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India: Land of sweet, smiling women - and awful surprises

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When I met my husband, a large part of the attraction was that he was Indian. I’d just read A Suitable Boy and loved The God Of Small Things. Talvin Singh’s OK was on repeat in my CD player.

I couldn’t wait to visit my husband’s homeland with him, learn yoga and meditation. He, meanwhile – having visited his parents’ village in Punjab as a small boy – was more reluctant. The poverty had terrified him.

But we went.

The first time, we stayed in a marble palace on the shores of Lake Udaipur. I had a four-handed massage and bathed in water scented with rose petals. Outside, the lake was at its lowest level for years, as so many hotels were stealing the water.

I hired a local tailor to make me clothes. ‘Everything is so cheap!’ was mostly what I said for the entire week.

Liz Jones reflects upon her time in India after the country has come under the spotlight following the death of a woman after a violent gang rape

We turned a corner, only to bump into an elephant. Sacred cows wandered everywhere.

The second visit was a little more basic but just as prosaic. We got a train from Delhi, which would take us north, almost to the Himalayas.

The day before we left we’d wandered round the city and I’d been shocked by a naked baby, laid out in the hot sun by the road, her mother cross-legged at her side. I wanted to give money but my husband said she was using the baby as bait.

We saw an old man, naked, with a huge tumour protruding from his buttocks.

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At the crowded, chaotic station, families were sleeping on the platform. We boarded the sleeper train, at last, to find it  all ironed sheets and cups of  tea. ‘Oh, it’s so old fashioned,’  I kept saying. ‘And quaint. Like the taxis.’

We stayed in a small village in the foothills with a very well-born, educated family. The house was beautiful, all wood floors and ceiling fans, and photographs of Gandhi and Nehru on the walls, evidence they once stayed there. We then went hiking for days, staying in local village houses.

They had no electricity and the women cooked on dirt floors over open fires.

I admired the fact the laws protecting wildlife were so fierce: no villager was allowed to kill an animal, or even chop down trees for firewood.

The women were breathtakingly beautiful in their hot-pink saris – worn even to work in brick kilns or to dig roads.

I eventually fell out of love with my Indian (and, my god, I’d been understanding. He was so lazy, but look at all the men in India, squatting and chatting! It was his culture to be so!)

But I still returned to India even after we’d divorced because I found it so romantic and good for vegetarians.

I defend India, all the time. A week or so ago, I was involved in a question-and-answer evening at a Muslim art gallery off Sloane Square.

I questioned why even the Western women present were dressed modestly, with most covering their heads. ‘Do you know the worst place in the world for rape was Kabul under the Taliban, where women were covered from head to toe?’

A Muslim man came up to me afterwards and said that, no, actually, that was Western propaganda, and rape was kept in check by the Taliban. ‘Yes, like the fact the Mafia keeps order,’ I replied, my naive belief system intact.

I’d seen groups of alcoholic men in Delhi and Mumbai, in villages, but felt, well, what else is there for them to do?

There have been many liberal white voices blaming India’s colonial past for its problems, for the recent rape and murder of the student in Delhi.

But that is like a good Sikh boy blaming his mother for the  fact he never changes his own bed linen.

There comes a point when you have to grow up.

If you are not Indian, and live in India, you cannot know about the lives of the women there. Because they are sweet, and smile, and wear earrings, you think they are OK.

I remember going to an elaborate Indian wedding. I sat, gazing at the young couple thinking how beautiful they looked, how loving their extended families.

It was an arranged marriage, but then my marriage, for love, had not panned out too well.

‘Ah,’ a man next to me whispered as the groom read aloud to his new bride a self-penned poem. ‘But what the bride doesn’t know is that the groom has done it with another man!’

And he gave a hearty, toothless guffaw. When you are a guest, at a wedding or in a country, all is not always as it seems...

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