“I strongly implied that I was the mistress of a wealthy Saudi oil baron.”
I also used to have a hard time believing in love. My first “serious” high school boyfriend (of all of ten weeks) dumped me because I outscored him in AP Chemistry. Things didn’t get much better in college: I dated a guy who believed he was Nietzsche’s intellectual heir and had to place one fuck buddy on suicide watch. So, I wasn’t expecting much in the way of romantic entanglements when I left school for a summer job in development in India. Two weeks in, I knew I was right. In conservative South India, white women are de facto porn stars – it’s only fair since all the contraband porn that sneaks in features whites. As a result, I got plenty of attention (think drive-by sexual harassment moped-style) but made little romantic headway.
And then I met A. I had a sightseeing date with a (female) Japanese expatriate. She brought her (male, very Indian) hot roommate. At lunch, he ordered us lamb brain. A week later, after a long, hard conversation with myself about mixed signals and conservative Indian values, after 10 hours of talking, smoking, drinking, and starring longingly (pathetically) at one another, I climbed on top of him and stuck my tongue in his mouth. He was surprised to learn Americans kissed with tongue. The next day, I moved out of my office, where I had temporary housing, and into his apartment. My office boy, who had long been hoping to catch the American doing scandalous American things, was overjoyed.
If either A or I had anything that remotely resembled good sense, we would have quit the day before I left for America. We didn’t. And by the grace of video skype, things mostly worked out. I promised to return in December (my winter break and India’s peak travel season), only to watch in horror as ticket prices escalated from $1800 to $3000 in the space of two weeks. Undeterred, I procured my tickets using purchased miles (which is a breach of contract for most if not all airlines), only to be interrogated by corporate security about my sketchy itinerary when I reached the airport. My heart thumping, I thought, “OMG, OMG, I am never going to see my boyfriend or the inside of an aircraft again.” After I strongly implied that I was the mistress of a wealthy Saudi oil baron, who had given me the miles, the corporate fuzz let me fly onward. In India again, I met my boy’s parents and helped perpetuate a mass lie to his extended family about my non-girlfriend status lest they all believe that he had morally lost his way. On the upside, we also went houseboating and risked indecent exposure on an overnight train. We’ve been making our impossible, mostly transcontinental relationship work for 8 months. In between, he introduced me to great Indian film and literature. I introduced him to Dan Savage’s column. I’m a snobby, globetrotting Ivy League elitist. My boyfriend grew up in working class Bombay and has never left India. The fact that we can make a relationship work (and work, for the most part, happily) that transcends deep-set cultural and socio-economic differences (not to mention a distance of a few tens of thousands of miles) says something about the illogic of where and when we find love. It also suggests that love is “memoryless” and that past failures have little impact on future successes except that they teach us a little bit more about what we are looking for.
