Fighting begun? Well, not quite, but certainly loss of patience. Plane full of freshly-minted rising classes, foreign-returned and flashing gold and phones. Ostentatious in their employment of those phones. Loud voices announcing their sense of self-importance. Arms waving back and forth lending emphasis to the volume of the conversation. "Look at me" it shouts. "Look at how well I've done. Look at all that I can afford".
It used to be only the domain of those foreign-born or foreign-bred, this ostentation and preening. But now it's a mark of wealth, of coming up in the world. Perhaps it always was. It just seemed to those of us on the other side, a mark of difference. We never understood the envious daggers that flew so true from retina to heart. We felt their green-hued points pierce the thin shells of our ego-armour long before we ever heard the snide remarks or cruel taunts - the jeers about our now-changed accents, our fancy modern clothes, our westernised, unoiled, short-cropped hair, or worst of all, the easy assumption that our western lives necessarily meant easy morals too.
That is the hardest to encounter still. The apparent comfort men feel in holding their daughter's hand on one side while happily pinching a bottom or groping a bosom on the other. That is the part, the hallmark of every visit to India (or at least Kerala) since the age of 13, that fills my heart with dread and leaves me in a cold sweat of stomach-churning trepidation for weeks before entering the country.
It used to be only the domain of those foreign-born or foreign-bred, this ostentation and preening. But now it's a mark of wealth, of coming up in the world. Perhaps it always was. It just seemed to those of us on the other side, a mark of difference. We never understood the envious daggers that flew so true from retina to heart. We felt their green-hued points pierce the thin shells of our ego-armour long before we ever heard the snide remarks or cruel taunts - the jeers about our now-changed accents, our fancy modern clothes, our westernised, unoiled, short-cropped hair, or worst of all, the easy assumption that our western lives necessarily meant easy morals too.
That is the hardest to encounter still. The apparent comfort men feel in holding their daughter's hand on one side while happily pinching a bottom or groping a bosom on the other. That is the part, the hallmark of every visit to India (or at least Kerala) since the age of 13, that fills my heart with dread and leaves me in a cold sweat of stomach-churning trepidation for weeks before entering the country.
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