Dirty

I am absolutely filthy. And filthy-minded as well, yes, you naughty people, but in more physical terms I actually have dirt all over me. I had the first mime class today, which turned out to be a group of males ranging in age from (approximately) 5 to 55 and me on a rough wooden stage in a theater. We learned four different ways to walk without moving and did various exercises, yoga-type stuff, some gymnastic-type things, etc. Then straight from there I went to kathak, where I finally met the senior teacher, who is a sweet older woman who is mesmerizing to watch even though she didn't stand up the entire time I was there (my teacher until now has been her disciple, a hearty young woman who dances with lots of flair). And of course I got very lost finding both and was quite late, but at least I got there eventually. So back to dirt. I've also been feeling dirty realizing what men here actually think of white women. During a fiasco trying to get to a club to hear jazz music (we were taken to the other end of the city because the name of the club is the same as the name of another part of town, and the driver wouldn't believe us when we said we knew where it was), Ramona, a Romanian film studies student who lives down the hall from me, told about how when she catches guys mentally undressing her she'll just yell at them in Bengali, "What are you looking at?" And men do do that a lot, I've found. From the movies, probably, they think that white women are prostitutes. Even in my mime class, the teachers and other students were looking at me funny, the little boys differently from the men. It doesn't bother me much yet, and I"m hoping it won't get worse. Wearing salwar kameeze (traditional Indian clothes) seems to help.
I wonder what those men would think if they saw Gobi Awakened, hee hee...