Perfectly Ordinary

Recently acquired dupattas

Saturday evening treats

Bombay, India.  June 18, 2012

I walked to the neighborhood sweet shop the other evening to buy some sev ki mithai, a Sindhi specialty I have loved my whole life. A cousin of mine calls it heaven on a spoon.

I was by myself.

That in itself was remarkable. My parents, whom I am visiting, don't like my going places in Bombay alone--even though this is a cosmopolitan, lively city where a woman alone is absolutely unremarkable. Maybe their hesitation stems from the decades I've lived abroad, away from India. Or maybe it comes from years of protecting me as a teenager when we lived in Kuwait.

My parents are okay with my walking around with Marilyn, my partner, so long we report in by mobile phone regularly. But she returned to the States a few days ago. Anyway, when I walk around with a tall, white woman, the only one around for miles, my foreignness is more marked.

That evening, though, I felt blissfully ordinary. When a cousin dropped me off near my parents’ apartment building after we had been to the movies, I was just another woman out on a Saturday in a salwaar kameez, the ubiquitous baggy pants and tunic. My dupatta, the long, flowing scarf, was draped across my shoulders. I love dupattas and had bought this one, sheer black and embossed with gold paisleys, only that morning. ("You and your dupattas," my mother had smiled indulgently).

As I walked to the sweet shop, avoiding muddy puddles left by the recent rain, I did not worry about looking "exotic," as I do in the States. And I knew I wouldn't have to explain my clothes to a fellow American.

I speak Hindi without a foreign accent, so I was able to buy the sweets and then pick up a Limca, a lemon-lime soda, at a nearby restaurant without drawing attention to myself.

For a brief time, I was neither an American in India nor an Indian in America. I was just another woman in Bombay, a woman who loves dupattas and sev ki mithai, unremarkable and ordinary.