Traveling With a Woman
Whenever I come to a seaside town, I find it hard to believe that people really live here. They seem happy, or rather they seem to be good where they are — in a this-is-all-I-could-want sort of straightness of face. And they seem like they want to talk. In Sri Lanka, they’ll say “You’re Indian?” before asking me if I’m from Chennai and then being disappointed with my admission of “Delhi, Delhi.” I wish then I could speak a bit of Tamil, or understand a word or two. Discounts could be aplenty if I could. But they’ll talk, not really about Colombo or Galle or Tangalle, not even about the cobbled Dutchness of their towns. They’ll say that they make cards and stand here everyday and sell them — a woman whose 1000 rupee card I could not afford because cigarettes are expensive in Sri Lanka spent some time telling me that her daughter makes the flowery little things she is selling, and that she always tries to find a spot next to a scooter to stand so that she can sit on account of her bad feet. This was after I had said no and she had put her wares back inside. Or they’ll talk about their sculpting. I find it hard to believe that people really live here like this every day, smiling at everyone they see or else sitting on one wicker chair near their shops all day through the breeze and the sun. I find it hard to believe partly because they have their backs to the ocean, and are not ogling like me. I cannot imagine not locking eyes with the ocean every time I can.
This is how I like writing about travel. Whenever I do travel, it is with a male friend who is a documentary film-maker. We have been to places we consider weird (I’m sure they’re not) and have had experiences we consider unique and thrilling (as one does). I remember a 40-hour bus journey, for 8 hours of which it was raining outside and the roof of the bus was leaking so it was raining inside too. We sat through dark and light with our ridiculous yellow and red hooded raincoats on, taking turns to sleep because a journey through the Uttar Pradesh heartland feels fairly dodgy at the best of times. It is one of the thrilling stories I like sharing at parties.
This changed recently, in Sri Lanka in fact. A female friend of mine decided to join us for part of our planned 15-day journey around South East Sri Lanka. And so I won’t write about travel the way I like writing about travel. Because now I know how everything unsafe is thrilling until you’re travelling with a woman.
Travelling with a woman changes how you look at places. What was not eerie earlier is eerie now. This happened in Galle, a charming little Dutch toytown at the South East tip of Sri Lanka. The place had seemed as safe as any till then, though my friend was worried about the general darkness of the poorly lit streets. I shushed her fears away, and so we walked around the place somewhere around 10 PM. It was not entirely deserted but as sparsely populated towns tend to be, you would spot a person or two, a shop owner or a tourist, once every hundred steps or so. And then:
When someone yells out of a slowly passing imported car in the most beautiful of Galle’s many cobbled Dutch streets, “O baby fuck me,” the Dutch architecture suddenly collapses and all you are left with is darkness, rushing into you as you are rushing through the night with no cognizance of buildings anymore. You are only hurrying towards the nearest light, or the nearest sign of another voice which is not saying what you had heard. You can’t talk either — you both know what to do. And when you feel that you are safe, you still don’t talk because there is nothing to say — so there comes a gap. That is the big gap, the break, which makes the place.
I enjoyed myself in Sri Lanka, but I’ll hesitate to say that it was the most wonderful I’ve ever felt. My friend liked it too. Though there were some two or three more incidents of eve teasing of varying seriousness. This sounds naïve, but I had perhaps willfully remained oblivious to the fact that while I read up on things to do, my friend reads up on “Travel Advice for Women” about the same place.
Somehow, I want to remember again Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, all places which I have loved so dearly, and see whether those experiences deserve to be measured by their value in thrill after all.
