The Opposite of Loneliness Essays and Stories(54)

I liked it.

When a rickshaw driver turned around or a schoolboy held out his phone, I flattered myself beyond the obvious parameters. I knew, of course, that my white skin and light features were responsible for the attention, but some part of me still took pleasure from being stared at on trains and photographed in city gardens. I didn’t quite mind posing for all the pictures and felt, rather disgustingly, like some kind of movie star, forced to pause for snapshots outside shops and on the streets.

The sentiment sickened me. Each time I felt a twang of pleasure from the stares or picture requests, my ego was kicked down by my very revulsion that it had been boosted in the first place. I pondered my own narcissism as I smiled again and again next to Taj Mahal tourists from Hyderabad and Mumbai. “One photo please,” they’d ask, and I wouldn’t know how to say no. Luke would walk ahead and I’d inevitably stay behind. If it made them happy, after all, why not play along?

I confessed such sentiments to two Irish girls on the rooftop restaurant of a cheap hostel in Jaipur. We complained about the stares on trains and in rickshaws, comparing stories of extremes as the sun set and kites flew up from the pink city’s nearby roofs. After a few glasses of Indian wine, I offered that maybe, sometimes, it really wasn’t so bad. Yes, they responded, nodding and thinking. They agreed with the emotion, they saw what I meant. I laughed at our deprecation as the light faded, but searched their eyes in earnest nonetheless.

Yet as the weeks wore on, it became harder to see fascination as flattery. In the Buddhist town of Dharamsala, Tibetan monks pulled cheap cell phones from within their thick maroon robes and asked grinningly for pictures against the Himalayan skyline. In a rural village near Jaisalmer, a man had me pose with each of his skinny children. In the City of the Dead, no cameras were allowed. The dying come to die in the holy Ganges River, burning on its banks and escaping reincarnation in its waters. Walking through the chaos of bells, human ashes, stray dogs, and bones, I felt a kind of double relief. Not a single Indian requested a photograph, and not one time did I snap my own lens. One night during the monsoon, we wandered down the shore to watch the cremations, standing beside bald men as they threw powders into fires that raged despite the rain. Not a single person was looking at us.

The next morning we boarded a thirty-two-hour train. In the afternoon, Luke climbed down off his berth, past the thin aged man and his saffron wife, wandering out between the cars to see the jungle fade to palms. I opened my journal to begin writing and caught the corners of my eyes watching the woman watch me. My prose was jumbled and distracted and I was reminded for an instant of a performance-art piece at the Public Theater. An actress worked on a typewriter in a corner of the lobby—claiming art through the action of everyday observation. I’d left the theater with an almost angry indignation. There was nothing to be fascinated by, nothing to esteem, nothing to romanticize in this everyday examination of our immutable solipsism.

That night, when the train was dark, the woman’s eyes smiled up at me before she faded off to sleep. I heard the rain break and the men vending dosa and chai slowly fade from the aisles. Far from my months stumbling through markets and holy land, I wonder how many photographs of my pale limbs line the walls of strange Indian homes. Embarrassed, I fumbled off my flash from within the stained train sheets, capturing the woman to bring home to a tiny box on my shelf.





Song for the Special

Every generation thinks it’s special—my grandparents because they remember World War II, my parents because of discos and the moon. We have the Internet. Millions and billions of doors we can open and shut, posting ourselves into profiles and digital scrapbooks. Suddenly and totally, we’re threaded together in a network so terrifyingly colossal that we can finally see our terrifyingly tiny place in it. But we’re all individuals. It’s beaten into us in MLK Day assemblies (one person can make a difference!) and fourth-grade poster projects (what do you want to be when you grow up?). We can be anything! Our parents are divorced but we’re in love! Vaguely, quietly, we know we’ll be famous. For being president, for starring in a movie, for writing a feature at eighteen in the New York Times.

I’m so jealous. Unthinkable jealousies, jealousies of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel I’m reading and the Oscar-winning movie I just saw. Why didn’t I think to rewrite Mrs. Dalloway? I should have thought to chronicle a schizophrenic ballerina. It’s inexcusable. Everyone else is so successful, and I hate them. There’s a German word I learned about in psychology class called schadenfreude, which means a pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. The word flips into my head like a shaming pop-up when a girl doesn’t get the internship either or a boy’s show is bad. I was lying in bed the other night wondering whether the Germans created a word for its opposite when I realized that the displeasure derived from the fortune of others is easier to spell. I should have thought to coin its green eyes.

I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything. Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don’t want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.