Let the cultural mishaps commence

I think I was as ready as anyone can be under the circumstances for the necessities of living and studying in another culture. It probably would have been different if I'd really been abroad before; maybe that would have prepared me for the changes I'm going through now, but probably not. Certainly wouldn't have prepared me for the mistakes I'd have made in that hypothetical situation, though. Getting to know a culture through vaguely guided trial and error is frustrating, confusing, and exhausting beyond words, but it's apparently the only way to do it. Kind of sucks that I have to do it alone, though.

Well, that's not entirely true. The people in the program are incredibly supportive, and there's another classmate of mine, a gentleman, who is currently going through the same culture shock as I am, even though he's been abroad before. India is just different from any place we've been before, and it's going to take some getting used to. And in the meantime, while we're adjusting, we're going to make all sorts of little mistakes like the following.

For me, there are two mistakes that stick out in my mind, one of them potentially damaging, one of them confusing. The first of the two was when I first moved into my current residence, and enjoying the freedoms that... *ahem*... being sans pants and in a tank top have to offer. For some reason, probably because I'd just moved in and wasn't quite used to the room yet, I hadn't locked the door. While I was working in Excel on my computer, trying to figure out how to get the particular sum I wanted out of a formula I was tampering with, there was a knock at the door. Not thinking, I responded "Just a minute"... in English. Our equivalent of a housekeeper, having heard a response, enters just as I'm getting up, so he gets a view of me standing in my room in my tank top and underwear. To be fair, the latter are more like shorts, but it's still sort of embarrassing when I'm "not supposed to" wear anything remotely revealing under threat of being harassed. I'm pretty sure I yelled or said something or he just knew to get out so I could put on some pants to follow him to check-in. While nothing's really come of it, I'm sort of worried about what could happen if he's gotten the wrong idea. I mean, I live here, and I like it. I don't want to have to move because I didn't think to lock my door.

My gentleman friend's incident is one I know about mostly because I sort of helped make it happen. He went with two other students to get chai at an open-to-the-street vendor nearby, and after bringing me some back, I decided it was the most delicious chai I've had yet. I'd thought about going with them, but one of the other gentlemen was kind of hesitant, saying that he's never seen a woman at that particular stall. The gentleman friend in question thought that as long as I had a chaperone (i.e. him), it wouldn't be a big deal. The next night, the two of us went together to have some chai at this particular establishment, though we stood on the street instead of going in. My presence was drawing stares from the three men patronizing the inside of the establishment, but being a woman getting stared at is normal, and nothing really came of it. We had our chai, we chatted for a few minutes, we left.

The next day, we told one of our female student friends about this chai place and she was interested in going. Said gentleman friend asked me if I wanted to come with them that afternoon, but I declined as I had already made other plans. The next morning, my gentleman friend told me that going had been a horrible idea, or at least going the next day had. Apparently four stores' worth of people emptied out of their shops to watch the two of them drink chai. Said gentleman friend suggested that it was because they had seen him alone with me at night the evening before, and then seen him alone with a different woman during the day. Part of me wonders whether the fact that I look vaguely Indian during the day and perhaps moreso at night made his "transgression" a bit more severe. Menfolk tend to be protective of their womenfolk to strangers in any country.

The last one is the most confusing, mostly because I'm not actually sure I did anything wrong. I walked around the corner to pull out some startup cash from the nearby bank today. I pulled out 7,ooo rps (~$140) to buy lunch for the semester, a bike so I wouldn't have to rely on rickshaws, and an Indian cell phone that actually works with my Indian sim card. And with the change, I figured it's nice to have a little emergency stash of cash in case you need it. On the way home, I realized I needed change for the autorickshaw tomorrow, so that I wouldn't be the one without change again. Apparently it's really hard to come by, or at least it seems that way. Anyway, I stopped by a store selling water on the way home, got my change from a 100, and opened the water in my hand on my not-even two block walk the rest of the way home when I passed some women. I make it a habit to smile at least a little at women, because it's really hard to meet women in India, and it's really much easier for a woman to interact with Indian women rather than Indian men because Indian women's expectations are presumably different for such a friendly relationship. Well, the first woman I sent a small smile to was clearly headed home, and she sent me a small smile back. The second woman, however, clearly poorer, was walking holding a baby. She looked at me, she looked at the water bottle in my hand, made an indiscernible face and shook her head at me.

Well, if I could have just read her face, maybe it would have been easier, but shaking one's head doesn't necessarily indicate disapproval; it can also indicate enjoyment. I also think that had she been amused by/happy with me I would have been able to read her face. So am I not supposed to drink my bottle of water on the street? Am I supposed to just wait until I get back to my room? And then, of course, I had just handed the shopkeeper 100 rps. That woman may or may not see that sum (~$2) in a month, let alone the amount I had bouncing in my purse against my hip. Was she disapproving of my actions, or was she disapproving of me? I mean, I feel obligated to help, but I don't know how best to help, and I'm certainly not going to get ripped off by paying 50 rps for a box of tissues thrust at me while I'm riding in a rickshaw - I'm not completely ignorant. But it's kind of a touchy situation, because I don't want to be the stone-like, unfeeling tourist either, who gets an amount every month that's more than some people get in a year but refuses to spread the love. How can I not be "that guy"? Is there a way to not be "that guy" when you're in my position?

For a hot minute, I tried to reassure myself that bouts of confusion and mistakes like these were something fleeting, tried to put things in perspective, say that, as a videshi, as a foreigner, I'm going to make mistakes, everyone's going to have a good laugh and get over it, and no one's going to remember it, and I'm going to be gone in May anyway, so why worry about it, but it felt wrong. As a student, there's a certain amount of transience to life that's cyclical; sure, I'm here right now, but this is not my life, nor is it necessarily the way I want to live my life, and this, too, will change. This is my life though, or at least it's going to be until I leave the country, which is still a long ways off. That means that for another 226 days, I have to deal with the consequences of my actions. And only having been here for a week, and having no idea what those consequences might be, that prospect is terrifying.

But after those 226 days... then what?

Today I talked to a classmate for a bit about what we're going to do after the program, which is vaguely like talking about what you want to do after finishing undergrad, but it struck me as an odd conversation. Neither of our talks included India, at least not for a bit, though mine at least included Hindi. But here I am in India, and I'm supposed to be living in the moment, not fantasizing about diving back into my (US) comfort zone and wrapping myself in it like a blanket. I mean, for the most part, I am living in the moment - in fact, there's hardly been any downtime for me to think of home. But I guess what's most interesting to me at this point is that as much as I'm misstepping here, it's going to be even stranger to go back to the States and have the blanket I thought was my comfort zone wrap surreptitiously around my ankles and wait for me to take my first tentative step.