Travelling white

Travelling with a white girlfriend - phirang! phoren chick! gori ladki! - is like nothing on earth. The country, its inhabitants, their nativity, naivete, you, are revealed in a whole new light. White light! Continuous strobelight! Washing over, disclosing, usurping everything in its proud sweep, magnificent ambit.

The first impression is of millions of curious eyes pinned on you, darting to her, to you, back and forth like some obscene pinball, raking your skin, peeling layers with its incisiveness, abrading. People all around, surging past and ahead, heads turned in bafflement, curiosity, surprise, sexual reverie. In Agra, a guy on a bike almost ran into an electric pole as he was scrutinising my friend's bared, recently freckled arms. Nearly every receptionist of the low-budget Bombay hotels we plied for rooms appeared to believe that I was mere escort to her and that I would leave as soon as she had secured accommodation; the suggestion that I might want to stay in the same room as my friend incited astonishment, displeasure and instant negation: "No no no, Indian and foreigner not allowed. You want, you stay in separate room. That is Rule." A few hotels down the line I lost patience and had the temerity to question this rule, its rationale. "Sorry, Rule is Rule." Staple.

Another bigtime getter-of-my-goat: some establishments suffered racial astigmatism and did not, could not, digest the fact that I was Indian. I needed to prove it. "ID? Passport? Anything?" Stuck in India with nary a clue about how to establish my Hindustanism, a stranger in my homeland. Skin colour and fluent Hindi were no passports. Outside the Taj Mahal, I was even given an entrance test. To confirm my national orientation, I had to name the Chief Minister of Bombay. My first thought (and this turned out to be correct) was, "Bombay? What CM?" Instead, I hemmed guiltily and scanned the asphalt for the answer, occasionally looking for inspiration into the glint of Bonnie's eyeglasses. "A-ha! You not knowing name of CM of Bombay? Then how you can be coming from Bombay? No entry." Fortunately, the watchdogs at another gate had no doubt about the Indianness of my Hindi, and let me slip through easily. Back in Bombay, I discovered that I had in fact carried proof of identity with me: driver's license. Never would I have thought to presume that I would need its first few pages - dog-eared from years of police checks - to avow that I was indeed an Indian me, and nobody else.

On a bus from Manali to Delhi, a probing Punjab da puttar asked (his tone implying that he was abashed, his face refuting the possibility), "Don't mind, ok? But she, who is she? Wife?" That was the first of a series of queries in varied accents and degrees of brazenness. To all, I spoke the same words, in the same frazzled monotone. "Friend."

Further intrusions included "Is she with you? (Why is she with you?)," and "Is she alone? (I pray to God she is)."

A pair on a train, very obviously brothers, attempted to befriend her by offering her lunch while I lay asleep on the upper berth. Later that evening, a few minutes into conversation with me, they looked at one another with disappointment gored into their eyes. I interpreted the glance as He doesn't seem gullible enough to get off with us at Baroda, Gujarat. Evidently they had floated the idea in Bonnie's mind that we should stretch our tour, expand our horizons, befriend spontaneity all over again and disbark with them at their hometown.

Naked lust emblazoned in a man's eyes.

He sat on my right and eyed her across me, watching her sleeveless dress, its flappy, tantalising looseness, watching for a glimpse of more. She shifted and stretched unselfconsciously, and her blouse clasped her tighter. His vigil went unrewarded that day. I saw the same eyes on a thousand different men in the course of three weeks and my instinctive mental rebuttal was Haven't you seen a goddamn woman before, irrespective of eye and skin colour. I thought I'd turned mind-reader when I observed these gazes full of raw longing and hypothetical sexual situations, between the men and her, between her and me; sexotica on a platter. Now I know that I am an Indian man, just as prone to the weight of millennia of sexual repression, and that in their place, I might, more often than not, knee-jerk into erotic phantasmagoria involving sex so frenzied, organic, so viscous that the black would seep into the white, her white would run freshets across and into my black and we’d meld, segue into a writhing pool of gray while the two countries watched in fascination and pipe-chuffing pontification.

Middle class Indian families. The husbands, Janus-eyed, one side dripping lasciviousness, the other playing genial, welcoming ambassador of the nation. The kids goggling, older siblings giggling, the wives sidling-squirming into the edges of the viewfinder as some excited, exalted passers-by ensnared this white rarity on film for posterity. I don't remember how many families wanted Bonnie in their photo-albums, some dismissing my presence peremptorily as if I'd never existed, as if India were the reason for her being here and not me. They milled about her, shook her hand the way a dog shakes a slipper in his mouth.

Bonnie Wagner is studying to be a classical pianist, at the University of Michigan. She acknowledges, without spurious modesty, that she is rather talented, and may be famous and wealthy some day. She is going to Paris next year to accompany, in more ways than one, a group of friends. For now, she is a blissfully anonymous young student. But: "I'm going to have withdrawal symptoms when I get back home and walk down the street without being an instant celebrity merely on the basis of my colour and sex." Welcome to India, Bonnie.

She plans to return in the winter of 2002. For another shot at the Olympics. Disassembling, vivisecting a foreigner is, after all, a national sport, akin to the fever-pitch-inducing cricket, films, and politics.