lives. She said the community didn’t support her and her sister and would lie to tourists leading them away from her shop. When she first opened the shop she said they smeared cow dung on her sign. She spoke so openly about how she wished she had more freedom and independence saying, “I think American women should switch with Indian women and then maybe the men [Indian] would understand”, followed by a laugh that felt contagious. She talked about how she wanted to continue in school to get her PhD and become a teacher but that her husband wouldn’t let her because he thought that she wouldn’t have enough time for him. I glanced over at her husband a couple times during this whole conversation, I wondered how he would react if he spoke English. He was such a kind of small ordinary man compared to this woman’s huge personality and sparkling sari. I went back to her that night 2 more times getting up the courage to ask her if she knew anything about the practice of Sati (my personal academic interest I have been pursuing). Contrary to what anyone else has told me she said that Sati still does exist, mostly in the villages and told me a little about how the ritual is performed on a certain moon cycle. She said i could come with her to talk to the women and do research and this seemed like the perfect idea for my independent study next semester.
I have mixed feelings about going into a field research study with Sati or issues concerning women’s rights because I know my values are different. The cultural practice Sati to me, seems like a gross moral injustice to the world but who am I to say that to whoever is practicing it. I read in the book that there are accounts of some women who voluntarily commit Sati and jump in the funeral pyre with her husband because they believe they don’t have a life without him. It’s so complicated because a widow in India in some places is treated almost as an untouchable so the reality of a life after the husband dies can be worse for the woman. Then there are women like the one i met on the train who is so blatant about how her culture treats women and is not only fighting in her personal relationships to break this tradition but in her professional life and as what she calls it “charity work”. So where is this change coming from, are western values being pushed on Indian women? Is this want for change coming from westerners themselves? From globalization? Or is it natural, like how all cultures are hybrid and the change has just been fueled by the women who have the power to help fight for it?
Where does that leave me again…in my opinion all women and people in general deserve to be treated equal with equal opportunity and freedom in life…so if gender equality is coming genuinely from the women of India then I think I would support that but how I go about doing that I think I have to be very thoughtful of.
Update on loss of material possessions
-One of my water bottles (the robot one with the suck top)
-Waterproof travel notebook from Powell’s (contained diary from independent study in Costa Rica and other thoughts)
-Exposed a whole role of film that I had taken since I had been here (rolled it the wrong direction and the film came out of the canister)
Other things lost…
-Didn’t lose but ruined the duffle my sister lent me (bag was too heavy and made holes where is strap connects to the bag on either side)
-Faith in ever feeling not tired
-Brain cells
-Moisture in hair
Gained in material possessions
-Blue silk (western) dress
-Duffle bag given as a free gift from the salesman (to possibly replace my sisters)
-Hotel ashtray
-White kurta
-White, not all silk; dress (western but with a Tibetan style)
-Blue vest
-Bell anklets
-Scarves
Other things gained
-Bug bites!
-Books finished reading: Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
*Excerpt from my diary on my opinion of the book besides it being raw poetry “reading Dharma Bums feeling like even this experience [mine] is more exotic and sincere then this fake Buddhist”. But I also wrote down a quote from the book that I really like, “Nobody can tell you that you aren’t free”.
And Death by Fire: Sati, dowry, and female infanticide in modern India by Mala Sen
-New amazing yoga routine
-Experience of riding a camel in the desert!
-Had an experience when we went out to the desert where I tripped on something called bhang (marijuana), which is legal in north India. At one point we went out on the dunes at night and I looked at the horizon and the whole sky was made up of this grid in a white twinkling outline of tiny infinite seeming squares.
-Offers for sex/uncomfortable implications (men ranging from street boys age estimated 14 although he said he was 17 to yoga teacher whose 55 married and hinted at me wanting it with him) offers for opium, hash, and marijuana
-Business cards for different hotels and restaurants (at least 10 just in Jaisalmer)
-Crazier craving for real Mexican food and Gluten-free pizza
-More “good luck”, as I walked by the Ganga and under a telephone pole I felt something drop on my head, a little boy started laughing at me. I looked up and felt my head…MORE BIRD POOP. I washed my hair in the river that’s probably infested with more feces then what I was rinsing out and thought about how I should try my luck at the lottery.
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| Jaipur |
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| Jaipur |
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| Camel Safari in the desert of Jaipur |
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| Taj Mahal, Agra |
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| Ghandi graffiti in Varanasi along the Ganges |
My train ride home from Varanasi began stressfully partly due to me. My friend from High School happened to be in India at the same time as me and in the same place! At first I thought my train was leaving 10 hours later then it was but it ended up being in the morning so I had limited time to actually see her and talk. Trying to get all the things I wanted to get done before I left and see my friend I ended up being late to meet my friends who i was traveling with for the train. They had a rick waiting so we just hopped in and told the driver we were in a hurry but for some reason he thought it was appropriate to stop to get some tea on the way. Then we get to the train station and tried to figure out which platform our train is supposed to come on so we go to the tourist help room. There’s a line and our train comes in 30 minutes so our friend goes to ask someone else. She comes back saying our train got derailed and re-routed to another station. So we wait in that long line of Australian accents, posh Europeans and loud American tourists to refund our ticket and exchange it for another one. When it’s our turn the man at the desk says he cannot refund our ticket because it was purchased online, he cannot help us. So in a rush we call our teacher to have her refund the ticket and look to see if there are any seats open on the trains leaving to Dehli today, which of course there are not. So after being traded off by various train station officials we get 3 “open seat” tickets which means either stand by the toilets (we did for a while) or in the doorways to the compartments or the doors out of the train. Or there is always ther option to sit on someone’s bunk who isn’t there (we also did this for the first part of the trip but got kicked out by the ticket checker man). So there I was standing next to the sink full of wet cigarettes outside the squatting toilets that is just a hole in the ground leading to the tracks underneath that rush by. Your pee flies away as soon as it goes down the hole so that it almost seems like your flushing (i said almost!). A man immerges from somewhere down the packed compartment and asks me if I would like to sit down, at this point I had already gotten a little sleep from the seats we had stolen earlier and was just happy to be on a train going to the place I wanted so I thought about it. I finally said yes and he brought me to a semi full compartment with an open bench and I went back to tell the two other girls I was traveling with about the spot after I saw that the man was harmless. The man was hard of hearing and had a book of music out the whole ride, he played air trumpet humming the tunei assumed was in the book until his stop. I liked him because he said I looked Russian.
We spent the rest of train ride in this compartment, at one point there were 25 people packed in, at one point they were all discussing the reason why we didn’t get on the train we had a ticket for even though we told them multiple times that it never came to the station, at no point did I go to bathroom because I didn’t even see that there was a path for me to get there, and at no point was I unhappy with our predicament.
We could have gotten kicked out a couple more times as the ticket man showed up again and the people whose seat we were sitting in showed up but at this point we had been adopted by a group of Dehli students who only after it got dark decided to ask us questions the whole night about how we define happiness and our ideal husband. We got off the train and got a rick to the airport admiring Dehli’s impressive infrastructure. After that everything seemed easy, clean airport bathrooms, retractable airplane seats and a reliable bus ride to my sweet apartment where my roommates waited in the living room prepared with hugs and a celebratory dinner out.
Something I find comfort in when I think about how far away from home I am and how long it would take me to get back… I am on the other side of the world so far from everything that makes sense to me, that’s easy and that I am comfortable in and I look up at the sky. It’s always there and it usually looks the same. When the stars are out I feel much more at ease in comparing the measurement of the distance of the universe and space then finding home again.
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