News That Stays News

Variation on a Theme by Dos Passos February 4, 2013

Theory:  Being a pretty girl in an American bar is like being an American among strangers in India.

Prediction 1.  Guys just walk up to you and hold seemingly reasonable conversations, and it’s nice.  Actually, really nice.  But you are always 100% aware that you are being talked to just because of what you look like.

In a restaurant in Hospet, a group of men walk up to me, hold a long conversation about their English classes, their business ambitions, where I’m from, what I’m doing.  It’s initially completely and always initially rather gratifying to be able to interact so effortlessly with strangers.

Prediction 2.  Being a pretty girl who goes to a bar with a prettier girl is unreasonably irritating.

By the Queen’s Bath in Hampi, a group of men walk up to my friend, whiter, blonder and bluer-eyed than I, and hold an entire conversation with him about their successes, and failures, their crusher [read: land rover], the things he likes and doesn’t about being here.   Not two feet away, I am left completely alone.  Somehow, in this situation, I resent the loss of undeserved attention, which is dumb enough to be funny, but not dumb enough that I don’t do it.

Prediction 3.  When guys are easily replaced, it’s pretty hard to treat them like they’re not fungible, unless of course they’re not.

A guy on the train to Mumbai schemes a way for me to sit down.  We talk about his travels, about India and China.  A family across the way starts a conversation with me, and eventually he is completely left out, and ends up getting off the train before us.  I can’t help feeling mildly ungrateful, as though my conversation were somehow meet compensation for his assistance.  I can’t help feeling mildly disingenuous, for I was willing to be quite caught up in our conversation about one-child, yet in truth it is readily forgotten.  I get caught up the same way with the family, at first, but conversely they prove to be quite wonderful (more on that later), and I think I continue to treat them as such.

Prediction 4.  One level of misdirection is usually enough.

A man named Urylesh walks up to me, chats for twenty seconds, works his way up to my paler friend, chats with him, takes a picture with me, then with all of us, and at last one standing with my friend’s wife.  We’re annoyed, but we don’t stop him.  Does this picture, posted on facebook, get ‘liked’?  Do his friends high-five him?  What is he thinking when he calls my friend, and asks if he can talk to my friend’s wife?