I was 22 when I first went to India. It was the late 90s, and the hippie highway from Agra to Jaipur to Rishikesh was still teeming with backpackers. Germans, Israelis, and Australians were travelling around India in elephant-print harem pants and prayer beads, feasting on banana pancake breakfasts and cannabis-infused bhangrashi. My boyfriend had seriously studied the Indian subcontinent, and he came armed with maps, train schedules, and a prestigious fellowship, with a plan to experience India differently. We would dress respectably, live on a local budget (less than $5 a day), and visit places other backpackers would miss. We would buy cannabis from farmers in Himalayan villages who grow the world-famous Malana Cream. We were Indians, fresh out of Harvard, and committed to doing our homework.
Young people may be known for taking risks, but their rebellion often takes the form of convention. In retrospect, our insistence on being authentic was just another rule.
Street Scene
The author, age 23, Khajuraho, India, 1998. Photo: Alex Traveli.
One thing my American boyfriend was strongly against was white women wearing Indian-style clothing, which he considered not only culturally insensitive but unattractive. This was problematic for me because the shorts and t-shirts that were a relic of my youth in LA were too revealing, especially in the secluded architecture spots we frequented.
I opted instead for a long skirt and short-sleeved blouse, modest but not suitable for hiking or night trains. Once, while travelling second class from Gwalior to Agra, we nearly missed our stop. When the conductor yelled out “Agra, Agra, Agra,” we ran for the exit and jumped off the moving train. The conductor managed to save us, but wearing an ankle-length skirt, platform sandals and a backpack half as big as my body, I tripped and fell onto the platform. I opened my eyes to find myself surrounded by a throng of curious onlookers. In my attempt to blend in, I had become the most foolish spectacle of all.
And in Orchha, India, on the same trip in 1998. Photo: Alex Travelli.
A few years later, I went alone to India to write my first book. I rented a room in a boarding house just south of the Hanging Gardens, a short walk from the beach in Chowpatty. I wanted an adventure, something to add to the story I was supposed to be writing. So I started dating a very different kind of guy. He was from Mumbai, from a prominent Hindu family that owned hotels and vineyards and liked to party. He had no problem with white girls wearing Indian clothing; he'd dated a lot of us. He told me he preferred the sari to the Muslim shalwar kameez, a combination scarf and loose-fitting trousers gathered at the ankles that hide rather than accentuate a woman's figure.
During my months in the city that Playboy and his friends still called Bombay, I went to clubs, racetracks, and parties on yachts. In preparation for the wedding of a Bollywood starlet on a nearby island, he took me to a boutique owned by one of his wealthy female friends. She recommended a magenta blouse with gold thread and a matching lehenga with a full skirt, but when I entered the fitting room expectantly, I could tell right away that the outfit was made for someone else. The waist was laughably tight and the top was anything but full. Lacking the necessary curves, I ended up wearing my own dress: a plain black Agnes B. dress, completely unsuited to the glitz and glamour of the event. While my date partied late into the night, I returned to the hotel early.
The bedroom where Freudenberger stayed during his visit to Shyamnagar, Bangladesh in 2007.
I left India in 2002, at the height of sectarian violence that left more than 1,000 Muslims dead on the watch of then-Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Three years later, on a flight from upstate New York to Rochester, where my grandmother had recently died, I met a young Muslim woman named Farah.
Farah had recently come to the United States from Bangladesh to marry her American fiancé, Dave. We soon realized that this unconventional arranged marriage, which she had arranged herself over the Internet, would make a great novel, and we began corresponding. In early 2007, I went with her to Bangladesh to meet her family.
In the middle-class area of Dhaka where Farah's parents lived, shalwar kameez was de rigueur even for non-religious women. My friend worried I might not have the necessary clothes, but this time I was prepared. I bought several shalwar kameez from a Tibetan-run store on Greenwich Avenue in New York's West Village. My favorite was made of translucent mint-green cotton with delicate white embroidery on the smock and sleeves. The pants were simple, with drawstring ties, and I had a matching scarf that could be worn as a loose head covering.
Sundarbans Delta, Bangladesh, 2007.
No one who saw me wearing it in Dhaka or in Farah’s grandmother’s village in the Sundarbans delta recognized it as local. It fit me perfectly, because it had been made by an enterprising Tibetan New Yorker who knew American sizes and tastes. The color didn’t look drab, and the cut accentuated my slim curves. To Farah and her parents, who liked to introduce their American friends to relatives skeptical of her marriage to a foreigner, it was glamorous and exotic, yet reassuringly understated. In it, I felt cool, comfortable, and, for the first time in South Asia, even pretty. Maybe it was because I was finally choosing it for myself.
I stayed at Farah’s grandmother’s village home, in a room painted a vibrant grass green like no other I’d seen anywhere. An antique sewing machine sat on a wooden table, and the four-poster teak bed was under a big white mosquito net. Soon after we arrived, Farah suggested we bathe in the village pond. As I wondered what to wear, she giggled and pointed to the mint-green shalwar kameez I was already wearing. Bathing in front of strangers in my thin cotton clothes was more revealing than doing it in a swimsuit, and my fashionable boyfriend from Bombay thought maybe he could learn something from the Desi village boys watching the spectacle. In a photograph of us taken by Farah’s husband, Farah and I were half submerged in water, our wet clothes clinging to our bodies, our hair dripping. We were laughing, but we were also making something up. One of us had a story, the other a whole new life.
