Between West and East
on REM Zoe Lara (in India) (India), 03/Jun/2011 08:23, 34 days ago
I’ve just returned to Delhi after two weeks away running around Turkey with my friends, and playing at lots of sports with my parents in a mountainous coast not far from Antalya. Having dipped into Europe after ten months away from home, I have been forced rather involuntarily to confront the evolution of my identity while away.I am used to being gawped at in Delhi. Just before I left, I was wondering back from work through a brightly painted semi-slum area in Govind Puri when a baby– not much more than ten months – caught sight of me. He was so shocked at my whiteness that his little mouth dropped open, his dummy popped out and his finger shot straight in my direction in awhoah mummysort of gesture. Any passers by-that caught the exchange burst into smiles and his mum giggled so hard that she nearly dropped him into the folds of her soft orange sari.Since I got back from lots of days of sunshine, moreover, my freckles have been of huge interest. Once the whitest and therefore the top of the foreigner caste tree, there is now suspicion in some quarters that I have picked up some sort of terminal skin disease when in Turkey. A recent conversation with Anil, the smiley man who owns the local store near to where I live with Katie, suffices to illustrate–“What are these?” Anil points to the dots on my face with alarm.“These are freckles”“No. Spots. You have spots”“No, no. They are freckles. This is what my skin does in the sun. See, they are flat”.I point to my arm to show Anil that it isn’t a face-rash. Anil shakes his head and - managing to find a stray pimple on my face - presses it with his finger as proof that I’m misguided about the rest of my dots as well.“Zoe, you have got rash from too much sweating. See, I have too”.Anil lifts up his arm to show me his own sunsweat pimples.I pay for my bread and back off slowly, pretending to ignore the crowd of Anil’s customers that gathered with enthusiasm to watch our exchange. As I leave, his wife offers to sell me some face lightening cream.Expats in other places have reported similar experiences, with one volunteer teacher in my beloved Vanuatu, Magali, being questioned by her students about whether she could wipe off her face dots. When I taught there, one of my own students once knocked on our door and asked my housemate– since white people are very rich and Miss Zoe is REALLY white – whether Miss Zoe is from a REALLY rich family.Though I’m used to being an oddity overseas, however, I thought I’d blend in a bit better when I was back in Europe. Not so. It turns out that I’ve internalised some Indian traffic-related habits in ten months here, including scoffing at ‘don’t walk signs’ and leaping fences to get to where I want to be. During a lost moment in Istanbul, my friends had to pull me back from scaling a fence near to a major road. It was a bizarre reality check to register the shock in their faces and remember that sort of thing isn’t done in the orderly West.It also turns out that it is difficult to fit into Club Med as a development worker. On saying a tearful goodbye to my friends in Antalya and arriving at the sports resort my family had booked into, my parents took one look at my tatty shoes and virtually frog-marched me to the Club Med shop to buy more respectable clothes. I couldn’t find any, so my mum went into town and came back with a pair of white sparkly flip flips. I contemplated them for a day before she pinched them back because her own new shoes had given her blisters.The strangers that I met in Club Med asked me what I did and often followed up by saying,You’re a very good person, as though doing advocacy in Delhi gives me some sort of qualification for non-corporate Saint of the Year. A British lady from the Northeast that we met on a boat in Fetthiye was far less circumspect–“India! What the bloody hell are you doing there?”She adjusted the folds of her bikini and pushed back her brass-blonde hair in a gesture of surprise.“I could understand if you wanted to go to Vegas or somewhere for a year, but India?”-----I miss many elements of the UK - but there’s also a strange comfort to being back in Delhi. As soon as I boarded the flight back, I heard the loudness and saw the colours and smelt the smells of India. A man yelled unabashedly across to his wife, three families ahead of him in the queue. Another man started choosing a new mobile phone ringtone at top volume, giggling and repeating his favourite bollywood tunes over and over without anyone lifting so much as an eyebrow. While trying to get to my seat, I was nearly flattened by an old lady in a sari with sharp elbows, who was apparently racing me to hers. When she tried to overtake mein the aisle, I gritted my teeth and told her “ek minute” in a very European reference to queueing; she took no notice and shoved me repeatedly until she had passed. A nice couple behind burst into smiles and asked where I had learned Hindi.I settled down and– after changing seats because the man I was sitting next to kept trying to take sly pictures of me on his mobile phone without me noticing – I sat back and listened involuntarily to the noises of nearby male passengers. Unlike us bloated Europeans who are afraid of the trumping sounds of our own bodies, these men farted and snorted and burped their way through the flight with reckless abandon. We were away from the authoritarian social order of Europe and back into the honest bustle that I have come to know. I woke up once somewhere over the Middle East, swapped into mysalwar kameezand settled back in my seat.----I really loved Turkey and it was a very happy mix between West and East. In coach service station toilets, we were given the choice of alternatives between the European sit and the Indian squat. As in Delhi, Western and Eastern clothes mingled together quite comfortably; and in Antalya, I saw quaint eastern lanterns shops selling their products next to stores of bras and bikinis. The parts of the country that we visited were beautiful and atmospheric– the bluegreens of the Southern coast, framed by mountains; the bustle and colour of Istanbul set to beautiful mosque spires and the haunting call to prayer; super-sweet Turkish delight in thronging spice markets full of dried apple tea and spicy chai; and two blissful afternoons spent chasing rainbows on horseback through a volcano-spattered rocky rural area. Lauren woke me up at 6am to stand on a roof to witness a still storm of hot air ballons floating into the morning sunrise.What I loved most, though (apart from seeing family and friends again!), was the warmth of almost every Turkish person I chatted to. Even in the touristy town of Goreme, where locals were used to the influx and outpour of visitors year in, year-out, residents wore their hearts on their sleeves and offered us some of the warmest hospitality I’ve had since coming back from Vanuatu in 2004. We made one friend, Ekrem, who spends his life with a fleet of wild horses that he captured in the mountains there; and lives part of the year in a cave built into the rock. He invited us for dinner in the cave and took us riding through the mountains for free; and while he loaded us up with a CD of photos ahead of a rushed goodbye, I was overcome with a sudden will to stay and make a nest there. I’ll be finishing my contract in India on the 14th July and I haven’t yet worked out what I’ll be doing between then and starting again in London in September – but after the sights and sounds and sheer exhaustion of the population density of Delhi, a month in Cappodocian countryside is a very happy thought. Home via a halfway house, and I can't wait to see my friends and family again soon.