Eastern Passage

On trips to India and Bangladesh, the novelist Nell Freudenberger struggled with what to wear—and what kind of woman she wanted to be.

I was 22 when I first went to India. In the late ’90s, the hippie trail from Agra to Jaipur to Rishikesh was still full of backpackers. Germans, Israelis, and Australians traversed the country in elephant-printed harem pants and Buddhist prayer beads, indulging in banana-pancake breakfasts and cannabis-laced bhang lassis. My boyfriend—a serious student of the subcontinent, equipped with maps, train tables, and a prestigious fellowship—planned to do India differently. We would dress respectfully, live on a local budget—less than $5 a day—and see places other backpackers missed. When we bought cannabis, it was from a farmer in a Himalayan village where they grew the world-famous Malana cream. We were two recent Harvard graduates in India, and we were all about doing our homework.

Young people may be known for taking risks, but often that rebellion has a conventional shape. Looking back, our pretensions to authenticity were just another set of rules. One thing my American boyfriend felt strongly about was Indian clothing on white women, which he considered not only culturally insensitive but unattractive. This presented me with a problem, since the shorts and T-shirts left over from my LA adolescence were too revealing, especially in the off-the-beatentrack architectural sites we liked to visit.

I opted instead for long skirts and short-sleeve blouses, modest but impractical for a hike or overnight train. Once, traveling second class from Gwalior to Agra, we almost missed our stop; when the conductor bellowed Agra, Agra, Agra, we rushed to the exit and leapt from the moving train. He made it fine, but in my ankle-length skirt and platform sandals, carrying a backpack half the length of my body, I stumbled and fell on the platform. When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers. In my attempt to fit in, I’d wound up the most foolish kind of spectacle.