"Can I ask you about your dot?"

After work, I was walking to the bus with Anu, who lives near my neighborhood. She was saying that I would be the center of attention when I went to the communalism workshop in the village of Mahbubnagar. I told her I don't mind when women and children stare at me, because the women generally smile back when I smile at them, and the kids like to say "hi! hi! hi!" and are super cute. It's the men staring that bothers me, because it is creepy and if I were to smile at them, as I do with the women, it would be interpreted disturbingly incorrectly. I know I'm a foreigner, I told her, but I still don't like the assumption that I am rich/easy/exciting just because I am a white woman. Why do all these men have to stare at me?

Anu was silent for a moment, and then asked me what would happen if an Indian woman came to America - would they get similar treatment?

"Oh no," I said. "They might stare, but it would be less sexual and more just because she was different... and we might talk louder to her, even if she spoke perfect English because people who speak English with an Indian accent are assumed to be intermediate in their English-speaking abilities, and ask her if 'Indian' was her first language... and we might institutionally discr iminate against her, but just a little, and somewhat subtly... and we might not stare so overtly in public, but instead fetishize her... And if it were an Indian Muslim women who wore a Burqa we would definitely stare, and comment in an airport that she would be thoroughly searched, because she is likely a suicide bomber, or part of an islamofacist terrorist mutiny, and talk openly about how oppressed she was by her men because she has to wear that awful thing, because clearly no woman would ever willingly choose such a burden, and...

"Oh."