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.
Photograph: Drying Saris by Amanda Coggin
Along the Ganges River in Varanasi, India
