ேநாரா ஸ்வீனி

India is a very challenging place for a solo woman traveler. Indian women almost never travel alone so foreign women traveling alone are both an oddity and a spectacle. This came as a shock to me at first because when I had traveled alone in the US and Europe, I found it to be refreshing and rewarding. After a year in India, I’ve learned to cope with the staring, the lack of women on the street, and the relentless parade of people who want something from me, be it money or simply to know where I’m from. I’ve figured out ways to make myself feel more comfortable, such as sticking close to women and families, staying on the move, keeping my wits about me, and maintaining my sense of humor. Occasionally, being alone works to my advantage. Last winter, I was walking along the beach in Cochin and I sat by a family and watched the water. The mother and the father kept looking over at me and smiling, so I came over and sat by them. They proceeded to feed me date cake and grapes and ask me all sorts of questions. The twenty-something year old son kept trying to get my phone number but his sisters just made fun of him, and thus I was more amused than threatened. However, despite moments like this I still always feel like I need to be on guard.

For my summer break, I knew I wanted to travel to Southeast Asia, but I didn’t have a traveling companion. After traveling alone in India, I was reluctant to do the same in Laos and Cambodia. I spent weeks agonizing over what I should do, thinking maybe I should try to find a traveling companion or go and visit one of the other Shansi fellows. In the end, I decided that I wanted to go where I wanted to go, even if I had to go alone. Fortunately, my trip to Cambodia and Laos turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and relaxing traveling experiences of my life. In fact, some of my favorite moments on the trip occurred precisely because I was traveling alone.

The day after I landed in Laos, I hopped onto a sawngthaew (a sort of shared taxi in the form of a pick-up truck) and headed off to Don Khon, an island in the middle of the Mekong River. Once I arrived on the island with some other travelers, it was evident that the pace was extremely slow. A series of bungalows lined the riverbank, and people were lying in hammocks on the porches of the bungalows. There was no electricity on the island, and the generators were only switched on from 6-10pm. I forgot to pack a flashlight and I was tired from the heat, so I went to sleep promptly at 10pm and got up and 6am.

When I woke up, I decided to rent a bike and explore the island while it was still cool outside. I biked to a waterfall and sat for a while listening to the rush of the falls. Then, as I was biking back to the main road, I saw a sign that said "Cool off with a lemon mint shake at Mama's restaurant." Sometimes advertising really works. I turned toward the restaurant right away. I think it was about 7:30am. I was definitely the first customer. The restaurant was owned by a family who had simply put some chairs and tables in front of their house for customers. The man came out and took my order. It looked like he and his wife were sort of scrambling around to find the right ingredients. Then, the woman brought me the shake. I tried it and it wasn't quite sweet enough. I asked the man for some sugar. He brought me a sugar jar from one of the other table and gave it to me, then quickly took it away because it was full of ants. Then, the woman brought me the bag of sugar from her kitchen and I doctored up my shake.

Instead of going back to the house, the woman sat across from me and started talking. First she asked me the usual questions - where was I from, how long I had been in Laos etc. Then I told her that I lived in India and we started talking about the differences between Lao and Indian marriages. She asked me if I was traveling alone and when I said yes she said, "that's good." She talked about how she liked going to the nearby city by herself and she complained about how her husband talked too much. She spoke English pretty well. She said that she'd lived on the island all her life. For some reason I then asked her how people give birth on the island. I wanted to know if there was there a doctor or a midwife. She said that she'd given birth to seven children and all her births were easy because she stayed active - always working in the kitchen instead of lying down. I was very intrigued by this woman. It occurred to me that she might not have sat and talked to me if had not been by myself. All of a sudden, I heard the sound of a television and I asked, "Do you have a TV running off of your generator?" She said, "Yes. It is so beautiful. Do you want to see?" I thought for a second and then I said sure.

The next thing I knew, I was watching a Thai historical drama on cable TV with this woman and her whole family at 8am. The woman kept filling me in on the plot. Her daughters sat with their own kids in front of me, all enthralled by the glowing screen. It’s amazing how important TV is, even in some of the most isolated places. I was so amazed by the whole moment that I asked the woman if I could take some pictures of everyone watching TV. She nodded, and I managed to get a great snap of the whole family glued to the screen. Despite the bizarreness of the situation I felt completely welcomed into this family’s home.

Later on in the day, I took a nice walk near the river, completely alone. I didn't see a soul for two hours. The clear water was full of beautiful rocks and there were majestic green hills in the distance. In India, there are people everywhere, so quiet moments like this are rare. I savored my solitude and thought about my early morning adventures. Being alone was refreshing once again.

The first time I wore a sari, I was in the middle of my Shansi fellowship orientation in Oberlin, Ohio.  There was a group of Lady Doak College students doing a project with students at Oberlin.  They did some sort of cultural show, which included yoga, dancing to Tamil pop music, and a demonstration of how to tie a sari.  I volunteered to have the sari tied on me, figuring that I might need to wear one some day.  It was a mildly embarrassing experience – everyone in the room stared at me while Priya Rajendran (an LDC professor) tucked the sari into the waistband of my jeans and wound it around me, muttering, “Of course you usually tuck it into a skirt, but this will do.”  So there I was, in front of an audience, standing awkwardly in a t-shirt and jeans with a sari on top.  I tried to take a couple of steps and almost stumbled onto the floor.  I managed to slowly amble to the other side of the room where all of the Tamil girls were sitting, chattering away and smiling at me.  On of them announced: “Nora, you are looking like Indira Gandhi with your short hair and your sari.”  I think I wore the sari for a total of ten minutes and then decided it was time to break free.  

Once I moved to India, I began to wear chudidas, which are knee-length tunics with baggy pants and a scarf. Wearing a chudida is basically like wearing nice pajamas.  It is a very comfortable garment – the pants even have a drawstring.  Chudidas are the typical traditional dress for young, unmarried women.  Women usually only wear saris if they are married or on special occasions.  So, I didn’t really think about wearing a sari for a while, until I started getting invited to weddings.   Suddenly I was getting invitations like this: “Nora, please come to my wedding – but you MUST wear a sari.”  I felt like I had to honor such a request.  I asked my friend Kassia, who has a lot more fashion sense than me, to go sari shopping with me.

On the day of the wedding, I returned from to Madurai from Mysore early in the morning.  It was a Sunday, so no one was around to help me to tie my sari.  My friend Divya promised to help me put my sari on at the wedding hall.  So, I walked into the bride’s dressing room with my chudida on, carrying my sari in a plastic bag.  Of course the first thing Shirin (the bride) said when she saw me was not “Hi Nora, how are you?” but “Hi Nora, where is your sari?  I asked you to wear a sari.”  I wondered how this could possibly impact Shirin’s wedding day when she must have had a lot of other things on her mind.  For some reason, if was important to her that I wear a sari.  So I proceeded to undress in this room full of Tamil girls.  First I attempted to put the blouse on backwards by accident, and then when I got in on, I realized it was much to tight at the base.  Indian corset, anyone?  I hadn’t had time to make sure that it fit right before the wedding because I had been out of town.  Once I had my blouse and my skirt on, I stood in the middle of the room and everyone watched while Divya tied the sari on me.  I am often a spectacle in India but not usually on this intimate of a scale.  The sari tying wasn’t going smoothly either.  Divya kept tugging at the drawstring of the skirt and tying a knot but it wasn’t ever tight enough.  Frustrated, Divya exclaimed, “It is because your hips are too narrow, that is why the string won’t get tight enough.”  Hmm…how did I go from fulfilling someone’s request to getting my femininity assaulted?  Without intending to be mean or critical, Indian women are pretty blunt when they comment on people’s appearances.  One time, Divya saw an picture of me from when I was in college.  I looked slightly boyish - my hair was shorter and I was wearing a t-shirt.  Divya looked at me, looked at the picture, paused, and then looked back at me and said, “You are more beautiful now that you are in India.”  I guess it was a compliment.  I think she meant that I look more like a girl now, which is true.  I usually think this sort of remark is pretty entertaining, but after the narrow hips comment, I was cringing.  Another student friend of mine, Priya, pitched in to help Divya tie the knot, explaining to me,”If we don’t get this tight enough, sari will fall off.”  This whole thing was beginning to seem like a bad idea to me.  Divya kept saying, “Why did you get a cotton sari, they are so hard to tie.”  Finally, after lots of sighs and grumbling and pinning, Divya tied my sari.  Everyone in the room marveled at me, the foreigner in the sari.  Soon after the initial positive response, Divya said, “Don’t you have a gold chain?”  I said no, and sensed a momentary vibe of disappointment around the room.  Apparently matching bangles and earrings weren’t enough.  I was bare without a chain.  Feeling pretty annoyed at this point, I muttered something about how they should all be happy I agreed to wear a sari at all.  Meanwhile, I felt as if I was taking attention away from the bride, who was almost ready in the adjoining room.  One of the other girls glanced my way and noticed that that the left side of my blouse wasn’t quite covered up with the sari, and said, “You have to be careful with this part, don’t let it slide over.”  It’s acceptable for the back of your midriff to show, but showing the front of your blouse is a little too much like exposing your breasts.  This is why girls conventionally when scarves draped over their chests when they are wearing chudidas.  Somehow the extra layer makes a difference.  Anyway, some more pins alleviated the problem of possible exposure.  


Everyone began to leave the room to watch the wedding ceremony.  Time to walk in the sari, I thought.  One of the girls sensed my reluctance to walk and gathered up the front pleats of my sari, handed them to me, and said, “Okay, go.”  I sat down as soon as I could.  Every time I had to get up and move around, I felt like the whole thing was going to fall off.  My sari was thoroughly pinned, but I’m pretty sure it become looser the longer I wore it.  I didn’t even have anyone take a picture of me because I felt so uncomfortable.  I was, of course, coaxed into getting my picture taken with the bride and all of her friends on the stage. When girls asked me what I thought of wearing a sari, I told them flat out that I thought it was really uncomfortable.  I felt exposed, confined, immobile, and just plain awkward.  The ironic thing was, most of the girls I talked to felt just as awkward in saris.  So why were they getting such a big kick out of me wearing one?  I’m still not sure of the answer, but seeing western women wear saris in something of an obsession, especially among Tamil women.  All I knew was, this was not something I would be doing often.  However, I am glad that I did it, because it gave me a lot of insight into how this garment impacts the level of freedom women have in Indian society.  Wearing a sari limits your mobility – you have to move slowly and carefully.  On the other hand, I see women who wear saris everyday and seem totally at ease. I’ve adjusted to a lot of things in India, but I’m still not interested in getting used to wearing a sari.  

During Shirin’s wedding, I imagined having to wear my sari again at Divya’s wedding.  I was planning to film Divya’s wedding.  Suddenly I had a nightmarish vision of me in a sari, saddled with all of my video equipment, tripping over my tripod and breaking my video camera.  Sari + video camera = disaster.  As soon as I got home, I quickly unhinged myself and changed into a t-shirt and jeans.  The next day, I talked to Divya and explained to her that I couldn’t possibly operate my video camera in a sari and that I would be happy to buy a new chudida to wear at her wedding.  I breathed a sigh of relief when Divya said, “Nora, my only wish is that you come to my marriage.”  

Mosquitoes, ants, very loud crickets, geckoes, a mouse, a small cockroach, flies, spiders, and millipedes (to be continued).

It's Saturday at 4am. I'm on a bus with about 60 Tamil girls. All of them live in the dorms at Lady Doak College, so they are not allowed to leave campus often. This is a special occasion. We are going to Kodaikkanal, a cool, hilly town in the Western Ghats, near the border of Kerala. However, the main thing is, we are leaving campus. There's a catch: we have to be back by 10pm. Kodaikkanal is four hours away. None of the girls seem phased by the long day ahead. I've noticed that many of the them have abandoned their traditional garb for jeans and t-shirts. I feel a little silly in my chudida - the westerner in traditional indian clothing. As soon as the bus starts, the driver blasts the soundtrack from Sivagi, the new Ranji Kanth movie. All the girls are cheering and dancing in the back of the bus. The bus is totally full. I am sitting next to the window in the front, squeezed in between one girl to my right another in front of me. There is a speaker directly above my head. Part of me is saying, "Why did I decide to go on this field trip?" Another part of me responds, "It cost less than $4 to go four hours away to a beautiful place that is 73 degrees instead of 95 degrees." And, despite the intense noise and lack of space, it was fun. I think between the way there and the way back, I saw parts of about five different Tamil movies. We would get through an hour of one film and then it would freeze up. I think I overdosed on Tamil pop culture that day. Kodaikkanal was incredibly beautiful though - green, lush, cool, mountainous - basically everything Madurai is not. After seeing many scenic overlooks, we went bike riding around a lake in the middle of the town. The bike I rode was clunky and had thick tires and breaks that barely worked. It was worth the 10 rupee (25 cent) rental fee - it still got me around the lake several times. At the end of the day I sort of felt like I had gone to an Indian version of summer camp.

My trip to Mamallapuram was much more eventful than I had anticipated. Ellis, Kassia, Sophia and I arrived at 6:30am, ate idlies and drank coffee, and headed to the beach. Mamallapuram is famous for being the site of a historic a Hindu temple complex called the Five Rathas. There is also a large temple called the Shore temple right near the beach. It was my first time seeing the ocean in India. The waves were huge, but I walked right into the water anyway. People don’t really wear bathing suits on the beach here – they just wear whatever they wear normally wear. Within minutes, my chudida pants were salty, sandy and soaked. The water was so nice and warm though, and it was refreshing to look out at the open sea after being in a congested city. It was strange to be in a touristy place after living in a city with very few tourists. Hawkers and shopkeepers hounded us constantly, saying things like – “Hello madam, please come. Postcards! Postcards, postcards. Only ten rupees.” Then we would say “vendam,” which means “I don’t want/need” in Tamil and the hawkers would look slightly surprised, especially once they saw that Kassia, Sophia and I were wearing Indian clothing. One hawker on the beach encountered us, paused, and then said in an amused tone, “Indian dress, Tamil talk,” and chuckled to himself. That was the most original line I’ve heard yet. The temples were very beautiful but there was something slightly disappointing about seeing places that existed solely to be tourist attractions. I missed being in a city bustling with people going about their everyday lives. It was also unbearably hot and sunny that day, which never helps. After we saw the temples, we got some lunch and took a nap at the hotel. That was when the trip took a slight detour. When we woke up, Sophia felt sick. Kassia, Ellis, and I initially thought she was dehydrated, so we made sure that she drank a lot of water, got her some juice and some oral re-hydration powder. We sat with her for a while and then we let her rest. Nausea seems like one of those things that people just have to let pass. We went for a walk on the Indian tourist side of the beach. The beaches were strangely divided into what seemed to be the Indian side and the foreigner’s side. The Indian tourist side was naturally more exciting. There were tons of families eating ice cream, walking in the water, and generally having a great time. When we got back to the hotel, Sophia still wasn’t feeling better, so Kassia took her to the town’s tiny hospital. It was late in the day by that point, so the doctor wasn’t there. The nurses gave Sophia a check up and some medicine. We let Sophia rest some more while we got dinner. We went to restaurant on the beach where we at delicious grilled fish and eavesdropped on Italian tourists.

Today I walked around with some of my photojournalism students while they took pictures. They were very timid with the camera at first. I told them to capture people involved in some sort of physical activity. None of them seemed to offer any destinations, so I led them to a small construction site on campus, full of piles of gravel, dust, and rusty poles sticking out of the ground, but also plenty of places to stand safely. My students approached the site reluctantly, but I sort of gently forced them to follow me and I started passing the camera around. There was one man hammering something, but the rest of the workers were taking sprawled out around the site, taking their afternoon naps. We began walking again and I pointed out the a large wagon full of tar, which I had taken pictures of the day before. I showed the girls how you could see the reflection of the sky in the pool of dripping tar. Some of the students were a bit repulsed by the tar oozing from the edges of the wagon, but a few seemed interested. Next I pointed them towards the college carpenter splitting wood with an ax. I told the girls to walk right up to him and take pictures from different angles. While this was going on, the men from the construction site returned from the naps and began working with the tar. We went back to the tar wagon and I told the girls to take pictures of the men pouring the tar and cranking the engine of the steam-roller. Suddenly, something clicked and I didn't have to instruct the students anymore. Then seemed genuinely engaged by what was going on in front of them. Better yet, they seemed to be having fun. I was excited by this moment because I was able to push the students to do something outside of their everyday experience. I have always been interested in industrial sites and machines, but I don't think the average girl in Madurai spends time exploring these things. Most girls I have met are extremely feminine, except for the few athletic girls who wear their sports jersies and jeans around campus. Also, most of them would not take pictures of random men working on construction sites. College age girls in Madurai rarely even interact with boys their own age. However, the workers on the site were extremely laid back and seemed mildly amused by the whole project. Once I get throught the necessary bureaucratic hoops, I cannot wait to take my students off-campus and watch them navigate the streets with their cameras in hand.

I'm here in Madurai and things are going well so far. Everything is an adventure, even doing something as simple as walking down the street. Basically there are no sidewalks (and no traffic rules). Pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws (tiny yellow taxi cars that look like little pods), ox-drawn carts, cars, trucks, buses, and random cows all occupy the same space. People honk their horns constantly - usually in order to pass someone, but sometimes just for the hell of it. A lot of cars even have little signs that say "sound horn" on the back. Being here is like experiencing sensory overload all of the time. The noises, the smells, the colors, the heat and the crowds here are more intense than in any place in America. There is always something interesting to look at. I took a picture of a guy driving an ox-cart and sitting on huge bags of rice. A couple of days ago, I saw a guy riding an elephant down a really busy street, right in the middle of a bunch of traffic. I've seen up to five people riding on one scooter (the little baby is always in the front). I think by the end of this fellowship I won't be surprised by anything. I'm teaching at a small women's Christian college. Most of the faculty is Christian, but 3/4 of the students are Hindu. The place is a little bit like a convent, since the students can only leave at certain times and seem to be restricted in a lot of ways. Luckily none of the rules apply to me. It is a very peaceful campus though. When I return, I'm always thankful for the calm mix of sounds in my apartment - frogs, birds, and the drone of the fan. All of the women I've met have been great. The students are really inquisitive. They are always trying to figure me out..."Why are you not married? Why did you come to India? How many brothers and sisters do you have?" The list goes on... If all goes well, I'll be teaching photography and filmmaking. I'll also teach art classes out of the International Center (a place established by Shansi where students can check out English books and movies). I'm also continuing to study Tamil. People just beam when I say like one sentence in Tamil. So, things are going well. I still have A LOT to get used to, but these things take time. Sometimes it's so hot that all I can do is take a nap. Usually whenever I feel overwhelmed, I'm soon pleasantly surprised by something - like the amazing spicy popcorn at the Tamil movie theater.