OTR Dispatches - October, 2004

Before I started reporting from South Asia, I expected conflict zones, particularly in the Muslim world, to be the hardest places to live and work. It’s taken me almost two years to understand why that’s not really the case.

Take Afghanistan, which was deeply conservative well before the Taliban came to power. On the streets of Kabul today, it’s a good idea for women to cover their head and arms, and mandatory to cover legs and hide body shape. Outside Kabul, women are never seen without their head and wrists covered. In fact, women are rarely seen outside Kabul, period. They stay in, and the men go to the market and bring their relatives to see them, as one heavy-set fundamentalist Pashtun in a tiny central Afghan village patiently explained to me not long ago. His patience quickly wore off when I asked why. He snapped, “Because there are good women and bad women. Obviously we want to marry good women. Which type are you?”

I never could have gotten away with such impertinence if I hadn’t been with three men, two of them Afghan. I must admit that when he began cross-questioning me, I told the Pashtun I was married “to a match my parents approved of” in a rather futile attempt to prove I was in the “good woman” category and salvage my reputation among the village men. I doubt that worked, partly because my supposed husband, standing husband-like beside me, was unable to contain his amusement at my sudden need to be accepted by this local Taliban supporter.

But despite the many restrictions on women in Afghanistan doing the crass things reporters do—sticking mics in people’s faces, asking aggressive questions—I realized recently that the worst threats I have encountered in two years of reporting have actually been in India.

India, the country where I now live, is the world’s largest democracy, as its rulers like to remind us. India prides itself on being a huge, if chaotic, democratic machine, in opposition to its long-time neighbor and enemy, mostly-Muslim Pakistan. In the eyes of most Indians, Pakistan is an oppressive dictatorship that spends all its resources manufacturing terrorists to export to India. Many Indians think that while they can go out in sleeveless tops to discos, every Pakistani woman is chained to the stove while her husband chants namaz, or Muslim prayers.

Of course, many things are made easier for a foreign woman by living in India as opposed to Pakistan or Afghanistan. While all three countries have maddening bureaucracies, deeply pervasive corruption, and conservative social attitudes, India is more open, more modern and westernized in some ways, and currently fashions itself as a burgeoning superpower. But when it comes to most social issues, India is just as backward as its Muslim neighbors.

Homosexuality is a good example. While researching gay culture in both Pakistan and India, I found that in India, a counter-culture for homosexuals has been allowed to develop in some cities. But life for gays in India is not any easier than for their counterparts in Pakistan, where Islam prescribes death as the only punishment for gay sex. That’s mostly because the emphasis on marriage and child-rearing is so strong in both countries. In India, most marriages are still arranged by the family and most families have upwards of three children. Stepping outside of that family realm by refusing to marry or have children is one of the most seditious decisions an Indian can make.

So in India, my boyfriend and I usually say we’re married (when he can manage to say so without cracking a smile), and when my family members come to visit me in New Delhi, all the assorted neighbors and shop-keepers who watch my every move get happy grins on their faces. It proves that the “American didi (sister)”, as they call me, is not “alone,” the worst possible thing to be in India.

All this was on my mind recently because I was filling out a survey on “women reporting war.” As I checked the boxes “Physical intimation,” “Having to use your sexuality to get yourself out of difficult situations,” “Being singled out because you are female,” “Humiliation or ridicule while reporting and working on a story,” “Feeling threatened by group of hostile or aggressive males,” and so on, I realized I was thinking as much of India as of working in any actual conflict situation, like Indian-held Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Sri Lanka.

The only times when I've been close to being roughed up, raped, or molested while working, was in India, and not even during war or near war situations. All those times it was only the arrival or presence of men that prevented it from escalating. Which means I have learned to do something I never would have chosen to do before—always travel with my boyfriend-husband, or another token male.

Even the simple act of buying alcohol can be frightening for a woman in India. I decided to brave the experience recently, because some Indian friends were coming over. So I hailed a cycle rickshaw and he started off toward the market, without quite understanding where I was going. Like most cycle rickshaw drivers, he was about 15, and had not a word of English. I speak some words of Hindi, but “liquor store” was not among them.

By the time we reached the market, I was beginning to wonder what to do, because I wanted to avoid at all costs having to stop someone on the street and ask where the liquor store was. Those Indian women that drink mostly belong to the middle and upper classes, and would never buy their own liquor - they have a flotilla of servants to take care of things like that. Asking for directions to the liquor store from my perch on the shaky rickshaw would have put me firmly in the “bad woman” category, and more importantly, would have made me vulnerable to the leering come-ons of men whose visions of Western women might come from re-runs of Baywatch.

So I caught my driver’s attention, and began my comic routine. “WhiSHkey!” I shrieked. “Beer!” even louder. He stared at me in horrified incomprehension. Most passers-by had at this stage also begun staring at the insane white woman on the cart, so I reverted to gestures. I pointed my thumb towards my mouth in a violent jerking motion, and made like I was gulping. Surely this is a sign of alcoholism, I thought. I am now violently making a fool of myself on the street in pursuit of Indian whiskey.

But he got it. “Daroo!” he said, and his face softened. He understood, and didn’t mind. My 15 year old rickshaw driver probably also likes his daroo, and he didn’t care that this immoral woman was off to get it on her own. He was just glad she’d stopped shouting at him. By the time we got back home, the bottles barely intact after the bumpy ride on the torn-up streets, we’d talked a little more, and he was my friend.

Miranda Kennedy is a journalist based in New Delhi and a Contributing Editor of The Old Town Review. She reports frequently for National Public Radio from across South Asia.