She kept forgetting that this is no Utopian country, but far far from it. Had she understood this, it would have been easier for her to survive here.
She can still replay that fateful day in her head when she packed everything up in her Heliopolis apartment in Cairo and moved India leaving behind a man who loved her and her booming business with the hope of adventure and a starry reality. She was delusional, obviously. But that is her, and change had worked well for her before. But India is a different game altogether. The people here are almost a different species, who have adapted and evolved over time. Her family here too had adapted. But she just couldn’t.
Three years, and many many deceitful encounters later, she has to make a decision. But again it isn’t easy.
Why won’t you just leave if you hate it here so much?
Why won’t you go back to Cairo?
What we don’t realize is that people make bad choices all the time. People do. And there are people all over the world.
And she had her own baggage. All her savings spent on trying to make her experience of living in India worthwhile. But at the end of it all, it was squandered, and now she feels trapped again just as described in the chapter of her first book.
She has been betrayed more times than she could cope with. Sometimes she introspects if it is her who is in the wrong because how can so many people be wrong. And then she realizes she hasn’t adapted. She isn’t one of them and she can never be.
She must find an exit.
And while she thinks of a way out, she gets duped again, by people she trusts and people who she has gone above and beyond for.
Do they not realize what they are doing to a psyche of a woman who attributed her heart to India?
On the surface she has pseudo-adapted. She has learned to be firm and blunt. She can be ruthless to people who lack common sense or won’t live up to the expectations of humanness. Ironically, though she is just trusting and hopeful. Trusting of every Indian she meets who comes from an educated class, and trusting that no one talks down about her behind her back, or should I say in front of her in a local language. And hopeful that there are nicer people around and that she will meet them soon. Hope can sometimes be dangerous. This is one of those situations.
She has to pause. She has to think. But all she can think of is how her friends double-crossed her. How she defended them and how they didn't hold up their part of the bargain. How secrets get leaked. How nobody pauses and thinks about the consequences of their actions. And then she realizes, everyone here is an opportunist. They have adapted.
Why does it feel like a war? Where you are only as good as the assets you have? And where you are important only until there is another entrant in the spy game who has more vital assets to share? The moment you have nothing to leak, you get disowned.
To whom can she trust? Or rather how does she shield herself from deceit and belittlement?
Last night she disowned two of her friends who lied and stood her up for their own ulterior motives. You see they probably didn’t want to go against the wishes of the person who could be a business sponsor and the man whom they set me up with just to please him. And all this while she thought, maybe this time, they were actually on her side. It was all a setup. And all she gets is “ but you enjoyed it too! Peace out”! As if that is supposed to make it all go away!
She is of course scarred but didn’t we mention above that to survive here everyone becomes an opportunist. Time she becomes one so she can survive too in this dystopian society India had become since she had last left from its airspace in 2004.
This morning feels different. She has 2 people less in her friend circle and pain of a different kind of betrayal. But there is still so much that is intact: her cozy home, the cats, the search for a new job, some good people she can count on, and her sole self.
But there are developments: she will no longer choose to ignore the signs that come from her gut, and she will no longer defend anyone else until they have proved their loyalty to her (no favors, just give and take). If this is war, she will play along!
