After nine months of backpacking alone around Asia, I was primed and ready to meet a group of fantastic girls, particularly because India had proven to be the ultimate challenge for a single woman. Indian men often asked for my hand in marriage—I always declined, but they grabbed me anyway. I could never leave my backpack alone on the train and was forced to lock it to my sleeper overnight. Groups of Indians stood a foot away from me—an area I would normally deem “personal space”—and stared. When the baby cow outside my guesthouse fell and broke her hip, I watched her struggle for the next three days in that same spot until she was gone. I was able to ask a new girlfriend what had happened to the little cow. She laughed. “Oh, don’t think those Indians are always on top of their karma. Once those cows die, they go into the Ganges like everything else and dive in after them for the leather.”
Varanasi was the first place in nine months where I met a group of women that rivaled my girlfriends back home. Annie, an Australian living in London, wrote for British Airways Magazine as a beauty columnist. She was researching Ayurvedic beauty products and was thrilled when I introduced her to my version of the perfect facial mask: sandalwood powder mixed with rose water. Then there was Daphne, an Australian hippie who always wore a smile on her face and walked with an air of grace. Daphne and Annie had met months before in Kathmandu at a Vipassana retreat, which I had also studied in my quest for spirituality. Vipassana courses were ten-day silent retreats where folks who never knew a thing about meditation would come out with a heightened sense of their bodies and themselves. Then there was a kind Finnish girl who explained to me that Finland was actually much closer to Estonia than Scandinavia. Lastly I met Olivia, a Long Island “yogini” who coached me on how to bargain in Hindi at the market. I lived with Olivia on the rooftop of an Indian family’s home. While she slapped the dough for our chapatis, she sent me out to the street for ghee (clarified butter) from the ghee-man, paneer (cheese) from the paneer-man, and milk for our chai— from a cow I stood behind and hoped I wouldn’t get kicked by.
Annie warded off the local men who drooled over her blue eyes and blonde braids by holding a safety pin in its open position hidden in her hand. When men would get too close on the bus or the street—which they did when they wanted to cop a feel—Annie would poke them. Daphne could sit along the bathing ghats of the Ganges River, sip her chai, and chat with a large group of leering men. She’d laugh and smile and appear almost clueless while the men whispered like they were teenage boys. Olivia put up with no one by walking briskly through the narrow streets with a shawl that never fell from her shoulders. I, on the other hand, managed to slap a ten-year-old boy across the face one afternoon. I was stressed, late for my train, and couldn’t handle the fact that the boy tried to steal my bag of guavas.
I wasn’t alone anymore and had found camaraderie in a group of international women in a country filled with men. Where were the Western men? It didn’t matter. We didn’t need them. Instead, we attended Indian classical music concerts on the main ghat of the Ganges River while candles and marigolds floated on the water. We giggled while buying popcorn from a man who laid it out on a dirty wooden cart. We went for the pizza place that had opened up down the river because we were tired of getting sick, missed our Western diet, and had heard a rumor that they had a killer apple pie. I emailed my best girlfriends back home and told them that I had found their traveling counterparts. I told them it was just us girls, but not to worry, because they were still my first-string girls.
