The day I stepped in cow dung

Until today, I had actually managed to avoid the large piles of cow poop that lie, goopy and stinky, on the streets of my neighborhood. I was innocently walking into Main Bazaar earlier this evening, reflecting on the unsettling events of the day and trying to put them in the past, when all of a sudden my flip flop slipped and slided in green mush. None of the aforementioned mush reached my feet, and I have the cosmos to thank for that one. So I traipsed cow dung down the remainder of Main Bazaar all the way down to Tooti Chowk, and thought "this is nothing less than what you deserve, Paharganj."

Before I stepped in holy cow feces, this is what I was thinking about:

I'm grateful to have found a slightly less bothersome -- and, for that matter, quicker -- way of walking to my older students' dorm in the mornings. Come time for the return trip, however, the new route is just as bad as the old one. I'm afraid I was harassed, pursued, and entreatied one too many times this morning. When yet another group of three men leered "hi beautiful, how are you today?" (and there *is* a significant difference between when these words are spoken aggressively, and when they are spoken pleasantly), I spat a rather strong expletive back at them. For several precious moments, they were too stunned to react. (I, too, was a little shocked at my behavior.) This bought me some time to walk away, but I hadn't gone very far when the ringleader began to walk beside me. "Why you talk shit," he accused, "why you talk shit to Indian people. You not liking Indian people. This is India. You are in India. No talking shit. No talking shit in India."

Good thing I was too terrified to do anything other than ignore him and speed up my walking as if I hadn't said a thing in the first place: he quickly tired of trying to shame me, and retreated to his pack of adoring followers. I'm just worried about the next time I run into him -- I hope he doesn't remember me.

I wish I had the grace to let these things pass, but sadly, I'm still smarting on two counts. The first involves victimhood -- though I'm not sure if I'm really much of a victim in this situation. The second lies in the particular words that my assailant chose to throw at me. It's not hard to see why.

But something scarier happened when I was on my way home from school in the afternoon. I was walking down the wide street that links Connaught Place with the railway station and saw, ambling toward me, a man who gave me that mythical "uh-oh" feeling. He was dark, dirty, and disheveled, but his walk wasn't like that of a street sweeper or ragpicker: those men and women walk with a great deal of humility; this man swayed and swaggered. His shirt was open all the way down the front, baring his chest. There weren't many people around us as he veered in my direction, and I knew not to even look his way. He still tried to touch me, however, sticking out his foot and making a slow grab for my body. He must have been drunk, and perhaps mentally or emotionally unstable. I sidestepped his reach with as much nonchalance as I could muster, and (for the second time today) quickened my pace and moved into a slow stream of other people walking down the street. Any larger reaction only would have made it worse.

It made me see the morning's incident in a different light. At least the men who leered and jeered at me earlier today knew the consequences of their actions: they understood that no matter how much I provoked them, they couldn't get away with anything more than the most basic of verbal abuses -- not in crowded Paharganj at noontime, anyhow. But the man in the street this afternoon was a different story. In his mind, there was nothing to stop him from physically reaching for me, following me, or doing who-knows-what else. I'm thankful that both his mental and bodily reflexes were too slow to allow him those courses of action.

Ten minutes after that was when I stepped in the cow dung.

I seem to be playing a woeful ballad on this blog lately, and I dislike that. Here's the other side of my one-rupee coin: I love my students. I love them, love them, love them. I love them when they have no idea what I'm talking about, and I love them when they don't have even the slightest intention of paying attention in class. Those daily moments of joy and laughter are worth all the unwelcome advances in the world: I promise you that for every story of yet another bothersome walk in my 'hood, there's a story of a kid's smile, sometimes missing a front tooth or two.