Humour: Travelling with the Paleface

Brownfaces amongst palefaces beside the Tiber

Being an Indian in a coach full of foreigners in Italy has its advantages and disadvantages,  discovers Sheila Kumar

 To be fair, we had insisted that we tour foreign parts, as it were, with anyone but Indians.

Don’t get me wrong, I am as fond of my fellow Indian as the next person; only, I have some experience of how badly Indians travel.

How they cart their idiosyncrasies abroad with their potlums and urugais; how they insist on
dal-roti-rice wherever they are, how they eschew all that they are wary of, which runs a wide gamut from Chippendale shows to a walk down the fashion district of Paris. And so on
and so forth.

The travel agent understood perfectly. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “I’m booking you on a coach trip with Americans, Australians and Europeans. You’ll be guaranteed great local food (they’ll insist on it), you’ll get insights into how other communities live, and there will be no short cuts where sight-seeing is concerned, they won’t stand for that kind of thing.

And I will vouch that they make for great fellow travellers.” It seems he had done one such trip. (Of course, it was much later that we found out he had carried a small section of his community along… wife, in-laws and two couples from down his street). Mixed group.

And so it was that my sister and I boarded a coach with a sundry lot of Americans, Canadians, Australians and a couple from Malaysia, a motley crew from all walks of life.

There was a man retired from the construction business, a beautician, the owner of a boutique, a man who’d made `several fortunes’ on the stock market, a woman who looked like she was recovering from some kind of nervous problem; a nurse, an Outback dude, one old couple who were also obviously old money, from upstate New York.

The younger lot was students, heavy on the make-up and light on curiosity about the places they were visiting.

At first, their sheer effusiveness upon meeting Indians camouflaged their sheer ignorance. I spent a good ten minutes listening to the stock market adventurer talking about how his Indian neighbours invited him to `the valley’ and how he loved the lights out there (Kashmir? Unlikely, I thought, even as I politely listened) before I cottoned on that he was talking about Diwali.

The hairdresser from Canberra happened to be walking with me around Bologna one sunny morning and asked me about the Valley (the real one, this time) with all the air of making light conversation. “All those people killed there for nothing,” she said, smiling brightly.

The only way to deflect that conversation was by asking her about the boat people, John Howard’s bete noire. And, of course, she knew as little about that as she did about Kashmir, so both of us turned to the topic of anti-frizz lotions with mutual relief.

Soon, we the Indians were   being asked questions ranging from the serious to the seriously ridiculous. The elderly couple had yet to visit India and asked keenly about the country.

The former construction businessman asked about the poverty, others about er, elephants and snakes (I kid you not).

Willy-nilly, we had become some sort of ambassadors for India. Be it knowledge of wines and cheese, my having read up on some of the more famous cities on our itinerary, why, even the puns we cracked in ye olde English seemed to have the palefaces in perpetual surprise.

One sublime moment came when we were driving down a leafy avenue full of old buildings and suddenly to mar the view, appeared the golden arch of a McDonalds. I nudged my sister ruefully, only for the Crocodile Dundee of our tour to lean forward and ask, “Your first McDonald, eh?”

The accents were something else. Of course, you got used to them after a while but every so often, you went into the old “Sorry? Excuse me?” routine.

The Oz accents were toughest, followed by the Canadian drawl. If the American mangling of English was amusing, the Malaysian couple was downright incomprehensible. My sister and I shared a table with the latter couple at a trattoria in Milan and the man insisted on speaking Italian to the dumbfounded waiter.

Our conversation was a brief and fraught interlude; all I gleaned was that the man had visited Chennai (and Vindaloo, his wife put in helpfully, before he told her that was the name of a dish not an Indian city) and loved,no, not the dosa and idli-sambar but the ice creams in our town! “Much better than the Italian gelato,” he insisted and we nodded in agreement weakly.

Derision seemed to come easily to the Americans and they spared not one of the Italian masters: da Vinci, they decided, was not a very popular man because he obviously had a lot of time on his hands to do all that he did.

They tired of the cathedrals early on in the tour, they felt David had been sculpted when Michelangelo had felt out of sorts,  and they chortled loud and long over the handful of askew towers we saw, not just in Pisa but a few other places, too.

Food was another divide. Often, after a long hard day of sightseeing, all we would want to do would be to soak our feet and turn in early. But not our fellow travellers, oh no.

However arduous the trudge, they’d be there at the dinner or lunch table, enthusiasm intact, wit flowing and asking us every now and then, “You girls tire easily, eh?” Our inability
to do full justice to four-course meals was a matter of concern, too.

And so it was that after a week spent in the company of these friendly but somewhat alien palefaces, we were in Venice when an Indian tour group disembarked and walked towards us.

There were men dressed in woollens that would have done an Arctic expedition proud, women in heavy silk saris and balaclavas (a deadly combination), and kids squabbling, shouting. I caught the eye of one woman and smiled. Her jaw dropped, closed shut and she hurried past, averting her gaze.

It took a minute before the realisation clicked in: she was wary of me. And Indians
always steer clear of  what they are suspicious of.

Well, it served me right!

http://www.hindu.com/mp/2006/01/21/stories/2006012100930200.htm

Thus ran in THE HINDU of 21 Jan 2006.