A western woman, during a casual conversation in a train, somewhere in Europe, asked me about my ‘origins’. Her interest in this was piqued by the way I looked (in a nice way). To her I neither looked ‘Eastern’ nor ‘Western.’ I was somewhat new to the west and the ways of the world. I beamingly said to her: “Oh my mum is a green eyed blonde and Grand pa looks like a Scotsman.”
When I told her where I was from (Kashmir), she clammed up. After an awkward pause, she said, “you sound highly educated.”
This remark pleased and flattered me. The 3-hour train ride, till I got off at my destination, was filled by a scintillating conversation, some aspects of which left me puzzled.
Well-travelled, articulate, with a sophisticated and nuanced world view, the woman narrated to me some of the sordid experiences, the most glaring of which was the attention she got in South Asia and parts of the Middle East.
Pared to the bone, what had unnerved her were the sexualized glares, remarks and salacious comments. “They saw me as a ‘whore’,” she said. She would, she said, sit at a café. Lo and presto, the waiters would suddenly hover around her table unnecessarily. Random men would ogle at her and even sit near her making unsolicited conversations.
“They would mentally undress me,” she said. Initially she was polite, but it got so bad that she then snapped. She also told me about getting ripped off. An item whose actual sales price was say Rs 10, would be sold to her for 200-300 times the price.
“I wanted to help by ethical shopping but Jeez,” she said, rolling her eyes. She, however, had some good things to say about people. “I met some great, very warm, polite and hospitable people there. We don’t have that kind of thing in Europe,” she said.
“But, at times, that would get a bit overwhelming,” she added. “Random people would invite me home for tea. Some would even offer accommodation to me for free. I could stay as long as possible,” she said.
The woman then said something about joint families, female education and so on. When the train stopped at the station I had to alight, the woman planted a goodbye kiss on my cheek and warmly shook my hands.
As I got off the train and sauntered toward my hotel, the content of the conversation with her swirled and twirled in my head. “Weird,” I thought. “Maybe most of it is in her mind,” I said a tad loudly.
It was when I returned to Kashmir in a convoluted way, through the Middle East and South Asia that the truth and import of the woman’s experiences hit home, so to speak. There was an eerie echo of what the woman had experienced (not sexualized though obviously).
As a 6 foot 3 inches tall male, with neither eastern nor western looks, and as someone who looks ‘wealthy’ maybe because of the way I carried myself, my demeanor and the way I spoke, people mistook me as a westerner. People spoke to me in English, addressed me as ‘sir’ and so on.
But it was the attention, the solicitations and related themes that got to me. Horrifying was an experience that drove the European woman’s points and experiences hit poignantly home.
In the early 2000s, an Australian female friend visited me in Kashmir. I was 30 and she would have been around 25 years old. While we were having dinner one evening, at a restaurant, I excused myself and went to the men’s room.
When I returned to the dining hall, my friend, aghast and distraught, was crying, tears streaking down her face.
Alarmed, I asked her what had happened. After getting consoled, she pointed out to a man and said, “this man, the moment you went to the men’s room, approached me and said, Come with me. I will take you to a nice hotel. Let’s spend the night together.”
I looked at the man. He must have been around 70 years old. My friend, to repeat very young. I was embarrassed and deeply hurt. The urge to thrash the man was undercut by other guests in the hotel who berated and humiliated him after I said loudly what he had done and who held me back.
When my friend returned to Australia, she apologized to me and said that she could not continue friendship with me. She had posted her South Asia visit seen a psychologist who had diagnosed her with trauma and counselled her to evict every trace of her memories of the visit-even good ones.
What is the relevance of these vignettes? Are these of any import? What do they tell us about immigration and people movements into the West? While the proverbial ‘sample size’ is small and somewhat anecdotal, but these could be held to be generic and suggestive common experiences many western women have in some non-western contexts.
To be sure, these are not meant to demean nonwestern peoples; in any given society there are good, the bad and the ugly people. And, by no means, this is to whitewash western males or people; in the west too, there are sexual predators, and assorted ‘shitty’ people.
But, on balance, because of prevailing normative ideals and culture- open societies in the west and somewhat closed in the non-west, there are certain pathologies peculiar to the non-west-like the ones described here. (There are pathologies in the West too).
But the issue that warrants attention here is immigration. If these male pathologies, trust and transactional honesty leaves much wanting in the non-west (relatively speaking), can western societies cope up with large inflows of people who have a different world view? Will this not lead to psychic and emotional injuries to host societies? There are no neat answers to these questions.
But in the main, large inflows of people into the US may not be entirely salubrious. It is here that the 47th president of the US, Donald Trump enters the picture. While he has copped flak for his stance on immigration, Trump is not entirely wrong in his diagnosis and assessment.
It may just be that the US president's means and measures are a tad extreme. But for policy reversals, initial extreme measures and announcements may be necessary. Should then immigration into the US and other countries be banned?
Wholesale barring immigration may neither be prudent nor practical. But some measure of sobriety and proportion must be imparted to immigrant flows.
Admittedly, this is a broad, general and generic assertion by way of a solution. The challenge is to find the optimal golden mean that does not inundate and thus injure host societies of the west but at the same time keeps some measure of openness alive.
What is this golden mean? At this point in time, we simply do not know!
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