Holy Cow

I just finished reading Holy Cow, An Indian Adventure by Sarah MacDonald.  Sarah is a bit more loose with her vocabulary than I typically like in a book (or in general conversation), but she creates an incredibly humorous and accurate portrayal of the troublesome life of a white woman in this country. 

I am certainly a much watered-down, boring version of her.  My husband isn’t risking his life in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the war on terror- he is just risking his heart from a lack of exercise with his sixteen-hour workdays.   But we are still separated for days on end.  Sarah tries everything India has to offer, including drugs, which are certainly not on my menu.  I’ve branched out only as far as trying a few Indian sweets.  She, rather than sitting at home grouchy (like myself), decides to go and find herself- she travels and explores the major and minor religious centers of India.  I am channeling my anger at the gym and by doing my very best (so far futile) attempts to quit my teaching job. 

The book evolves along, starting with her hatred of the country and its daily frustrations.  But then she begins to make friends and travel.  Her travels focus on learning about the various religious experiences India has to offer.  I find the fact that so many people in the world worship so many varieties of gods in so many different ways fascinating, so I enjoyed that section of the book, though I know it would probably bore many people who are less interested in the multitude of world religions.  She meets incredibly famous gurus and hears the Dalai Lama speak.  Apparently a living female religious figure makes her breast grow until she takes off the ring representing that mother. Eventually she finds her peace in the overwhelming country, and of course, by the end of the book, she loves India and is tearful to leave.  

I’m at day 69 of my own trip to this sensory overload of a country.  My brain is still stuck in her first few chapters, focused on the frustrations and hating the country’s behavior towards women with a passion.  But who knows, maybe I’ll evolve like her and wind up crying like a baby when I leave.  I rather doubt I’ll leave with her sense of religious understanding, however.   She travels, everywhere, and mostly alone.  I am not exactly a fan of traveling, and in this increasingly smothering weather, I am prone to throwing up each time I step out of doors.  Trust me.  I got heat sickness on top of a glacier once.  For me, a good day is starting to become a day when I don’t have to go outside and interact with the general public or weather.   A complete 180 reversal from the old me, who considered a day wasted if I didn’t get to go outside for a walk and enjoy the crisp fresh air and weather, or chat with a new person on a bus.  Granted, my favorite season for breathing the fresh air was winter…  an air condition that is impossible to obtain here in Mumbai. 

Surprisingly, rather than making me feel better about common shared experiences, or happy that the future will be bright, the book just depressed me.   I spend so much of my life angry here, frustrated with the futile processes and hoops that we jump through (the most recent frustrations revolve around our car - we bought it nearly two months again and it STILL isn’t in our name, and now our car insurance is expired, and no one even wants our money to cover us), that it is just awful to hear even more troubles.  I’ve developed my own mantra, “It’s just India,” to explain away the frustrations, and repeat it frequently on a daily basis. It does help to calm me down….  but I have also started giving Americans a bad name by blatantly pushing people in airport lines (of course, only if they pushed me first!), and mouthing off to the women who dare to cut in front of me in the various lines in which I am standing (well, not the little old grannies, just the women who are obviously NOT grannies). 

But each time I have to interact with the public, I build more, not less, anger.  Individuals are different than the public, of course.  Once you know a person, they are nice, incredibly helpful, and friendly.  But the nameless, pushy, rude faces?  I feel the strong urge to just push them back before I’m swallowed up.   Unfortunately, in a city with 14 million odd people, there are a lot more nameless faces than familiar ones! 

Last night, I watched the movie My Name is Khan.  It was amazing; it managed to make you laugh, make you cry, feel anger and feel hope.  It is a fictional story about a Muslim named Rizwan Khan who is born with Asperger’s syndrome.  As an adult, he moves from Mumbai to San Francisco, has a wonderful life, and then 9/11 strikes and everything changes.  The story of his journey across America sort of reminds me of Forrest Gump.   In the movie, as a child, Rizwan’s mother taught him that there are two types of people in the world- good people and bad people.  You can’t determine whether someone is good or bad by religion, but by their actions. 

I think, since being in India, I have come up with my own division of how to tell good people from bad.  Everyone I have met, or had some form of relationship with, is lumped into ‘good’.  Everyone I interact with, outside of an introduction, is ‘bad’.   No matter where you go, be it the gym or the teaching center, if you have an ‘in’, people treat you wonderfully, politely, nicely, even if you don’t know each other by name.  Offer you food, look at their cell phone pictures, etc.  But once you are outside that circle, shopping, waiting in line for a bathroom, etc, people do their best to walk all over you.  It is so odd.  Clearly, I am being silly with this categorization, but it really does, at times, seem to be a clear-cut line.  Perfect sweetness and politeness if there is a chance we’ll see each other again vs. complete rudeness/pushiness if we are strangers.   

But back to the book.  In Holy Cow (this is a complete paraphrase off the top of my head), one person tells Sarah that Indians are happy because they look at someone ‘below’ them in life and say, “I have so much more than them, I am so much better then them, and thus I am happy.”  Whereas an American looks at someone with more and says, “I wish I had what they had.  I’d be happier then.”  

Two thoughts struck me immediately upon reading this comment.  My Indian driver’s reaction and my own.  A few days before I had read the book, my driver asked me to give him music from my computer.  I was happy to do this, but he has only 2 GB of memory, so I can’t give him the entire 12 GB library.  I’m not exactly the kind of person who enjoys sitting and listening to music, so I sat him down in front of my computer, taught him how to use the mouse pad, and made him click and listen to each song.  After twenty or so minutes, he just ecstatically bursts out, “Look at me!  All of the other drivers are sitting outside in the heat, but here I am, at a computer, listening to music!” Apparently it was his first time at the controls of a computer.  And he wasn’t rejoicing in it just to be happy to learn how to use one.  He was happy because, as he said, he was experiencing something that those now ‘below’ him did not get to experience.   It set him apart.  He was special.  

I believe my reaction is a bit different than what was said in the book about Americans.  I’ve always known what I want.   When I was a kid, reading Little Women, I was always a bit worried when it came to the chapter on building castles in the sky.  For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it is set in New England around the time of the Civil War.  In this chapter, they are describing their dream futures.  Sixteen year old Meg wants a handsome, incredibly rich husband and wonderful dream home, fifteen year old Jo dreams of being a world famous authoress, twelve year old Amy of being a world famous artist, and thirteen year old Beth?  Beth just wanted a happy, unchanging home close to her family.   I was like Beth. For heaven’s sake, I cried when my parents re-sided our home and got rid of the tarpaper brick exterior.  I am not good with change. I was a bit ashamed of coveting Beth’s castle.  Sure, I wanted to be a writer, like Jo.  But not at the expense of my family.  I think it has always been most important to be near and dear to a family.   Of course, which book character dies?  Beth, the one with no ambitions.    So I was secretly worried that I too would die if I didn’t find something to be passionate about, career-wise rather than baseball-wise.  

Well, fifteen to twenty or so years later, I haven’t changed.  I'm still stubborn and fearful of change. Yes, like the person in Holy Cow said, I’m an American looking for something I don’t have.  But the difference is that I had it. And we voluntarily left it behind, to seek my husband’s castle instead.  No wonder I’m grumpy here.   I don’t care to own designer purses and jeans.  I don’t need a designer job.  Yes, a job is a way of ensuring your family can happily exist, but I could never exist just for a job (that is the problem with grad school….) I just want a family that can be close, care, and joke together.  Being here in India just puts that further and further away each day.  Thank goodness for Skype, at least.  

I was reading reviews on Holy Cow, and some people (read that as Indians) really hate it.   But her personal experiences are all true.  Women lose their self-confidence here.  Men creep us out when they look at us.  Fortunately, I haven’t been groped, but you hear stories about it all the time.  Instead of complaining about her text, why don’t these people tell men to stop harassing white women?  I can be dressed from head-to-toe in Indian attire, and I still won’t feel completely at ease around the men here.  That isn’t to say I am not safe.  But feeling safe and comfortable are two completely different stories. But it is the freaks that creep her out.  It is just honestly. 

I’m sure, when people look at America through new eyes, they see many issues that we are blind to, having been indoctrinated in the culture since birth.  When you are used to a country, you don’t see the glaring faults.  Maybe I will spot many more faults when I return home to America.  But it is the reviewers who are blind, not Sarah.  Every country has faults.  It is better to admit it, fix them, and move on then to ignore them and try to deny them.  Her book expresses exactly how I feel in the country, so there must be some truth in it.