Foreigner

I am choosing my seat quickly. Criteria is always the same: seeing well but not being seen. Not a perfect timing though: it’s already lunch time and passersby's hungry eyes examine the smells coming from the inside. From a spectator I become an aquarium fish, getting glance after glance through the restaurant’s window. “Glances, stares, people turning around just to have a look. Just deal with it,” I think to myself when my attention gets caught by a couple in the corner. They’ve just finished and the woman stands up. I can see the way she’s dressed. She grabs something from the table and starts to walk in my direction. An average woman here would wear loose trousers, matching dress and a scarf – fashion’s stood still for hundreds of years. But women in the cities look slightly different. Many wear short sleeves or leggings under the dress, just like her. Still, I spot a nose piercing and makeup – traditional signs of being married. Humans across the world feel the need to connect and belong. And to share it with others. Just think about all the online relationship statuses, pictures, tattoos. Here a nose piercing means a woman’s married. A dot on her forehead - married, stripe of paint in her hair, makeup, toe ring  – married. But are all these meant to express affection? What about those marriages which are arranged?

It's like this: one day you become a part of another family - the relatives of your husband. You leave your siblings and friends and move to his parents’ house. The 3-days wedding party feels more like a funeral to you. If you’re lucky he’s good looking, but there is no connection yet. Value of loyalty, social pressure or something else – what is there behind those signs?

“I should ask him when he arrives,”  I think and check the time.

 As the woman gets closer I spot a smartphone in her hand and I recognize that look on her face: a selfie request! Oh God, I should start charging these people!

But Shiva’s obviously not on my side, as she’s already at my table.

My response is ready to pop out, when she smiles and asks:

“Can you please take a pic of our family?”

It could have been so awkward, I think to myself and my big explicit “No selfies” smoothly transforms into: “No problem.”

To make it up for almost being a jerk, I take not one but five pictures of the couple and their cute little baby.

“Such a cute little baby. What’s his name?”

 “Only 4 months old. So don’t have a name,” she says.

At some point it always gets awkward, doesn’t it.

I am now left alone with my thoughts and a menu card. Am I a risk taker going for the unknown or should I play it safe? The only sure thing is that whatever is there, it's vegetarian.

How come we perceive providing a child with vegetarian food - or let’s take it one step further: feeding a dog with vegetarian food - as something controversial? These are the topics to discuss only in our meat consuming society. Here, this is the norm. What shouldn’t be a norm is that many children here still don’t get enough food and that this doesn’t shock people anymore.

What shouldn’t be a norm is that they defecate in the open, that there is no soap in use, that they don’t get any health education or no education at all. That the beautiful country is drowning in litter and if you eat or drink in the bus, any school kid will offer you to throw the trash out the window for you.

There'll be a boy in the slum and his mother will say: “He doesn’t go to school because he prefers to sell things on the street.”

There'll be a woman in a white mask. She'll be holding her daughter whom she'll have had to stop breastfeeding. She will cry, “I am scared that tuberculosis is back.”

There'll be a man with two kids on the train. He'll see my rubbish and say: “You can throw it away. This is India.”

But India can do better than this - this is what I'll learn.

I can hear the motorbike’s sound. He stops the engine and enters the room. A helmet in his hand, a smile on his face.

“So what would you like to eat?”