From Vashi to the Village in One Right Turn

We turned right off of Palm Beach Road, one of the two main roads in Vashi, this suburb of Mumbai, onto a street clogged with rickshaws and shops and vendors, some 7 blocks away from where I’d stayed for 6 weeks, where I was told that several East Asian families lived, when the topic of diversity came up. I, in all my whiteness, dressed in all my Americanness (shorts), and she, in all her brown South Asianness, dressed in Western clothes. We were an 8-minute rickshaw ride and 45 minute train ride from downtown Bombay, and yet these people looked at us as if they’d never seen a white guy before, and as if this first-seen white man had come and taken away one of their village’s girls. But no, it really wasn’t me they were staring at. Despite the phrase “Gora memsahib,” or “white man’s woman,” floating to us on the wind at one point, they were undoubtedly staring at her. And right at her. Their eyes and faces staring at her with unselfconscious concentration like she were a gold coin in their crap, or a dog with 7 legs – certainly not like she were someone equipped with functional eyes and a sense of awareness. Once the sound of traffic dies away, the scene there is indistinguishable from that in a village in the middle of Maharashtra – and not too easily distinguishable from that in a village in the middle of Maharashtra in the middle of the 19th century. We pass stands upon stands with chickens in cages, something I hadn’t before seen in Bombay. We pass one guy frying up some of his chickens. We pass vegetable mongers with their produce arrayed under holey tarps. We pass roosters; we pass chickens. We pass cows and we pass bulls. We pass children defecating in the street. Then we realize we’ve passed everything, and there’s still no main road. There’s only a dead end formed by a few houses. I suggest that she ask someone how to return to the road. She doesn’t agree that that’s the best option. I can't speak Hindi. We double back to where we saw a much-used footpath. Past the children. Past the chickens. Past an uncomfortably proximate bull. As we reach the path, we can see that it ends at a main road – not that that means we’re free from stares and glares. In following this path out, the children look up at us. The men in the shop look over at us. The women on the balconies look down at us. Usually, in other situations, when I've seen Indians staring at me, a look straight into their eyes, and then a smile, elicits the same. But these people are barely aware I’m there. They’re just staring at her in her sleeveless black shirt with edges of the pink tank top underneath highlighting the corners. She’s wearing unsensible high-soled sandals and black pants with cargo pockets and tie strings on the cuffs. I’m sure they’re aware of that, but as they walk past, I see (and, after a while, I realize I can observe them with impunity – stare at them the way they stare at her – enabled by the fact they don’t take their eyes off her) that they don’t seem to be focusing their stares at her clothes, but just at her face. My best guess is that maybe they're trying to see what a gora-befriending westernized girl looks like up close.