In Kakkabe, high up on a mountain at the foot of Thadiyendamol, I meet E. Girl-woman who’s into peace and climbing peaks. I fall in love with the way she speaks — I think I keep her talking just to hear her form words. E is from Moscow and wants to live in Nice some day, by the blue sea. She’s currently studying yoga in Mysore. She runs a tourism business through the internet using her smartphone. She could be a cliche but she’s not. She’s rather cool, in fact, though her enthusiasm for doshas and chakras is (ironically) alien to me.
We get lost a lot. On our way up to Thadiyendamol and back, we try shortcuts, jump the wrong walls, run up deeply mossed steps to the other side of the mountain. There is a feeling of constantly traveling sideways. Then there are the women. At a dead-end in the forest, a bland white house and in the verandah, a woman who fixes us with her mad eyes as if she knows our deepest secrets. Later, after a crossing of streams, a tribal woman who smiles in relief as if she likes unexpected guests, gives us water from her groundwater tap. I am struck by our differences, all of us, women standing on the same small bit of mountain.
About E, what stays with me are not the specifics so much as a ‘mood’, the air she carries about her — of adventure bordering on foolhardiness, and the kind of innocence that Indian girls must lose pretty quickly. E is not wary, furtive, careful, or cold around men she passes on the streets. She smiles, says hello. They look bemused, shy or amused depending on their age and general proclivities. When I am with her during these exchanges, I look away, am often caught between grimace and smile. You see, I’m not used to such warmth with strange men. I’m more the ‘look through – look down – look sternly ahead’ kinda girl. This difference in our behaviour makes me think of the places we grew up in, the ways in which we grew up.
I wonder what it would be like to walk down a road and not see men as potential trouble. To not shuffle or scuttle or sidle by.
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After I got back, I rather instinctively googled ‘russia women’ to find out more about gender constructs in modern-day Russia. I say ‘instinctively’ because if I had stopped to think, I would have remembered the stereotype and expected the gadzillion dating and marriage sites I was hit with. Of course, I quickly modified my search with ‘gender relations’, ‘freedom of mobility’. But I discovered little because the sea of dating sites and other stereotypes swamped everything else.
There were more putrid examples like this, but also reasonably innocent-sounding ones. This blogger talks about this phenomenon in some detail:
According to Google, all Russian women strive for one thing: a marriage with a foreigner. The first link that came up stated “All Russian Women Want to Escape from Russia” – with an only intention of finding a foreign partner, of course….The ‘Russian woman’ as been turned into a brand by the internet. I am surprised no one has registered the Russian Woman trademark yet. (Or has someone?)
Clearly, we have no other desires but to popularize ourselves with handsome foreign strangers who will whip out their cyber guides, make us borsch, and will then whisk us away from our homeland. Do women in other cultures have a better digital reputation?
So using the same, rather loose attitude-mapping tool, I googled ‘India women’. The top link was something about ‘100 beautiful Indian women’ but most of the other links on the first page dealt with women’s problems in one form or another — an article on the Mangalore bar attacks, a UN report on women’s status, a dated, bleak census report on women’s health. And I wondered if all of us are just traveling sideays after all, in our own corners of the world.