A Dose of Truth

It’s time to put to rest a few of the rumors Sally and I brought with us to India, because many of them weren’t true—at least, not for us.

Let’s start with something easy. “The Unwind Island,” our hotel in Bangalore, wasn’t new. I wrote that it was before I knew the truth: That we weren’t staying where we’d expected to stay. That other hotel--the one we didn’t even see--was the new one. So, if you’ve been picturing us in paradise, you’re only partly right. “The Unwind Island” is an imitation of paradise for sure, but just so you’ll know, it’s a tad rundown.

Sally was caught by a piece of packing advice in the book we read before our trip. This book advised against jeans, so Sally didn’t bring any. As it turned out, we did some touring, rode go-karts, climbed onto a donkey cart, sat on airplanes for hours at a stretch, and just hung out when we weren’t working. Jeans would have come in handy. We saw them everywhere, although I will say that most Indian women wore their native dress instead. Sally wished for her jeans more than once.

There are two other bits of packing advice that may not be true for everyone. First, the monastery scarf. All the travel books tell women to take along an all-purpose scarf when traveling abroad because they will not be allowed in churches without it. Generally it’s good advice. So I lugged a scarf to India and had it with me every day in case we went somewhere that required us women to cover our heads. Even though we toured a few temples, I didn’t need it once.

I also took a shoe bag I didn’t use. It is very common for tourists entering palaces, churches, or even someone’s home to be asked to remove their shoes. To prevent theft, the book advised, just put your shoes in a shoe bag and carry them with you instead of leaving them outside. The idea that my new walking shoes could be stolen spurred me to take a bag for them. Well, that didn’t work. We had to check our shoes and it was too much trouble to go against the tide.

We’ve already shot down the rumors about using the left hand, but here’s one more story. After we arrived in Delhi we were sharing a meal with representatives of a company there. So far, no one had jumped up from the table and shouted “Unclean!” at Sally or me as I had feared, but I decided to test the theory on them. I mentioned the rumor to the man seated next to me at the table. “If using the left hand were unclean,” he said, “I would have been unclean from the day I was born because I’M LEFT-HANDED!” Power to the lefties!

The rumor about never looking an Indian man in the eye is past its prime, at least with the people we met. One day at the office I took a walk after lunch. There were three of us walking, one a young man. I decided to run my eye-contact story by him. He was so surprised by it that he ended up staring quite pointedly at ME as though to say, “Where did you get that one?”

No doubt there are some men in India who’d make something ugly out of a woman’s look. Sally and I took pictures every day during our commute in Bangalore, to capture the crazy traffic as well as life on the sides of the road. It’s hard to do in motion, so sometimes we lowered the car windows to get a better shot. In those moments I glimpsed a few faces I was glad to be passing quickly in a vehicle. These would be the male faces we were warned about, very different from our office colleagues.

India is teeming with people, all kinds—dirty and clean, wealthy and poor, male and female. Every village holds a thousand pictures, if you could only take them all. How can anyone easily say what is true or false when going another mile can change everything?

There was a TV show called “The Naked City” that most of you won’t remember. At the end of each episode the announcer would say, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

I figure the person who wrote the travel advice book was telling her truth, but her experiences were different from ours. Someone who backpacks through a country with one outfit from home will have a different journey from that of a business traveler protected from even walking alone on the street. The point is that everyone’s trip isn’t the same—and that’s the best part.