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Two years.

Seven hundred and thirty days, give or take or week.

Seven thousand, five hundred and twenty hours.

Two years since I first stumbled off a plane in Mumbai, severely jetlagged, stupified by the 82 degree heat baking the city at 2 AM, and somewhat doubtful that my latest MommyWizard adventure was a Good Idea.

The original plan (well, yes, there was one) was to stay in India for several months, and then rejoin civilization. As those of you who have followed along with the blog for the last two years already know, I never did quite get around to boarding a plane headed out of the country and in a westerly direction. At times the timing for a trip to the West simply didn’t work. At others, financial snarls of this-and-that combined to make a plane ticket hard to obtain. So I stayed, keeping my visa legal with obligatory trips to Nepal, and finally registering for residency.

In that time, I’ve done my share of “going” local. Instead of T-shirts and jeans, my wardrobe consists of salwar kameez suits, kurtas, and dupattas. (Dupattas are an absolutely necessary item. An Indian woman would sooner forget her head and leave it home, than leave the house without a dupatta draping her shoulders. It’s just the way it is.) Chai is the drink of choice, rather than coffee. I no longer grumble when the Sikh temple begins broadcasting prayers at 5:30 AM. In fact, if I don’t hear it, I grumble more, and light a couple of candles to shower by, because the silence means the power’s out again. And I now snicker along with the local ladies when a Western tourist slinks through town wearing yoga clothes and attempting to look mystical.

I should really expand that last thought, because I had a similar experience after spending several weeks in Mexico. San Miguel was far enough off the beaten track–despite the large expatriate population–that I soon grew used to moving through crowds of short, brown-skinned people, all with straight black hair, all close to my height. On my return to the incredibly spiced melting pot that is the Bay Area, it took me a little while to readjust to crowds of people that were all shapes, sizes and colors.

The process does not work at all well in reverse. Rewalsar is, like San Miguel, far away from anything cosmopolitan and filled with crowds of short brown people with straight black hair. Westerners tend to stand out. And….well…

They look funny.

Part of the problem is the Western perception of India as a sensuous place devoted to physical sensations. You know, the Kama Sutra. Yoga. Temples filled with the smoke of exotic incense. All of which overlooks the India with moral conventions out of the 1950s, Sanjaya, and a fetish for cell phones and cricket matches. The result is usually an attempt to dress “Indian” without really buying any Indian clothes. So from time to time we have folks putter through wearing kurtas and pants made from the material that’s normally used for djolas (purses) or as mattress ticking. Sorta like wearing a jacket with a “Saranwrap” or a “Tempurpedic” logo….Then there was the one young lady who attempted the “yogini” style of dress. Unfortunately she decided to wear salwar pants with a white tank top. To most Indian women she looked like she had forgotten to get dressed before heading outside, and they wondered aloud where the rest of her outfit was. I know, I did my share of wardrobe malfunctions before understanding how clothes actually functioned socially here, but two years is long enough to have me snickering along with the natives at other folks’ faux pas.

India is a place where there is no social restriction against staring. Having been the staree for at least a year, it’s sometimes surprising to find myself now the starer–especially at Westerners kitted out in the tourist uniform of t-shirt, shorts, sandals, backpack, hat, and expensive camera. Strange to step through the mirror, and see out…

June 14th, 2008 Posted by admin | General, Travel, India | 2 comments