By Kate Wallace, 1/21/2015. Right now I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my flight. It is delayed, which is nothing new by now, the winter fog seems to disrupt all flights here. I’m a bit nervous because this is apparently the worst fog Udaipur has seen in the last 10 years, although everyone I ask gives me a different answer. “I’ve worked here for two years, the flight will leave on time!” to “go book yourself into a hotel.” I’ve been eavesdropping on the family behind me and it doesn’t sound good. I’m laughing at their conversation. They are a group of eleven and seem pretty desperate to get to Delhi on time. The two men are walking around the airport talking to people and now they seem to have different airlines coming up to them promising their flight will leave first and they can buy tickets at *insert exorbitant price here.* I’m not sure you’d see that in America, but these people seem more than happy to pay and now different officials are trying to get in on the action. I on the other hand have a feeling I might be here for a while, but oh well all part of the experience. At least I’m in a cheery mood already because this morning I got my first hot shower since I got here. Will appreciate my New York apartments bathroom a lot more after this, bad water pressure and all.
Yesterday was one of the most interesting days I’ve had in India. We were having breakfast at a little cafe the night before and were considering taking a walking tour of Udaipur run by the local restaurant to see more of the city through a locals eyes. There were some travellers at the cafe who recommended we go on a different tour. They spoke highly of the woman running it and said that instead of talking generally about India she also tells you her life story. They said she is quite a character and while the tour focused on the caste system they really enjoyed hearing about her life. I thought this related to my research project and headed over to her cafe to see if I could talk to her about making a living through working with tourists. She told us she would be happy to talk with me and to meet her at noon the following day.
Her name was Meenu. She was small in stature and build but had such an explosive personality she felt a lot bigger. Her english was very good, she said from working with tourists for years. I asked her how she got into this field of work and her life story quickly spilled out. She graduated high school at 17 and her parents said they couldn’t support her studies anymore. She went to work for them at their family restaurant and learned the business, living with her parents as is typical in an Indian home. She then got married and moved 5 hours outside of Udaipur to live with her new husbands family. This didn’t last long, as she had a stormy relationship with her in-laws and brother in law. After a few years she had two kids and decided to leave her husband and move back to the city to her parents house. This is a highly unusual move for a woman to make in Indian culture. Everyone in her family was angry. Her parents said she could move in with them with her kids but only if she worked at the restaurant without pay. Meenu was then forced to do what she could on the side to pay for her children’s education. She would teach Hindi lessons, do Henna, sell whatever she could get her hands on, do cooking classes and walking tours. She says her husband would come and visit every now and then but gave no support financially, and basically just came to “have sex for four days and then leave,” (I was surprised at how matter of factly she said this). She made friends with a man from Germany in this time and he saw the entire drama unfold. Out of the goodness of his heart, she says, he bought her a house in Udaipur so she no longer had to live with her parents. Eventually her husband decided to leave his parents and move in with Meenu and his children. She is now the breadwinner for the family, supporting them by doing cooking lessons, walking tours, selling her wares and still helping out at the family restaurant (for no pay). Her husband doesn’t work and can’t get a job in Udaipur, she said “he spends his days on endless chai breaks.” Although he does do all the cleaning and takes care of the kids, while she is the primary breadwinner. Needless to say, this is a highly unusual and interesting story. She described other women who were in bad marriages or unfortunate situations and she tried to help them set out on their own. She described a friend of hers who is brutally beaten by her husband and his family won’t help her. Meenu says sometimes she meets her in the middle of the night and lets her stay at her house, offers to talk to the husband or the husbands family or help her leave her husband and live her own life. The woman is a teacher and would have enough of an income to support herself, but Meenu says every morning she dutifully goes back to her husband. She says, “Only a strong woman can be on her own. I am strong, I have to be for my children.”
I asked her what it is like working with tourists and she says she loves meeting new people but the women in her community talk about her relationship with the tourists. They accuse her of sleeping with the German fellow who got her the house (to be honest, my first assumption too) and accuse her of making money by doing things with the other male tourists. She says it’s fine when it’s a girl like me but when it is a group of girls everyone starts talking and tells her parents. Her parents are now too afraid to tell Meenu what the women say about her because Meenu has on more than one occasion gotten mad at them for gossiping about her. She says her money comes because she works very hard, and the German man wanted to do something good for a friend. Thinking about it later I realized given the currency exchange and the amount of money some of the tourists seem to have here, buying Meenu a house may have just been pocket change for him. Or there could be more to that story, but I guess we’ll never know for sure. She is grateful for the tourists because they give her an income that would otherwise not be possible and she can use the money to put her kids through school.
Meenu highly values education and says it will bring her kids a better life. She also values the education that comes from the people she meets. She says India is changing fast and this is highly due to an increase in foreigners in India. She thinks it’s good that foreigners bring money in, allowing entrepreneurs like herself to provide for her family. She likes the Western influence because now people are more accepting of women being independent instead of relying on their husbands. She spoke a lot about the caste system and how even now it matters in Indian society, particularly in rural areas, but with the increase of Westerners there is now more value on money than on the caste you were born into, allowing people of a lower caste to achieve more financial stability than they would have 20 years ago. For her own children she wants them to have a good education but says India is changing so rapidly she can’t predict what they will be doing in 10 years. I was surprised to learn about how prominent the caste system still is, I had always thought it was a thing of the past. When walking through Udaipur she pointed out all the symbols which you can use to identify what caste or religion a person is a part of. It made me wonder if castes are still prominent in Indian culture, are they are relevant now as they once were or has that systems place in society changed overtime?
When asked about the negative effects of tourism and foreigners in India her response surprised me. She said she feels uncomfortable with a lot of the the Western clothing styles. When she brings women on walking tours and they are in ripped short shorts or their boobs are hanging out, the men on the streets catcall them and she feels uncomfortable. She also described women scantily clad sitting in her home, bending over and talking to her husband and she feels deeply uncomfortable when this happens. Indian girls are starting to emulate American fashion and she feels uncomfortable when her niece comes out wearing shirts that show her boobs and jeans with rips in them, saying “10 years ago when pants had a hole you threw them out!” She also doesn’t like how foreigners view all kids as poor kids and buy them chocolate and sweets. She says her kids don’t have money for candy because it’s not good for them, and says “how would you feel if a stranger gave your kid a full chocolate bar and they ate it all and wouldn’t eat dinner?” Fair point, American mothers would have a fit if this happened.
At the end of our meeting she sold me some snacks and some spices. I didn’t think too much about the prices because I was so enchanted with her and her story, but later was thinking that they were quite high. She let me try on one of her Saris and then offered to sell it to me for 800 rupees, and also offered to sell me some of her charms. As this continued I found this part a little bit uncomfortable, people here are always trying to sell me things and overcharging me for everything. She sold me one of her chocolate truffle balls, which she is famous for and warned me not to tell her parents should I come to the cafe because she’s not supposed to be doing that.
She described the problems with getting her business going. She said it’s hard because she is linked to her parents cafe on both lonelyPlanet and on tripAdvisor, both reviews that local people depend on to bring in tourist business. No one in her family knows how to build a website, so people also don’t know how to get ahold of her to book tours and cooking classes. I looked her up on tripAdvisor when I got home and was immediately linked to her parents restaurant, Queens cafe. I was shocked to see negative review after negative review about her. All went something along the lines of “food was great, except for the daughter wouldn’t let us enjoy our meal, kept trying to sell us overpriced tours, spices and other wares.” My personal favourite was one describing how they politely ignored her but then felt bad for the American tourist who was there on her own who Meenu sent upstairs to help her daughter with her homework.
Reading the reviews raised three questions in my mind. One: Was Meenu fabricating or exaggerating her life story as a way to gain travellers trust and sympathy, hoping it will lead to them buying her tours, her spices or even a house? And if so, is her behaviour inherently wrong or is it ok to bend the rules to survive in a system that is designed to for women to be dependent on others and for the poor to stay poor? Perhaps I just experienced some of India’s famous “corruption” on a very small scale. In Katherine Boo’s book “Behind the beautiful forevers” she writes “In the West, and among some of the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.” Assuming there was something off about Meenu’s story, perhaps we are wrong to focus on the morality of Meenu’s actions and rather focus on the cause of the problem, aka the system that forces people to turn to corruption as a means of survival. We can look at this on a micro scale in the instance of Meenu, but what about in the police force, or government or business level? Is the drive to act corruptly a part of human nature, driven by greed or is it sparked by a broken social system?
I laughed when I read about Meenu’s interactions with the tourists on TripAdvisor. They complained about her talking to them through her whole dinner, and I wonder how much of this is Meenu being an aggressive business woman and how much of this is a cultural difference. I have definitely felt that Indian people are naturally more open to interacting with strangers than Westerners. Perhaps Meenu would think she is being hospitable by wanting to sit with them and talk, whereas Westerners view that as an invasion of space and privacy. Perhaps the tourists discomfort came from when she tried to sell them things, but one could argue this is also a cultural difference.
This whole incident also made me question my own assumptions about people. Am I being naive to trust Meenu and her story, or have I been taught to think that Indian people are always trying to take advantage of foreigners and therefore have lost my trust in the good of people just because they come from a different culture. As usual I think I just went searching for answers and was left with more questions. With this one I suppose I will have to decide for myself whether to trust Meenu or not, and will be interested to investigate more into this idea of morally acceptable corruption.