Raising Eyebrows

For more than a year now, we have been living close to our farmland, near the small rural town of Athimanjeri. Like in all small places, here everyone knows everyone else. Through close marriages, most people are either related or their families have known each other’s for decades. Caste boundaries in marriages are strictly observed. People know and remember great details about their fellow villagers’ lives.

We are told that typically people don’t move into any village, but people do constantly move out looking for jobs in nearby cities. Thus when we came to live here, there was a lot of curiosity among the local people to know about us. There were questions from all kinds of people, and even after more than year of being here we still get tons of them.Here are some questions and conversations that ensued from them.

***

Before we bought our land, I went into a nearby household hoping to find out something about the land’s history. I was invited inside by an old couple and their daughter-in-law. Before I could begin, the lady of the house gestured to her daughter-in-law something to the effect that I had to be questioned first. And so I was:

“Are you married?”                                                                                   

I nodded.

“Are you bai?”

Wthout knowing what exactly “bai” meant, I said no because I thought I was not “bai”, whatever that was. Only later did I come to know that she actually had meant to ask “are you Muslim?”

“Are you Jesus?”                               

(Who, me? Of course not!  Can’t you see?)

I was struggling hard to not laugh out loud and to understand what she wanted to ask. I quickly realized that she must have wanted to know if I was Christian and said that I was not.  

“Are you Australia?”

(Identity Crisis! What am I? Who am I?)

My answer was no.

She then asked me why I didn’t wear the accessories that married women typically do. I didn’t feel like talking to her in detail about my thoughts on such matters at our very first meeting. So I ended up saying that I don’t like wearing such accessories. She simply gazed at me.

***

A curious tenth-grade girl approached me shyly when we went to meet her father who was a construction worker. She asked me if I was a foreigner. I said, “I am not!”, and just to drive home the point desperately, “I speak Tamil, just like you do.” She refused to agree with me. She said that I looked different from the local people and that I was white skinned. I went close to her, put my arm next to hers and asked her to compare our skin colours. Mine was only a shade lighter than hers. She was not convinced. She raked her brain for the next few moments and announced happily, “But you can speak in English! So you must be a foreigner”.

***

Dev and I were riding to the town on our bicycles. We were wearing wide-brimmed hats for protection against the strong sun and must have presented a strange sight. On the way, we got stopped by two motor bikers.

They: “Where are you going?”

Me: “To the town”

They: “Our local police department wanted to know what you do here”

Me: “We have a piece of land and we are trying to farm it”

They: “But then why do you ride bicycles?”

Me:  “Why not? And why do you ride motor bikes?”

They: “Oh! We are going to the town. We have got some work there”

Me: “Same story here.  You are on your motor bikes and we on our bicycles”

They: “We thought that you travel around the nation preaching”

Me: “No! We don’t have the time for that. We have a family to take care of”

They: “Sorry Madam! It is your attire, your hat and bicycle that got us suspicious”

***

For certain groceries we end up going to the larger town of Sholinghur. The town has a lot of narrow, old-world bazaar streets, brimming with people and temples. Despite the crowds, it is still not unpleasant to get around on foot, not in small measure due to the fact that there are still few cars here. In a narrow by-lane we like to stop at a small coffee kadai with a split personality. The back and side walls of the shop have on display rows of slippers and shoes, and then just to complete your sense of incongruity, there sits a sewing machine in a corner for small tailoring jobs. So while you are sipping on your hot coffee or tea, another customer would be trying on the latest polyurethane VKC-brand sandals.

One afternoon when we were there, we found the small space filled with the owner’s three kids doing their homework, while waiting for their father to fix them cups of hot milk or tea. We got our drinks, and when his kids had walked out, the owner turned to me to ask what my relationship to Dev was, gesturing at Dev as if he was a piece of luggage (Dev’s broken Tamil often makes him invisible). Once he understood that we were married the next question was obvious: “But then why don’t you wear the accessories?” I said that we didn’t believe in that and also that we didn’t want to buy gold.  He must have felt sorry for me because his reply was, “Well, although you are poor at least you both are fair-skinned, so you look rich.” And then he gave us a two rupee discount on the coffees.

***

A land related issue recently took me to a Government Office in the bordering Andhra Pradesh. All the signs here were in Telugu. Not knowing Telugu made me understand how intimidating it would for an illiterate person to enter such premises. I was sent back and forth from one office to another when I asked for some publicly available documents.

As I was walking down a corridor, a man in his fifties asked me where I was from, followed by the usual set of questions. Once he figured out that I was married, he scanned me for the forehead mark and other accessories. Since nothing matched his expectations he got a little wary. He paused, made sure that there was no one in the earshot, and then lowering his voice conspiratorially, finally asked in English, “Love marriage?”

I didn’t have the heart to disturb him any further, so I lied, “No. It was an arranged marriage. Parents were involved in the process.” He left the place with a sigh of relief. 

- Hema