the ass behind all those assumptions

We hadn't noticed the security guard coming our way. And then even if we had, it would have been hard to understand what made us so interesting.  

Maybe I had already become immune to all the glares we attracted from the second we left the house. Maybe I was more concerned about looking down to avoid dog shit. Maybe I couldn't care less. It's not like I didn't know what people were thinking. Puji had provided the inner monologue to all those stares: she a woman of loose morals at best, a white man's prostitute at worst. Everything from holding hands to kissing in public attracted such thoughts. We joked about such things. Neither of us cared too much anyhow. Her stepping out of the house in shorts or a summer dress or smoking a cigarette would be met with equally silent disapproval. Even in a modern city like Bombay, this was something she faced daily on the train, on the street and wherever else prying eyes would roam. There was no pleasing ignorance. 

But on this otherwise perfect day Ignorance was hovering right over us and urging us to kindly get the fuck out. We had crossed some invisible line. I must have been absentmindedly snapping pictures of vultures in the sky when he got word from the incensed park members. Apparently there was a problem with me tanning without a shirt. The conversation took place in Hindi so I was not privy to detail, tone or reasoning. We were asked to leave. End of story.

I wasn't mad at first. It was bound to happen. I would have preferred it not have happened at one of the few spots I could call my own in the city. Some decent runs under the scorching Bombay sun had ended nicely in this same little park by the water. The one with the nice breeze. And no one had complained when I was going through some Yoga poses quietly to myself, topless, facing the sun. No security guard had visited. Then I was just a silly white boy at best. People anyway expected such things from foreigners. It's the same reason the Bollywood industry hired Eastern European girls to do the really sexy dirty work in those elaborate dance sequences. Put an Indian girl in that same dance and eyebrows would be raised. In the same way I became something else with her next to me. What exactly that was I wasn't sure. 

As we gathered up our stuff I scanned the park for any guilty faces. Who had made the complaint? A couple of young girls who had been smiling and pointing at us every now and then continued to do so. Probably not them. Maybe it was the man who had been hungrily and shamelessly staring Puji down from the second we arrived. Or was it the group of older ladies sitting around chatting. The security guard was obviously not going to reveal his sources. Still, I wanted a better explanation as to what exactly I had done wrong. So Puji asked him when we reached the gate. Sitting back lazily in his chair, the headphones firmly back in his ears. He was apparently in no mood for debate and only raring for a fight. Forget it, she told me. The conversation was going nowhere.

I have been told Indians are amongst the least confrontational people around. Disapproval, annoyance and anger were rarely if ever voiced loudly or directly. These feelings lived mostly in silent sighs and dirty stares and whispered from one ear to another. And in this case handed off to some security guarded, a young man who very likely stared down women he saw on the street and then went home and watched those same highly suggestive Bollywood films and toothpaste commercials he apparently had such moral issue with. And suddenly it bothered me that our little Saturday picnic in the park had somehow become everybody's business. And we would never really know who that 'everyone' was. Whoever disapproved would never have had the guts to come tell us themselves. So I was forced to assume. Chances are it had been a woman. Most men would have been more than happy to put their own moral outrage aside and stare at Puji for some time. Like that. So then it must have been those women. And what was the probability that any to all of these women lived under repressive husbands? Fairly high. And what were the chances that any of those husbands had raised their hands on them. Fairly high. And maybe each had their own daughters who would someday be innocently sitting in a park with their boyfriends and come under the hateful glance of disapproving men and their wives. 

And maybe those glances would become something much, much worse. 

It seemed to happen every day in India. Rape. Acid attacks. Murders. The evening news was full of acts of violence against women. Even the aayahs could tell you a couple of personal stories that would make you want to take a drive and strangle their husbands.  Funny how religion, cast and patriarchal norms all served to make watchmen of their female subjects; allowing them to decide not only what is best for their own children but what is best for everyone else's children as well. And that thought made me a little sick. Because I would never want to think that any of these women deserved what they had coming to them. Because it was ultimately women like Puji and Smita that had to bear the brunt of such intrusive ignorance. 

I thought everyone should be allowed to live their life the way they saw fit. What a simple and naive thought that was. Just like a simple day at the park.