The Stranger

Mumbai, 2016.

I am going to pee myself. Mumbai isn’t an easy place to find a public restroom, especially around Borivali, in its cluster of greying residential buildings and lack of restaurants to meander into. My bladder needs catharsis. I am hobbling around, so full I may internally bleed if I hold it in any longer. And then I see him. A man fumbling with the front door of a six-story apartment, and without thinking, I run over to him. “May I use your bathroom?” He smiles with a thick mustache framing purple, upturned lips. “Sure, challo betee.” Of course, let’s go, my child.

I am not a child, but I guess everything in life is relative. I’ve always looked younger in my bird-boned daintiness. This man is old enough to be my father, with his graying whiskers and receding hairline and cheeks subjected to the sagginess of time.

I am twenty-one, now old enough to drink a beer at the bar without using fake IDs or hustling the doorman. The last time I used a fake ID, it was a white Ashkenazi Jewish woman’s. In the license photo, she had dark hair like mine (our only commonality). Her name was Janelle T. Herman. The bouncer rolled his eyes and rejected me immediately, “Girl, yuh ain’t white. Yuh ain't a Janelle T. Herman”.

I follow the stranger up the stairs, and my stomach sounds like it’s purring; something inside me is twisting about. Maybe I will pee myself before I reach his front door. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen to him in Mumbai. If he’s anything like my father, they’ve both seen much worse/weirder stuff growing up here.

I vividly remember at age seven, crossing Peddar Road with my daddy and tripping over something log-like. It was a dead person. Flies cornered his unblinking open eyes. His jaw was slack. His face was crisped from the midday sun. My father dragged me onward as I shouted, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” as my little arms flailed about. The stream of people behind us casually stepped over the corpse as if he was a pile of dog shit.

I was crying hot, slobbery tears, and my father was blasé in his lack of response. In that moment, I sensed the weight of my otherness. I was not a real Indian. Too soft. Even now, I am very American in my sensitivity, meaning too weak for India’s intensity. I feel the same around this man now, too American. He tells me a jumble of words I can’t reach as I don’t really speak Hindi. I don’t know what the heck he’s saying, and it hurts my head to concentrate, and I’m going to pee myself.

His apartment is on the third floor. He jingles the keys to the left and steps aside to let me in. With a bony index finger, he points to the last door down the hall. I half run through the living room. This stranger is a no-frills type of person, or maybe a renunciate. There are only the absolute necessities. A dark teak table. Four plastic chairs. A marbled Ganpati statue on the windowsill.

The bathroom is dank and small, so small I cannot believe this man can fit on the toilet wedged between narrow tile walls. I relieve myself slowly. The relief is purely physical because my mind begins to catch up with the reality of where I am. I am in a stranger’s apartment in Mumbai, meaning, an Indian man’s private space.

I am not the “strangers are strange” kind of person. I’ve hitchhiked and couch-surfed in several countries, but still, this is India. The India my mother was fondled in by her dentist while he numbed her with laughing gas at age ten. Her chest then was no bigger than what she called mosquito bites. This is the India where my uncle locked his wife in the basement, in total darkness, alone for days on end, and wasn’t called abusive. This is the India of bride burning and female feticide. This is the India where men are godified and women serve. Is this man one of these men?

A prickly fear rises up my neck and into my face. Growing up, my mother didn’t want me to even sleep at a friend’s house if the friend had a father at home. My whole life I’ve been told “stay safe” more than “have fun.” I’ve been lectured for my risky solo world travel, that I’m too young for it, but the unspoken understanding is also too female for it.

I brace myself for the inevitable that every woman in my family has warned me about. Everyone’s right, I’m too trusting. I’m too open. It’s the fate of a woman with my disposition for freedom, and now it’s time to pay with my body.

At least I’m grown, not like what happened to my aunt way before her little body got her first period. I can fight. I will resist him. I will refuse to freeze. I will coax my body into necessary violence. I will be claws and teeth. I will dish out screams and punches to the groin.

My heart is thumping so loud, I worry he can hear it. I crack the bathroom door open and poke my head out to see if the man is standing outside waiting for me with a knife or a hard-on. I plan to make a run for it before anything weird happens.

I hear the clinking of pots in the kitchen, and he calls out, “Chai, betee.” Part of me, the part that’s inherited my mother’s stories, says to book it. The other part, the part beyond the culture, says he’s just a human who wants to drink tea with me.

I slink out of the bathroom. Perched at the kitchen table is a pruny woman in a crimson saree. His amma? The man is delicately placing biscuits on a silver plate as golden light fills the edges of the apartment. Chai is gurgling in the pot. The air is cardamom-spiced and earthy, and Mumbai’s toxic stench doesn’t exist here.

He smiles with his eyes and lips and tells me to sit down in a Gujarati accent. A kindness radiates from his sing-song voice. The part of me that believes in man's benevolence takes the stage, knowing, this stranger is not the man of my mother’s stories, and this scene of him pouring tea for me is the real India too.