The Kind of Girl
on travel, sweat, and the questions we ask women
tw: sexual assault
I'm in Ongole India, sweating outside a church waiting for the four hour service to end. Women with skin of mineral dust grab me firmly by the arm and point to their prayer request—a blind eye, a bad leg, an empty mouth—and I say, No, not pastor, teacher, pointing to the school perpendicular to the church. They wobble their head side to side to say okay and I nod up and down to say okay. Flesh ripples around their caldera eyes, pupils smoldering like obsidian.
Here, the sunlight is not lace; it doesn’t fall like that. It’s heavy, fan-beaten, coiled. It’s the conception of mirages, those dishonest daughters of light and static space. It slides a finger down the length of your spine making you wet where you ought not to be wet. It doesn’t beckon, it insists. Sometimes the sun is a boiled egg yolk. Sometimes the air is so dense and the sun so ardently orange that you can look right at it and ask questions.
It lingers, reeks, smarts, soils. My neck and thighs and the crooks of my elbows are temples of dampness built for the banished offspring of raging water gods. My pores pray psalms of salt.
The children don’t notice the heat. I wave my hand to my face like a fan and say hot and they laugh and say winter. They speak Telugu in wide vowels I cannot imitate. I learn to say how are you, where are you going, when will you be back, have you finished your food, my food is finished.
Stay separate. My host is clear about that. No looking, no touching, no talking. This is India, he says. No sleeveless shirts, no ankles, no stolen glances, and be careful where you put that smile. Don’t let them get the wrong idea.
Not too far from the school and never too late at night, I sometimes walk to the shop. I pretend to be shy, distracted, as I step over crusted cow pies and broken glass. I reserve my smile for street merchants once they’ve given me my proper change.
What kind of girl are you? The principal of the school who is also the pastor is sitting in a plastic chair and I am opposite him cross-legged on the granite porch. He asks me this as flies buzz. They rub their front legs together when they land on my arms. I touch a palm to the granite and think of my female students who sleep on it and that when I asked one of them if it hurt she said, No, it’s smooth and cool. They spend all their time here on the smooth and cool granite porch. They aren’t allowed to wander. The principal tells me what kind of girl I need to be while the flies adore the dry mud on the floor. I wobble my head side to side to say okay.
*
Malaria pills bring strange dreams. I dream murder one night and an orgy the next. A hotel of ice. A yellow seesaw. When I wake up, there’s been an untangling. I float. I feel the sun hit me.
*
It’s a hundred and humid and I'm wearing leggings under a purple Punjabi dress tailored so tight that my chest is pressed down and my biceps are bulging; my collar bone hidden by a pink silk scarf. Two other teachers and I go to the central market. Crossing the street is a choreographed death wish and the three of us dance from mangos to bangles to coconut stands. I eat pani puri and watermelon, sweet and spicy liquid dripping off my chin.
On the way back to the hostel the rickshaw stops to pick up two men, strangers headed in the same direction. One looks right at me but I don’t look back. He rubs my arm, reaches out his fingers for my breast. I shift and look away. He swerves with the rickshaw and presses into me as if his clawing is an inevitable result of a rough road. I push his hand away but it comes back and I look down at the dirt under the wheels. I think that this is not the first time and it won’t be the last and what is wrong with me. I think what it means to get handled and how can a touch steal something sacred, something unnamed in me. The wheels turn up dust. I tell myself that it’s not my fault and that he can’t hurt me but that doesn’t make it stop.
*
In January the air is thick with smoke and there are shadows in the broad strokes of sunlight. I learn that this hazy paradox of light and non-light is due to Bhogi, the first day of the Pongal harvest festival, when people burn old household items in the streets. Women burn old clothes then take oil baths. They are making room for spring. They are honoring the God of clouds and rain.
What kind of girl are you
I'm a mosquito feast. I'm a spoon. My wrists sing when I walk. I taste the world on my tongue and it’s spilling from my skin.
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So evocative. All the sights and smells and sounds. I’m sorry this happened to you. When I was in Morocco two young men approached a friend and I and grabbed my breast as they ran past, laughing. How easy it was for them, how little respect they thought I deserved.
This writing is so beautiful and lyrical.