Abstract
Brown eyes fizzing with mischief, a giant smile creasing her angular face, Vidhya twisted from side to side. She mimed Charity’s search for the crow, scanning the courtyard; the whitewashed stand for the sacred basil plant, the plastic chair and the low orange rim of marigold bushes. Then she laughed, throwing out a palm towards me. I touched her palm, sharing in the joke. This was 1994, and I had been visiting the Himalayan foothill region of Kangra, Northwest India, for almost twenty years: long enough to know that mentioning a crow’s polluting touch was a euphemism for menstruation among high-caste women. Charity, though, the fictional blonde anthropologist of Kangra whom I was trying to imagine into being, was for Vidhya clearly a misguided outsider, both childlike and earnest.
When Charity comes to the village there can be a woman sitting separately. Little kids are always told ‘Kāh chhoi giyā’ — a crow touched her — when a woman sits aside. Charity can start frantically looking around. ‘What crow? Where’s the crow?’
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© 2007 Kirin Narayan
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Narayan, K. (2007). Moving Stories: Beyond the Local in Ethnography and Fiction. In: Robinson, K. (eds) Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592049_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592049_4
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