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2/6/2023

Being white in Pune is generally a pleasant experience. Unlike in Japan where whiteness generates a reflex aversion, here whiteness draws admiration or desire. Children’s faces, which are usually easier to read, start with a squinted frown as they make sense of what they see (someone shaped like an older lady but in local clothing) and then as my whiteness becomes the dominant story, there is a smile. Sometimes the smile is small and private, and sometimes delighted, eager. I’ve become less uncomfortable accepting how I’m seen here, although the overt bias towards light skin is disturbing. Wearing wrinkled and somewhat shabby clothes I stopped at a favorite bakery/sweets shop run by Sikhs to buy a bottle of water, and the young man serving me paused frowning to ask in English, “are you Indian?” I answered in Marathi that no, I was American and his face opened in relief as he asked, “and how do you like it here?” I told him I was very happy here and we beamed at each other. Still, I wondered, if I’d turned out to be some kind of North Indian or Parsi or the like, would his frown have softened?

Getting off a bus recently, a sudden jolt twisted me almost into the lap of a teenage boy. There was some laughter as the crowd around me helped me back on my feet. I was wearing a sari, and several people told each other approvingly: see, the foreigner is speaking our language and wearing a sari. As I got down from the bus a woman eagerly helped me with my heavy sack and then urged me to join her in a rickshaw since she was going in the same direction (on the bus we had already established that she was heading for an area a bit further down the road than where I was going). Again I wondered, will there come a time when whiteness will merely be amusing or even obnoxious rather than an attraction? But then again, it’s not just the whiteness but the fact that this white person is trying to adapt, is showing respect by wearing a sari. At the lodge I paused to pick up my key, saying only a greeting and in Marathi, ‘key please,’ but as I walked away the desk clerk said in Marathi to a couple checking in, 'yes, she’s foreign and she speaks beautiful Marathi.' He himself fully knew that was an extreme exaggeration, but as I hadn’t proved otherwise, they turned and stared at me with bright smiles until I stepped into the lift. 

In my previous visits to Maharashtra, I became used to people begging Lee (with his conspicuous camera) to take their photo; and with the advent of cell phones, asking to take selfies with us. I suppose it’s the same impulse as autograph-seeking: the desire to have a record of proximity with something special. Usually I complied, although in tourist areas where whole busloads of excited children can gang up, I would run away. These days in Pune, though, no one has asked for my photo except after we’d had a conversation in a coffee shop, exchanged email or the like. Maybe like New Yorkers they are learning to be more discreet, or maybe there are enough foreigners around that it’s just not that thrilling any more.

My own impulse to take a picture usually happens when I see an item of nostalgia, like the ox-cart trundling along in Pune traffic carrying dirt from the riverside, probably for someone’s garden, evoking decades past when motorized vehicles were rare. I didn’t take a photograph of the ox-cart. In fact, I have taken very few photos. Partly it’s because I have the thought that I can’t replace what Lee would have done in the same circumstance. And partly it’s out of a desire to remain inconspicuous. Mainly, though, I don’t enjoy the effect on people when they feel a lens directed toward them. Lee himself has written about his preference to keep people out of his photographs.

There’s another reason I don’t take out the camera, too, one that I have not quite put into words. It has to do with how one sees a place. My experience of Pune is tentative. I am not sure yet how this place wants to be seen. Walking along JM and MC roads I noticed how difficult it is for my eye to know where to rest. I struggle with figure and ground problems. At first the sidewalk scenes seemed as flat as movie screens: walls of hoardings (billboards), jumbles of smaller signs, the smaller streetside lanes almost unseen under banners and balconies and merging vehicles. By now my eye begins to see depth, to follow trajectories, but still I don’t see what to frame. On the drive from Ellora my eye searched and searched for the remembered and for what remained after decades of change. Also birds, animals, water. One image remains with me: a skeletal old man in grubby white on a cement platform clutching his knees in the morning cold staring at a huge billboard showing a gigantic platter of rich food. But I didn't take a picture. On a relatively long bus ride when I (mercifully) had a seat by a window, at stops I studied what my eye reached: faces of people on passing two-wheelers, the small ditch each vehicle bumped over one by one, the plants resolutely forcing their way through old walls, the heavy gray dust coating abandoned contraptions that were once exciting objects of hope.  

Dust and grime and rubble is covering what only a decade ago was shiny with entrepreneurial optimism. On the Satara road out of town, I remember from bus trips in years past a cement roadside strip (shops downstairs, offices and apartments upstairs) with the usual tea stalls, scooter repair shops, “permit rooms” (bars with permits to sell alcohol), and there was an illuminated sign in bright colors offering “Hot Chips.”  This kind of fancy sign and the jarring presence of modern snacks was, back when Lee and I saw it, still unusual. Then a block later, there was another one. The second sign, though, was clumsily misspelled, and I remember Lee taking a snap from the bus window, amused by the juxtaposition of the dignified and practical versus the aspirationally tacky. Earlier this week riding back from the village on that same road, there it was: the same sign: “Hot Chips.” But now it was just a little flag of color in a widely stretched quilt of bigger, brighter more demanding signs. Something in me twinged with nostalgia, but we had moved on before I thought about a photograph.