A New Roommate

A new roommate can be a harrowing thing, especially when you live in a cloistered, concrete box such as our apartment in Tirur. ATI has assigned another American to teach at another school in Tirur and she has taken up residence in the bedroom beside ours. Her name is Jaime, and luckily she is a down-to-earth, personable woman.

She was born in New Jersey and went to Ithaca College in upstate New York. But she has lived the last few years in Los Angeles working various jobs, most recently for a non-profit that delivers food to AIDS and cancer patients. She arrived in Tirur Sunday morning (while Jenna and I were away in Calicut) after spending a month in Kochi training, as we did three months ago in Kolkata.

On Sunday night, after she had spent all day cleaning her room and catching her breath, Jenna and I offered to take her to dinner at one of the local places we frequent every week. Jaime—looking for some company and conversation—agreed right away.

If one white person walking around Tirur garners some quizzical stares, two white people (together with a darker-skinned Indian woman) must be the equivalent of the Pope visiting. As we made our way to the rickshaw stand, people on the street stopped what they were doing and looked up at the three of us as we walked by. Stopped dumb in their tracks, as if they had been told some amazing piece of news.

“Do you get used to this?” Jaime asked, as we passed a group of older men who twittered and giggled as we walked by.

“No. Not really,” Jenna replied simply. “It still bothers me. And I think it will always bother me.”

It was the same story at the restaurant, families gawking and stopping their meals to turn noticeably in their seats to get a better view of us sitting in the corner. “Oh wait, honey, let me just move my chair a bit so I can see. Yeah, that’s great. Can you see over my head? Perfect! Pass the popcorn while you’re at it.”

The analogy to a caged animal sometimes fits, like on Saturday in Calicut when Summer, Colleen, Jenna and I had gone to the beach and a crowd of teenagers and young mothers literally gathered around us and started taking pictures with their cameras.

But at the restaurant Sunday night with Jaime, we felt more like reluctant rock stars being tentatively stalked by a nervous group of our followers. Small children and grown men alike hovered nervously a few feet from us, staring intently as we put food to our mouths. “They eat the same things we do! Amazing!” Yet, none had the conviction to come up and introduce themselves or smile and wave or simply just turn their eyes back to their own business.

I would be lying if this Indian habit did not bother me sometimes. Though it depends on my particular mood in the moment that I am being studied. (For, after all, sometimes you just do not feel like being stared at.) Our ATI trainers in Kolkata warned us about this phenomenon and gave us the somewhat lame-sounding excuse that, “Indians are just curious people.” Their subtle hint was: embrace the staring. Yet, curiosity blends easily into what Americans perceive as rudeness. And getting slack-jawed stares while you try to shovel rice and curry into your mouth falls into the ‘rude’ category with most Westerners.

There is a flip side, though. The same ‘curious’ spirit that drives many people to simply stare at us from afar, drives others to strike up friendly banter and greet us as if we were old friends.

“Hello, sir! Your native place?” is a question I have gotten dozens of times while in India. Indeed, some Indians exhibit an openness and casual hospitality sorely lacking in the US. I have already predicted that that is one thing I will miss the most once we leave India: the sense of kinship and warmth you feel from some people here, even if you do not know them that well or cannot speak more than 10 words to each other.

The attendant at the grocery store, my barber, the manager at our Internet café, the hundreds of students who barely know me: all these people would invite me to dinner and give me a spare bed if I needed it.

So would, I suspect, Muhammed Hafiz, one of the waiters at the restaurant Jaime, Jenna and I ate at Sunday. As we left, he cornered us and extended his hand: “Good to see you again. How are you? Good, good. Please come again. Please, come again. I want to see you again!”

Being a Westerner in Tirur goes both ways, sometimes.