It's raining men

Today it’s raining. I think it’s been raining softly for most of the day (a very Dutch style of rain where the rain is really fine, almost like mist and you can walk through it, but it’s cold and continuous) but I wouldn’t know as I was asleep for a great part of it.

Last night I was invited to some of the guys’ home who I’ve been hanging out with. They live in two bedrooms somewhere a short distance away from the centre. We sat and talked about everything from the size of the galaxy to good literature and even, dare I say it, gossip. Yes, occasionally even I gossip.

I crashed out there for a couple of hours, then headed back to my new hotel (which has a 24 hour door, a must for me I’ve found) where the managers looked quite surprised to find me walking in at 11 o’clock in the morning. They probably thought I had had a much more adventurous night than I had actually had.

I slept some more and now I’m back near the MG road (short for Mahatma Gandhi Road). It’s three o’clock and I have another suspicion tonight will not end early.

That’s all cool, except I have one important question that I need answered: Where are all the women? It’s very strange for me to hang out in almost completely male company. It seems like the sexes don’t mix very much over here at all. Though there are women about they seem to almost always be either in the company of each other, or in the company of their boyfriends; and this is in one of the most western cities of India.

I’m going to have to figure out how to solve this, because I find idea of remaining womanless for much longer very unappealing. And no, not just in that way. It isn’t always about carnal knowledge, you dirty minded dodger! Well maybe it is a little, but there is more to it than that. I’d like to meet and get to know (in the normal sense, not the biblical one) Indian women. I’d like to understand how they tick and how different they are from the women I’m used to.

So far, almost all the conversations I’ve had with women have been with Western ones. That’s cool, but I already have a reasonable idea about how Western women work. It’s how the South Asians fit together that still mystifies (and therefore intrigues) me.