It is never intentional. I hold fast to principle and never realize that I am making a scene until it is too late.
As I waited for the 9 p.m. bus from Bangalore to Hampi, I realized that I was in for a 12-hour bus ride on an empty stomach, and headed across the street to a restaurant. It was packed with men, and the waiter who stood at the door immediately directed me downstairs to what he called the “family section”. Stepping out of the evening’s stifling heat, I wasn’t going to be easily convinced to step into an equally sweaty, dark, basement.
“Why can’t I just sit up here?”
“Downstairs, ma’am. Women sit downstairs.”
This wasn’t my first such encounter. When I was in Calcutta, I accidentally took a bar for a restaurant and was immediately shown the door.
This time, I stubbornly walked out of the restaurant and into the next one. Same thing.
“Why can’t I just sit right here?”
Although a part of me wants to raise my voice and demand equality, I wonder if it’s a Western inclination and a Western understanding of equality. Having grown up in the West but in an Eastern family, I sometimes feel split between the two sentiments. I think it’s the same inclination to yell in frustration that also introduces a tendency to oversimplify.
I know that I feel wronged when I am treated differently for being a woman, but at the same time I don’t know what to think when I remember that so much of my family lives in lands where it is inappropriate for a woman to walk out of doors unaccompanied by a man. And while I don’t believe such treatment of woman is right, it all too easily becomes a conversation of “we are right and they are wrong because they are different”.
I began to hesitate on insisting on sitting in a section of the restaurant that was so clearly allocated for men. Ultimately, it felt like wandering into a foreign space and assuming that I understood why things were done the way they were. There are thousands of years of culture and religion that have come to shape modern India, and to think it is possible to grasp that entirely in a mere six months is not just overly ambitious, but simply ignorant.
Before I could retract my objections the waiter was sitting me down and trying to take my order.
“Menu?” I asked.
He paused and gestured to the man, ostensibly the manager, who was waving me over. Silently, he looked at me for a couple moments:
“English or Arabic?”
“English.”
“English or Arabic?”
“English.”
“English or Arabic?”
I don’t know how he picked out my Arab roots from a face, that mostly shows my mother’s Eritrean heritage. Perhaps he repeated himself because my voice was being stolen away by the wind from the nearby window that was carrying car horns and the Bollywood music of car speakers that were flying by, or maybe he was just looking for the answer he wanted.
“Arabic,” I said reluctantly.
Unfortunately, he didn’t see my reluctancy as a hint to how rusty my Arabic is. After 6 months in India, I know the meanings of all the typical Indian dishes, but to now have them riddled off in a sort of part Hindi and part Arabic--in a dialect inevitably different than mine—was verging on incomprehensible.
But at the end of nearly every dish, I heard the Arabic word for chicken and beef. Apparently I had to make a point of holding my ground in what seemed like the only non-vegetarian friendly restaurant in India.
“Aloo gobhi (Potato Cauliflower),” he said quickly, and I nodded.
They immediately brought over my food but without any cutlery, which I didn’t mind. I’ve come to think food tastes better off my hands, but maybe it’s the taste of nostalgia because I watched my mother eat off of her hands all throughout my childhood, and it seemed much more graceful than the way that most people ate with cutlery. Next to my mother sat my sister and the juxtaposition they held was bizarre. Her cutlery was still guided by the English boarding schools she attended as a child. I would sit across from my mother, clumsily imitating her while teasing my sister’s propriety.
So eating with my hands will always remind me of my childhood, but perhaps it looked unnatural after so many years because the waiter dropped a spoon on my table moments later. And when I looked up, I could feel the stares of men who entered the restaurants, whose gestures and conversation told me that they were regulars, and I was out of place.
I responded as I always do to such looks: awkward smiles all around.
As I waited for the 9 p.m. bus from Bangalore to Hampi, I realized that I was in for a 12-hour bus ride on an empty stomach, and headed across the street to a restaurant. It was packed with men, and the waiter who stood at the door immediately directed me downstairs to what he called the “family section”. Stepping out of the evening’s stifling heat, I wasn’t going to be easily convinced to step into an equally sweaty, dark, basement.
“Why can’t I just sit up here?”
“Downstairs, ma’am. Women sit downstairs.”
This wasn’t my first such encounter. When I was in Calcutta, I accidentally took a bar for a restaurant and was immediately shown the door.
This time, I stubbornly walked out of the restaurant and into the next one. Same thing.
“Why can’t I just sit right here?”
Although a part of me wants to raise my voice and demand equality, I wonder if it’s a Western inclination and a Western understanding of equality. Having grown up in the West but in an Eastern family, I sometimes feel split between the two sentiments. I think it’s the same inclination to yell in frustration that also introduces a tendency to oversimplify.
I know that I feel wronged when I am treated differently for being a woman, but at the same time I don’t know what to think when I remember that so much of my family lives in lands where it is inappropriate for a woman to walk out of doors unaccompanied by a man. And while I don’t believe such treatment of woman is right, it all too easily becomes a conversation of “we are right and they are wrong because they are different”.
I began to hesitate on insisting on sitting in a section of the restaurant that was so clearly allocated for men. Ultimately, it felt like wandering into a foreign space and assuming that I understood why things were done the way they were. There are thousands of years of culture and religion that have come to shape modern India, and to think it is possible to grasp that entirely in a mere six months is not just overly ambitious, but simply ignorant.
Before I could retract my objections the waiter was sitting me down and trying to take my order.
“Menu?” I asked.
He paused and gestured to the man, ostensibly the manager, who was waving me over. Silently, he looked at me for a couple moments:
“English or Arabic?”
“English.”
“English or Arabic?”
“English.”
“English or Arabic?”
I don’t know how he picked out my Arab roots from a face, that mostly shows my mother’s Eritrean heritage. Perhaps he repeated himself because my voice was being stolen away by the wind from the nearby window that was carrying car horns and the Bollywood music of car speakers that were flying by, or maybe he was just looking for the answer he wanted.
“Arabic,” I said reluctantly.
Unfortunately, he didn’t see my reluctancy as a hint to how rusty my Arabic is. After 6 months in India, I know the meanings of all the typical Indian dishes, but to now have them riddled off in a sort of part Hindi and part Arabic--in a dialect inevitably different than mine—was verging on incomprehensible.
But at the end of nearly every dish, I heard the Arabic word for chicken and beef. Apparently I had to make a point of holding my ground in what seemed like the only non-vegetarian friendly restaurant in India.
“Aloo gobhi (Potato Cauliflower),” he said quickly, and I nodded.
They immediately brought over my food but without any cutlery, which I didn’t mind. I’ve come to think food tastes better off my hands, but maybe it’s the taste of nostalgia because I watched my mother eat off of her hands all throughout my childhood, and it seemed much more graceful than the way that most people ate with cutlery. Next to my mother sat my sister and the juxtaposition they held was bizarre. Her cutlery was still guided by the English boarding schools she attended as a child. I would sit across from my mother, clumsily imitating her while teasing my sister’s propriety.
So eating with my hands will always remind me of my childhood, but perhaps it looked unnatural after so many years because the waiter dropped a spoon on my table moments later. And when I looked up, I could feel the stares of men who entered the restaurants, whose gestures and conversation told me that they were regulars, and I was out of place.
I responded as I always do to such looks: awkward smiles all around.
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