a whale in India

My hosts in the village of Bharan were literally bending themselves over backwards to make me feel at home. Sometimes to the point of breaking, as soon as I tried to sit down on the ground or a stone there were panicked cries echoing around the courtyard and a chair or a cushion magically produced. Never mind if I wanted to sit on the ground, or that I didn't need an extra sweater, or that I actually didn't feel like dancing in front of 200 people staring at me as if I were from outer space, or that I'd rather eat together with the other villagers instead of being refined with Mr Black Cat to a "dining parlour", desperately trying to think of a way to get rid of the whiskey that he insisted that I drink. I still don't know if he ever realised that the chutney suddenly changed consistency during the brief seconds he stepped outside to take a phone call.


Brina had told me that I needed to wear a sari for the wedding, she couldn't have known that the women of Himachal Pradesh actually don't wear saris, instead preferring the much warmer salwar kameez, also called the punjabi dress. So there I was, insisting on wearing my sari despite the villager's protests of me being cold: if I had dragged the darn thing across half of India I was gonna wear it!


Now posing in a sari is very different to actually wearing a sari. Since it had been raining on and off through the day, I couldn't just walk with the normal poise of an Indian woman. I had to hike my skirt up over my ankles, and then carefully step through the muddy fields in my Chinese flip-flops. And within a minute of eating dinner with my bare hands, sitting crosslegged on the ground, I managed to drop greasy dal all over the skirt, to the muffled laughter of the boys in front of me. And later that very night, whilst trekking through a pitch black field still slick from the previous rain, I saw the world pause in slow motion as I suddenly lost control of my footing, waving my arms helplessly like a helicopter, and landing on my arse with a heavy thud, once more underlining the fact that I am as elegant as a beached whale. And don't even start me on the subject of how to pee on an Indian squat toilet whilst dressed in a sari, I think you can imagine the disaster.