Month: October 2015

By meghanclorinda

Before I left the US for India, I set a very important condition for myself: I promised myself that these five months would be completely romance-free. No flirting, no coffee dates, nothing physical, and absolutely, positively no relationships. These things just brought unwanted stress, something which I figured I would already have more than enough of just learning to live in a foreign country. Not to mention, freeing myself from college hookup culture and the GW dating scene would allow me more time to reflect on myself and my experiences in India.

But the truth is, I'm a romantic through and through. I love the playful back and forth of flirting, and I thrive on the mystery of would-be love affairs. Honestly, I was probably lying to myself the whole time I made those promises about avoiding any kind of romantic intrigue. And while I did manage to hold it together for a full two months, I can't say I was particularly disappointed (or even actively resisting) when an opportunity arose for me to get a glimpse of dating in India.

Last week, I wrote about my inadvertent flirtation with a few male classmates, and the stalker-esque Facebook messages, overly excited greetings, and date proposal that followed. This last occurrence was simultaneously the most concerning and the most exciting. On the one hand I hated myself for foolishly being so open with my male classmates, particularly the seemingly non-traditional Kartik -- after all, how many times had my program leaders and host brother warned me that most Indian college guys had a much broader definition of flirting than American ones did? But on the other hand, the idea of experiencing a date in the Indian context intrigued me. Considering how vastly different social norms are here than in the US, I had a feeling this wouldn't be remotely similar to the run-of-the-mill American coffee date, and I was curious to see what format it would take. Besides, dating in the US had always frustrated and exhausted me with its small talk and superficiality; maybe I'd actually...enjoy dating in India?

I left Kartik that day still uncertain of whether or not I would meet him the next afternoon; luckily for me, the first major difference between an American date and an Indian date that I noticed was the complete lack of a concrete meeting time. There wasn't even a rough time to work with; instead I received something more along the lines of "If you're free tomorrow afternoon, just drop by the studio, and if I'm here and I'm free, then we'll go." Without his phone number, email, or any other method by which to contact him, I was fairly worried that the two of us would just miss each other should I actually decide to go. However, the ambiguity enabled me to think the whole thing over a bit more. All the way home I weighed the pros and cons of meeting up with him. Pro: learn more about Indian youth culture. Con: potentially cause an entire semester of awkward art history classes. Pro: finally find the elusive Mushroom Rock on campus. Con: inadvertently lead a genuinely nice guy astray. Pro: Kartik was friendly, witty, good-looking...As that thought crept into my mind I realized that I was forgetting the most important factor in deciding whether or not to go on a date with someone: the person himself. Maybe it was okay if I wanted to go on this date because of Kartik too, and not just as some ethnographic study in the dating habits of Indian college students.

Once I accepted that I was actually genuinely interested in Kartik, and not Indian youth culture, my excitement started building. I promised myself that despite my nervousness (and the very real possibility that the lack of planning would cause some sort of time or place mix-up) I would get myself over to campus the next day and go through with this thing. I became more and more nervously excited, and I wondered why I hadn't realized from the very start that maybe flirting with Kartik could be a good thing.

After what seemed like an agonizingly long twenty-four hours, I found myself walking into the printmaking studio at the school of fine arts, heart pounding as I scanned the room for a pair of aviator specs. I caught Kartik's eye and he waved me over, telling me it'd be just a second before we were on our way. I attempted to casually look around the studio as he grabbed his keys and went over to talk to one of our classmates, a shy girl who often sat next to me named Anjali. I watched out of the corner of my eye as he rattled something off to her in Malayalam, the language of the Indian state of Kerala where both of them are from, and caught the phrase "Mushroom Rock" and a quick gesture in my direction. "Chalo! Let's go Meghan!" he called over his shoulder. I followed him outside to the rain-soaked courtyard where we had parked our cycles.

"Let's wait just a few minutes, I asked Anjali to come with us," he said, not quite meeting my eyes as he unlocked his cycle. I froze, my stomach turning as my mind worked over this information. Oh my god, I read this situation totally wrong, I thought. This was not a date. Anjali was undoubtedly the most gorgeous girl of all the first-years in the art department, with silky black hair, big eyes and a shy, sweet smile; not to mention she had a charming little laugh and was an extremely talented artist. Boys don't just invite absolutely incredible girls along to third-wheel on a first date with someone else. As Anjali skipped out of the building to meet us with a big smile on her face and Kartik laughed and teasingly called out to her in Malayalam, I actually started to wonder if maybe I was the one third-wheeling on their love fest.

The three of us got on our cycles and rode off down the road towards the jungle area behind the fine arts school, and as Kartik and Anjali chatted with each other in rapid-fire Malayalam I mentally cursed myself for being so naive. I had gone and gotten myself so excited, convinced that this boy had to be interested in me, when he and -- was she his girlfriend???? -- Anjali were probably just being nice to the awkward foreign girl who didn't have any real friends. Once again, I had proven myself completely incapable of understanding social cues here on any level. Though I had made no indication  to either of them that I had expected to be going on a first date, I was terribly embarrassed.

"Poor Meghan, she must be bored out of her mind. We should be speaking English!" Kartik exclaimed, grinning back at me. I shrugged. "It's okay, Malayalam's beautiful, so I don't mind listening even if I have no idea what you're saying." Kartik shook his head. "No, no, this is about you. English it is."

As the conversation thankfully switched back to my comfort zone, I learned that Anjali wouldn't be on campus the whole next week. "Oh no! Why are you leaving?" I cried. Despite my fear that for the past two weeks I had been flirting with the boy she was dating, Anjali was one of my favorite people on campus and I desperately wanted to be her friend. And now, just as I was getting to know her, she was vanishing.

In classic Anjali fashion she simply giggled shyly and shrugged. "Oh, she never hangs out with us if she can help it," Kartik chimed in smartly. "She's always running off on the weekends to meet some friend or relative out of town." I glanced over at Anjali, whose pretty cheeks were turning a ruddy shade of pink.

"No, no, not true!" she squeaked with another giggle. "Meghan, Kartik's lying. I'm going back to Kerala this week to visit my husband."

It took every bit of strength I had not to lose hold of my cycle handles and swerve off the path into the dense bamboo forest. "Wait, you're....married?" I croaked, hoping the shock, confusion, and utter relief weren't too apparent in my tone of voice. She nodded. "Yes, and my husband still lives in Kerala. This is the longest we've been apart since we got married last year and I want to visit him."

I probably made some kind of polite comment about how nice it was that she'd be going home to see her husband, or how I hoped she had a lovely trip, or how I'd miss seeing her in class the next week. But inside I was grinning, jumping for joy, and dying of laughter all at once. Because yet again, I had failed to understand the social situation I had gotten myself into. Anjali wasn't my competition, and she definitely wasn't dating Kartik, that much was certain. As I watched the two of them interact the rest of the afternoon, it became increasingly apparent that Kartik's teasing toward Anjali wasn't that of a boyfriend, but that of a brother. And it also became apparent that Anajali took a step back so that Kartik and I could talk, acting as the buffer during an awkward silence or whispering some clever jab at Kartik into my ear when he wasn't looking. But she didn't play the third-wheel. Rather, she acted as chaperone. Why hadn't it occurred to me that it would have been incredibly improper, even creepy in the Indian context, for Kartik to take me out into the woods alone, even if it was daytime and we were on campus? In the US that might have seemed totally innocent, but here that would have been read as entirely scandalous and overly forward. Anjali, the quiet, married, sisterly figure, made the whole thing acceptable, and saved both Kartik's and my reputations.

Although I had an amazing time that afternoon, our foray to Mushroom Rock mostly left me with more questions than answers: did Kartik's hand linger on mine after he helped me onto the rock, or had I imagined it? When he invited me to his house in Kerala, was that as suggestive as it sounded? But in the end, I forced myself to quiet my mind, to just stop thinking about everything for once. Because in India, anything can happen; the only predictable thing is that you can't really predict anything at all. So instead of worrying about translating actions and words into meanings I could understand, I decided to just enjoy the beauty of feeling for once as we flew back downhill on our cycles, a flurry of indecipherable Malayalam ringing beautifully in my ears.

By meghanclorinda

"Why are you still sitting here? Get out and travel already, will you?" Throughout my first month here in India, I was confronted with this question almost constantly (particularly by Alok, my hyperactive, always-teasing older host brother). Every new Indian I met was eager to find out if I had traveled around the country yet, and if so, where I had been, what I had done, which foods I had tasted and absolutely loved. However, their faces quickly fell when I told them that thus far I had just been settling into Hyderabadi life. "No, no! Get out of here! There's so much to see!" they'd shout excitedly, launching into a list of suitable locales for extended weekend trips.

Their enthusiasm for their vast and diverse country was contagious; I longed to heed their advice and catch the next sleeper train out of Hyderabad, headed for adventures unknown. However, a voice in the back of my mind held me back, reminding me of the mantra that my study abroad program coordinators had been chanting since the first day of orientation: "You are not a traveler, you are a student." Academics came first, no exceptions. My friends and I had taken this warning very seriously -- perhaps a little too seriously -- and found ourselves wrapped up in a deep-seeded guilt that prevented us from going any farther than an hour-long busride into Old City. Just auditing and registering for classes at the University of Hyderabad had been an absolute nightmare of schedule conflicts, unreachable professors, unannounced class time and location changes, and last-minute cancellations. Imagining what it would be like once I actually had homework and exams to worry about made me want to take up permanent residence in the library (which is deemed a strictly enforced "Silence Zone"), not run away to have fun for a weekend only to return to a new round of anxiety. Not to mention, the last impression I wanted to give those around me was that of the American study abroad student who crossed an ocean and two continents just to party and slack off for a semester.

However, even my host dad, who is a retired English professor of the University of Hyderabad, was eager for me to get out of the city and explore another part of India. "This may be the only time you live in India!" he reminded me with a twinkle in his friendly eyes. "You shouldn't be working hard -- you should be working hardly." The concept he proposed was so foreign to me; a borderline-masochistic perfectionist by nature, and a posterchild for the typical GW overachiever, the idea of throwing caution to the wind, believing things would work themselves out, and going on vacation for a few days sounded like something that people only do in the movies. But hey, teacher knows best, right? Who was I to argue with an esteemed former professor?

And just like that, with the right mix of impulsiveness and restlessness, two of my friends, Sara and Caroline, and I planned an extended weekend trip. We did the whole thing via Facebook message in about half an hour. One minute we were speculating whether or not to go, and fifteen minutes later we had purchased round-trip bus tickets and reserved a hostel room for the coming weekend in Hampi, a massive complex of medieval Hindu ruins and a hub for European backpackers about 400 kilometers southwest of Hyderabad.

Our eight hour, overnight busride to Hampi was full of giddy excitement: at any given moment I was liable to burst into a fit of giggles, full of wonder and disbelief that we were really doing it. I felt like a little kid who'd stolen fresh baked cookies hot off the pan and somehow managed to get away with it. Aside from my twenty-four hours of grueling travel from the US to India, this was the first time that I was adventuring on my own without any supervision. The whole world was at my fingertips, and every tiny moment, from sharing snacks on the bus to watching Hyderabad's night markets flash past my window as we left the city, filled me with awe.

We arrived in Hampi  around six-thirty in the morning, after transferring from our bus to an auto rickshaw ride past sleepy villages, ox-drawn carts piled high with sugar cane stalks, and rice paddies bordered by palm trees that shimmered with morning dew. Our first glimpse of the village of Hampi was a massive, ancient-looking  Hindu temple with layer upon layer of intricately carved deities, stretching toward the hazy sky like a wedding cake for the gods. In that moment there was no doubt in my mind that this was exactly what I needed -- a weekend to get in touch with India's rich history, to clear my mind of university anxieties, and to leave the stress of Hyderabad's clamor behind me.

After freshening up in our shoebox-sized hostel room, we were eager to get going. Water bottle full and backpack loaded with granola bars, guidebook tips, and sunscreen, I lead the charge towards Virupaksha Temple, the first site on an extensive list of historical and artistic wonders. Hampi, the former capital of the Vijayanagar Kingdom, is the largest archaeological site in all of India, with thousands of Hindu temples, statues, and palace ruins carved into the rocky landscape. As an Art History major accompanied by two History major friends, the site promised us a weekend of exploration and learning.

We quickly realized, however, that Hampi wasn't exactly the blast from the past we had expected. From the second we stepped out of our hostel we were bombarded by people hawking everything from guided tours of the monuments by autorickshaw to Bob Marley tee shirts (which seemed incredibly out of place in a small town in South India) and visibly mass-produced Ganesh keychains which we were assured had been "made by hand in my village far away."

It was practically impossible to escape the constant onslaught of commercialism. Taking your shoes off before entering the temple was mandatory as per Hindu beliefs, and yet storing your shoes on the wooden rack outside cost a fee, in addition to the temple entry fee. Part of the temple itself had been converted into the official Hampi Tourism Office. Middle aged men with terrifyingly bright smiles hovered around the temple entrance, waiting to lure foreigners into their office with promises of free maps and information. Within twenty minutes I found myself forcibly given four copies of the same map, all of which had been rendered illegible by the scribbled recommendations of auto drivers and tour guides.

We explored the temple in haste, anxious to leave the town center and discover the more secluded ruins where we were certain we'd find peace. But nowhere was safe. Even after a half-hour climb up a steep set of centuries-old granite steps set into a deserted hillside, we were approached by men posing as Sadhus (Hindu holymen, or ascetics) quick to charge us for a photo of them and people lurking around ruin corners, hawking more mass-produced souvenirs. Two more hours of wandering luckily afforded us some peace and quiet in a ruined temple colonnade, with only hundreds of grazing cows and the ghosts of Vijayanagar as companions.

But upon returning to the village for dinner, we were once again assaulted by an overwhelming sense of how out of place we were. The South Indian food that's come to be a constant comfort for me over the past month was nowhere in sight, replaced by sad excuses for pizzas, pastas, and overpriced hummus platters catered towards the European and Israeli backpackers that keep Hampi on its feet. Ironically, in Hampi's desperate attempts to hospitably cater to my every need, I felt more uncomfortable, more foreign, than I ever had while walking through the rarely visited streets of Hyderabad, despite that I'm almost always the only non-Indian there.

The night was only made more bizarre by an encounter with an Indian man on the way back to our hostel. After we responded to his question about our nationality with "USA," he gave us a sickly, zoned out smile before mumbling "You want marijuana?" More than a little weirded out, we hustled back to the hostel. I went to bed that night depressed and terribly homesick, not for the US, but for Hyderabad, for my homestay family, for my noisy street with its barking dogs and honking autos, for my strange sense of belonging in a city of millions.

Though the next two days were definitely an improvement from our first, the majority of Hampi's challenges were unavoidable.  We succumbed to the insistent urging of the tourist office and signed up for a four-hour bike tour around some of Hampi's monuments, which turned into a grueling six hours of our tour guide making terrible dad jokes and asking for tips. No matter where we went, we found ourselves bombarded by salespeople hawking souvenirs covered in gaudy renderings of Hindu deities and the mantra "Don't worry, be Hampi." Every restaurant we ate in served the same terrible, overpriced, "Western" food, which ironically gave Sara and I a wicked case of food poisoning on our last night.

Despite all this, however, my point in this entry is the utter necessity of traveling while studying abroad. Although my three days in Hampi were far from the relaxing, educational weekend in a rural paradise that I had imagined, in many ways that weekend is what finally enabled me to process and evaluate my first month of study abroad. After all, it wasn't until I had landed smack in the middle of the confines of Hampi's tiny alleyways, with a monkey population that seemed to outnumber the human one, that I realized how much I loved my crowded auto rides on traffic-filled streets each day, the wind tangling my hair and the gaze of a million strangers to whom I was any other girl on her way to school. It wasn't until I was surrounded by people I was supposed to feel more familiar around (European backpackers who looked like me, were around my age, wore Western clothes, carried around the same Lonely Planet guidebook) that I realized there was a reason I was living in India for five months and not just hopping around from place to place, never really finding a home in the country. It wasn't until I was given the opportunity to get off campus and out of my homestay for an extended period that I realized maybe those places were exactly where I was meant to be.

The strongest sense of belonging I've had since coming to India was the utter delight and relief that washed over me my second morning in Hampi when I discovered the restaurant we had chosen offered aloo paratha, an authentic Indian breakfast. It didn't taste like an exotic treat to me -- it tasted like Durga Ma's hand-formed dosa, Uncle ji's laughter, the crunch of my bike tires on the University of Hyderabad's dirt pathways, and the smell of my gulmohar tree after the rain. It tasted like home.

They say you don't know what you've got until it's gone, but maybe you don't have to lose it completely to realize how much it means to you. Maybe you just need to take a step back and look outside yourself for a moment to see your place in the world. In a study abroad context, I think that undoubtedly means taking a risk and traveling, even if only for a weekend. Yes, you're a student first, but there's so much learning that happens when you get out of the classroom, and out of your comfort zone. I think you'll be amazed by what you find out there.