“Air kisses only.”

I had only ever imagined—and secretly hoped with greatest fervor—that my first trip to a third world country would make me feel less broke. Working in non-profit, terms like “two-ply” and “organic” really do traipse around the parameters of that which I consider luxury, and I had begun to think that the only way I was going to get beyond feeling sorry for my own inability to be satisfied with see-through toilet paper and pesticide-riddled plastycene produce was by traveling to a place where a square meal looks something like a bowl of topsoil and hair. So off I went to India. I imagined stepping off the plane and immediately being accosted by fly-wreathed child beggars, lepers handing me their eyeballs in exchange for a few rupees, once-pretty wives whose faces were singed off in notorious “dowry fires” begging me to take them in as lowly servants, and all manner of ragtag cripples, slum-dwellers and untouchables just yearning to make me feel better about my own comparably laughable first world poverty.

But I’d gotten it wrong. When I stepped off of the plane into the humid, mosquito-thick Mumbai airport, the first person to greet me was an overweening driver named Kamlesh, whose obsequious zeal to collect me, collect my bags, give me a fully topped up cell phone and then usher me through the dark city to my appointed destination as if I were some sort of case-making political refugee was only outmatched by the smell of the inside of his silver Toyota minivan—a pungent cocktail of cumin and remnant farts. Much of India—I am told—bears with it the badge of this stench like a soldier does his dog tags. It is both functional and aesthetic, and once you possess it, its mark upon you is indelible and forever. The reason I say that this—and much else about India which is steeped in poverty and chaos—has been recounted to me and not actually experienced, is because, well, I didn’t actually experience it.

Let me come clean. I was in India for a wedding. And not just any wedding, but the lavish, balls-to-the-wall, no-holds-barred, no-stops-left-unpulled wedding of an extremely wealthy girl I knew in college. I just never quite understood how wealthy. The five-day affair was so luxurious in size and scope, so teeming with socialites, Bollywood stars, politicians, tycoons and card-carrying Brahmans of the highest order, that comparatively I felt like a filthy railway tramp. Albeit the happy-go-lucky kind that just jumped off of a rambling coal wagon to warm his bare-knuckled hands over an oil drum fire, only to be unexpectedly whisked into the manor of a local steel baron when his free-spirited wife takes pity on him after spying the tramp from a levee while riding around with her lover in a brand new Model-T (NOTE: This unwieldy reference has been brought to you by F. Scott Fitzgerald, pomade, and the year 1927). So Kamlesh falling over himself to shuttle me from the airport to post-colonialist safety was really only the beginning.

Upon arriving at my digs in an old British country club to which only members of Mumbai’s elite belong, I was greeted by what I thought was a doorman—until I saw him holding a semi-automatic weapon, followed by what I thought was a concierge—until I spied his AK-47, followed by what I believed to be a bellhop—until I saw he had been manning something that looked like a noir-era Gatlin gun, followed by what I was convinced was a porter, who, praise Ganesh, turned out to be an actual porter. I don’t know many things about security, but this place was on tighter lockdown than a drag queen’s balls. It struck me as almost absurd. Why would anyone want to rob ME? I thought. And then I realized. They don’t. They want to rob everyone else on the premises. And, given my shoddy I-haven’t-upgraded-my-wardrobe-since-grad-school appearance, they probably think that I want to rob them.

There is something to be said for imperialism, and if India got nothing else from the British, they certainly inherited a steely elitism and proud sense of social hierarchy. My hosts had long ago cleared past any hurdle that might separate them from even the upper .0001% of Mumbai’s wealthy, and the marriage of their only daughter was an elaborate, multi-phase exercise in flaunting their fiscal muscle. That first night I arrived—after proving to the militia guarding the country club that I was no threat (this I achieved through one deft maneuver of standing by unflinching while my $14 Kohl’s luggage ripped apart as I clobbered it up the stairs, only to reveal a flood of Kotex pads, of which I brought an excess, thinking I might be able to use them to barter with the locals for jewels)—I was whisked out by my driver Kamlesh to meet the bride’s brother, Ankar, who had rung me up to tell me to ignore my jet lag, get changed, and come out clubbing with some of the bridal party.

Now, I had been told that India was a conservative country and that women should keep their extremities covered at all times, lest they trumpet an unseemly sexual libertarianism and invite all manner of unsavory advances. So when I heard “clubbing”, I imagined that if I wore any garment that revealed even so much as an ankle, a “clubbing” is exactly what I would get. So while Kamlesh waited, I sifted through the mountain of Kotex pads and found my homeliest dress, the hem of which falls at the bridge of my foot, and topped it off with a long-sleeve cardigan. If I had owned a burqa, I would have worn that, and I vowed to procure one the following day. Fifteen minutes later, Kamlesh and I pulled up to the front of a high fence, from behind which pumped an obscenity of loud techno music and day-glo lights. Kamlesh whispered something to the bouncer, who looked at me, obviously confused as to what a missionary was doing at his nightclub. I’m fairly certain it was only the mention of Ankar’s name that got me in. When I entered, I was frisked and my bag searched—yet again by a man in uniform holding a semi-automatic weapon, my wrist then stamped, and into the bumping sanctorum I went. The inside of the club careened into my view in a halo of lights and noise. Women in hotpants and dresses that might barely pass as shirts even in the most progressive definition of the garment shuffled past me, dancing and squealing, turquoise-hued drinks in hand—all of them sneering at me like a chaperone at prom. The place thumped like the sleazy worst of the Bridge-and-Tunnel-packed clubs in the Meatpacking District. And I, dressed head to toe like goddamn Laura Ingalls Wilder, could barely handle pressing forward into the melee, so stranded was I in a mire of total confusion—“Why aren’t these women being stoned?”—I wondered. Also, someone was standing on my dress.

I was ushered further back into the VIP room, where the Kristal and top shelf hooch were perched on large ice-like sculptures, ready to be poured unchecked by whomsoever wanted to have at it. And have at it they did. After an hour, the boozy throng were barely clinging to their tiny garments, let alone any vestige of sobriety, and I left wondering if I shouldn’t just grab a King James Bible so at least I had an excuse. I thought to myself, Let me at least make some small effort to ingratiate myself with these people. Having just stepped off of a plane not an hour before, I thought that talk of air travel might prove to be easy common ground to get to know Ankar and his friends. His friends, mind you, were all dressed as if they’d been outfitted in a Queer Eye death match, and the results were Fierce with a capital F. Prada suits, Marc Jacobs dresses, shoes made by Asian designers whose names I can’t pronounce—it was as if I had just inadvertently popped onto the set of Bollywood’s very own Melrose Place. Only, the pilot episode where a token Westerner appears for comic relief before her character is deemed useless and killed off in subsequent episodes. But I tried anyway, with all the enthusiasm I could muster.

“So I just got here, guys! MAN, how great is Air India!”

Even amidst the aneurism-inducing techno subwoofing, their laughter resounded as a titanic eruption.

“Are you serious?” I was asked by a dapper young man with a spiky English-football-club-style haircut and a girlfriend who looked like her skin was daily softened by the farts of angels.

I don’t know why I didn’t take this as my cue to abort the mission.

“YEAH! Totally. They have these little roller thingies for your feet on the seat in front of you—it’s, like, awesome!”

Again, cataclysmic laughter.

“Is this the first time you’ve been on a plane?” asked Naira, a stunning model, whose hot, lanky presence next to me made me want to become a card-carrying bulimic the moment I left the club.

“Uuuuhhh, hahaha, NO—of course not! But it was definitely better than some other flights I’ve been on. And the food is really good too!”

The group was visibly nauseated by this addendum, clearly wondering if my regular diet consisted of woodchips and yarn. I realized that not only had none of them ever traveled on Air India, but they had probably never been transported anywhere on anything other than a private jet, yacht, or nest of rose petals, and that any suggestion to them of Air India’s preeminence in in-flight customer service was tantamount to actively sucking them down by the ankles into a lower caste. At least two of them took this opportunity to physically back away from me. Suddenly frantic with the awareness of my protracted blunder, I demurred with all the elegance of a 13-year-old social outcast who just squandered her one chance to get invited to the cool kids party by showing off her retainer.

“O-M-G, guys!! TOTES kidding!! What’s life like without the Concorde, amirite??”

Too little, too late.  They already knew what I was. More to the point, they knew what I wasn’t. When I returned to the car to get a lift back to my digs, even Kamlesh looked disappointed. Well, I thought, tomorrow is another day. I’ll impress these people yet.

The following day marked the first day of the wedding festivities. After sight-seeing around Mumbai, buying a gratuitous bushel of tourist-priced bangles and wall-hangings (all of which, cumulatively, still cost no more than buying a stick of gum in the US), receiving at least one marriage proposal from a deranged Goan man with henna-dyed hair that left streaks on his nappy mane the color of rust—the whole gnarly mess of which was ornamented by a rat’s tail dread that snaked down his neck, I was ready for the first big celebration. I had been told to come attired in a sari, and a friend of mine had lent me hers—a lovely saffron-colored thing, though I couldn’t make out the fabric. When I took the hotel iron to the blouse and immediately burned a hole in the tit, I realized just what fabric it was. It was liquid nitrogen, it immolated immediately upon contact with heat, and now I had a huge hole where my left breast was supposed to be. Hysterically, I summoned the hotel reception, and tried to explain my predicament without inviting a rapist to come to my room. It is possible that I failed.

“Sir, I have a hole and I need someone to fill it.”

“Madam, I am sorry, perhaps you should go to the hospital.”

“Listen, I’m not wounded, it’s my blouse. I need someone to help me because my breasts are spilling out.”

“Madam, this is hardly something I can provide.”

“Please send me any woman on your staff.”

“Madam! May heaven help you!”

“No, no, no, no, NO—I need a woman to FILL MY HOLE. Please!”

Silence.

“Never mind.”

By that point, I think the man had fainted. So I ran into the hallway outside my room, grabbed the nearest sari-clad staff member and begged her to help me by making several insane semaphore-like motions using my torso as a fulcrum to flail the sari fabric frantically in the direction of my bosom. She was clearly terrified and most likely helped me out of fear for her own life, but whatever the reason, the end result was actually, well, not only better than I anticipated, but some might even say good.

Some, but not all. Because when I rolled into the driveway of Mumbai’s posh Trident hotel—where a car bomb search and bag X-Ray were only the prelude to a full body cavity search—compared to the women around me, I looked like the retarded body double of a shitshow Cinderella…before she even got invited to the ball. The fabrics I saw were of a finery and elegance that I have never before observed. They swathed their inhabitants in shimmer and sparkle and a flattery of bright color. What I thought were rhinestones turned out to be honest-to-god diamonds the size of walnuts, and every species of silk produced since Marco Polo dragged his carb-fatted ass back to Europe was on display. This sartorial cornucopia was enough to make me realize that no matter how shiny, my brand new “gold” Payless sandals were, compared to the other guests, just a step above prison gear. In truth, I may as well have worn an orange jumpsuit emblazoned with a chunky stamp of the phrase “CELL BLOCK D” across the back. At least those don’t tend to have holes in the tits. Prison rape usually entails more of a challenge than that.

I also, before leaving the country club, managed to douse my eyes with what I thought was saline solution, but turned out to be cornea-reaming lens cleaner. While Kamlesh grew impatient waiting for me outside, I stood in the bathroom blinding myself with all the swiftness of a Grecian tragedy, emerging from the country club lobby looking like I had just suffered the majority of the travails of Job—all I needed besides the torn garments and swollen eyes was the gnashing of teeth, which Kamlesh, after taking one look at me, was clearly ready to furnish.

Suffice it to say, I quickly realized I hadn’t brought my A-game. In fact, what I had brought might be something akin to a Neanderthal bringing home his bludgeoned sister-in-law to roast on a spit, thinking she was an antelope. And were it not for the lavish food, drink and entertainment to distract the happy multitude, my mediocrity would surely not have gone unpunished. As it was, however, I was able to slink to the periphery, barely-veiled boob-hole and swollen eyeballs in tow, ensconcing myself behind a statue of Vishnu constructed entirely of small white and red flowers—clearly the work of devoted orphans who were likely paid for their craftsmanship in tennis balls and shoelaces. When one of the old aunties hissed at me for standing so close to one of Vishnu’s arms that the god appeared to be copping a feel, I slowly wandered over to the bar and drank a shot of something blue served to me by a man in a turban who offered it up, saying simply, “Try.”

And then it began. From the far side of the vast room, a stage was cleared, and onto it was rolled a series of person-sized letters made from flowers spelling out a Hindi blessing. Well, it was either a blessing, or a sign that said “BRING IT, BITCHES,” because that’s exactly what happened next. When, out of the corner of my eye, I caught the ancient matriarch of the bride’s side doing Jack Lalanne-era calisthenics, I asked, “What’s happening?” to an elegant neighbor, to which she responded more excitedly than I believed possible for someone donning baubles that big outside of a porno: “It’s a DANCE-OFF!!” It was then explained that each member of the family had apparently been preparing for this showdown for weeks, and different factions of both the bride’s and groom’s sides were about to take the stage with their very own, fully-choreographed Bollywood dance routine. It began with The Father of the Groom and His Cronies. They did a more traditional number based on a 1981’s hit film Ek Duje Ke Liye. When The Hot Young Male Cousins Crew came out, I thought some of the girls in the crowd were going to unfurl what I imagined was a traditional 28 yards of silk underpants and heave them at the stage. They danced to a song whose insipid English lyrics were totally negated by their heartfelt swooning gestures and pouty lip-synching: “We’ll be singing, dancing, hot romancing, Masti all the time, any season! Need no reason! For some place ‘n feeling fine! And we TWIST. We TWIST. We TWIST. And we TWIST. We TWIST…” ad infinitum.

By the time The Grannie and Aunties Brigade got up to sing and dance the shit out of last summer’s romantic Bollywood blockbuster, Billu Barber, exposed tit or none, I was itching to get my ass on the dance floor. These bitches had thrown down like it was 1899 and I was not about to shamefully misrepresent the Bronx by hiding behind a deity-shaped plant. The emcee, who throughout the evening changed hats (from fez to fedora to some glitzy Punjabi-style turban number—all of which matched his red velvet jacket) must have sensed my booty-shaking duress, for, several minutes after opening the room up to the throng, he jumped off the stage with a cheesy 80s knee-breaking lift-off (think Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future), and ran in my general direction, camera crew in tow. A sweat-dripping and fist-pumping anguish were the condiments to what I can only describe as a desperate cry to get the white girl on the dance floor. With lights flashing around me—surely highlighting my areola under the translucent silk sari cobbled together around me—he screamed/sang,

“ARE YOU A J.C. GIRL??”

I looked at him blankly, but smiling. The wildly clapping, frenetic crowd now seemed intrigued.

He shouted again, this time pulling a bandana out of his pocket to wipe the sweat off of his neck, “ARE YOU A J.C. GIIIIIIRRRRRRRL????”

Thinking that answering “yes” to this question meant either “Yes, I am of the Brahman class and marriageable” (false) or “I’m a Western libertine whore” (false but more believable), I went for the more innocuous, fun-loving, “Sure, why not!” and let the man lead me by a sequin-gloved hand to the center of the dance floor, where I was made the nucleus of a circle composed of the cheering, whistling, drunk, throbbing upper .001% of Mumbai’s elite. In the hour-long dance showdown I had witnessed, I had picked up two dance moves: 1) a turning, one-hand-on-hip and one-hand-lightbulb-twisting maneuver, and 2) a shoulder shimmy that I had only ever previously seen executed by the epileptic. It was the former, and not the latter, that seemed to impress upon my hosts what was apparently the gravity of my mental condition, and it was clear when I was led to the corner of the dance floor by a well-meaning cousin—who strategically ushered my right, tit-free side behind his person—that my ill-advised maneuvers might be construed as an elaborate series of ethnic slurs. By the end of the night, I’d learned one more move, the full glory of which involved a limbo-like downward grinding motion, topped off by a leap upward into a single handed clap. When the octogenarian matriarch successfully executed it, I thought, NO PROBLEM, and proceeded to give it a whirl. By the time I got halfway down, my knee locked, my ankle buckled, and I had to be helped up. By Grannie. After ambling off the dance floor, I proceeded to drown my sorrows in a bowl of ras malai, thinking the evening could probably get no worse, so why not suffer a bout of lactose-intolerance-induced stomach cramps just to make the day complete.

At 4 am, I emerged from the hotel lobby and let free the first in a string of dairy farts, whereupon Kamlesh took in the sight of me, groaned and looked skyward, approaching me only to say “Madam, I- ” and pluck from my face a jeweled bindi, which in the course of the night had migrated from the middle of my forehead to my ear. I’m sorry, I implored him with my eyes. As we drove back in silence, one thing was clear: sorry just wasn’t enough.

The next day I woke up bright and early convinced that TODAY was my moment to shine. At 5 pm, my presence was requested at the Mehendi ceremony, an event that inevitably prompts the reaction (once you return stateside): “What’s that shit on your hands?” That shit on your hands is actually henna, and despite the fact that it is completely unclear why one slathers it, however beautifully, on one’s limbs, it’s lovely, and potentially one of the more interesting, if enigmatic parts of the marathonic Indian wedding tradition. When I walked into the room, I felt like I had stepped into some kind of candy-colored casbah—it was like the Chutes and Ladders board of my childhood had come to life. All around billowed swaths of colored muslin, which gracefully enclosed each of a battalion of tent-like structures that had been constructed throughout the room. Sitting in each flourescent tee-pee on seat cushions daintily appointed with gold trim, beads and tassels were women of every size, shape and constitution. They had, as far as I could discern, at least one thing in common—they all looked at me as if I were a back pimple on the otherwise unblemished torso of their society. I tried not to ruffle too many feathers as I observed them—each sitting squat atop those cushions like toady Cleopatras, all of them silently pulsing out the cry “Giiiirrrrrrrl, Imma get my shit DID.”

What “getting your shit did” at a henna ceremony entails is sticking some combination of your extremities (hands, feet, or both) into the face of an extremely talented but lowly servant and allowing her to adroitly fire out intricate patterns of a substance that looks and feels like caked-on birdshit. But it comes out great. Looking around the room, it was apparent that these women—already puffed to bursting with the presumption of the regal treatment to which their station in life had already allowed them to grow accustomed—expected no less than an exaggeration of this handling by the feverishly slaving artists who attended to them now—quite literally on hand and foot.  Even a blind imbecile could discern that anything less would be considered heresy, and a shitstorm would have reigned down with all the fury of the spurned bride of Shiva.

When one of the henna artists—a troupe run by Zinga Harawari, billed as “Henna Artiste To The Stars”—executed a pattern that was not to the liking of her customer, I seriously thought the poor girl was going to get smacked. Never mind the fact that what she had just created possessed the Fibonaci-like elegance and precision of the kind of artwork usually associated with autistic patients. But the Queen of Sheba just wasn’t having it. By the time it was my turn, I wished I had been able to communicate in Hindi to the beleaguered, abused woman, A hangman-like stick figure will be just fine for me! When I approached, her look of deference washed over me with all the force that white guilt can corral, and I almost excused myself from the room out of shame. I work in non-profit arts, too! I wanted to cry. But I realized, of course, that this would mean nothing to her—even the $10 bright salwar kameez outfit I had pulled together from a local boutique that morning to wear to the event was probably the value of her entire weekly household income. So I shut my trap and let the bird shit wash over me instead of the guilt. By the time the whole fawning, involved process was over, I was grinning from ear to ear, and could hardly take my eyes off of the canvas she’d made of my hands. My only real regret, as I was told I had to let them air-dry untouched for two hours, was that I hadn’t gone to the bathroom first.

Or eat. After the two desiccating hours had passed, I was so piss-clogged and ravenous I almost soiled myself running to the loo and nearly fell down a flight of stairs as I dove towards a buffet teeming endlessly with delicacies. While the regal doyennes barely picked at their hors d’oevres, I practically disrobed and dove bodily into a stack of naan. The end result of my zeal was a turban-sized stain made by the contents of a freshly made masala dosa spilling out onto my right boob. Observing my lithe maneuvering and unparalleled dainty eating habits, one of the bride’s uncles approached and asked me if I had “two stomachs.” I was hoping that through the magic of linguistic misunderstanding, this wasn’t what he actually meant. He smiled genuinely, though, and asked me to share a bowl of dal with him, saying that this was the food of kings, and it looked like I had swallowed a king. Again, I hoped I was getting this all wrong. I told him, “I’m pregnant,” a bald-faced lie, because anyone within a five mile radius could tell someone this uncoordinated was obviously physically unequipped for hand-shaking, let alone intercourse.

Stuffed to the gills—almost certainly more from depression than from actual hunger—I summoned Kamlesh, and walked out to meet him. Kamlesh looked at my right breast, and then, pleadingly, into my eyes. “Don’t say it,” I muttered, and slid into the back of the car.

Night three was the reception. Contrary to a usual wedding m.o., the reception for this wedding took place the day before the actual ceremony, since apparently the wedding itself had to take place on a certain astrologically auspicious date, and the night before was, I was told, the only night the family could book the racetrack.

A racetrack?—you ask. Yes. Why?—the obvious follow-up. Well, apparently an old Victorian racetrack is only place in Mumbai equipped to handle two thousand guests. Let me repeat that. TWO THOUSAND wedding guests. It was a number of people to feed that seemed impossible to comprehend outside of pouring porridge from a cement truck and serving it in Dixie cups, and that’s coming from an Italian woman. My adoration for the family and my respect for their hosting abilities were only outmatched by my relief that, with 1999 other people around me, making a huge ass out of myself was going to be far more difficult.

Or so I thought.

I had been told that “cocktail attire” would be appropriate for this event, and with all the seizure-inducing colors parading around me at any given moment, I chose to wear a bright red, low cut, knee-length dress with a froofy, poofy skirt—I looked like I had shat out the top of a toadstool and it crept up around my waist. Whatever, I had worn it to my best friend’s wedding and thought it was a hit. Then again, I made an enormous fool of myself that time by asking the BLIND officiant of the ceremony to READ in front of a crowd of hundreds, and the red dress probably didn’t make that particular faux pas come off any more subtly. Like, “Well, clearly a girl wearing a taupe knee-length frock had no intention of making a fool of this famous politician. But the saucy bitch wearing that obnoxious red number was clearly plotting this shit from the beginning.” But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, every other woman at this event was once again wearing a damn sari, and I’m still unsure what exactly was the “cocktail” aspect of the outfit I had been told to wear referred to unless it was code for some sort of racy undergarment or strap-on that I was simply unable to observe. So in a crowd of literally thousands, I once again stood out like an oyster in a bedpan.

When we arrived at the racetrack, the family had fallen into what was now a familiar receiving line, and I would wager they had servants handing them orange slices and hand cream to help them endure the long exercise. Before getting to India, I had been informed that the people of this country were generally averse to public displays of affection of any kind, even platonic. Especially when dealing with the upper crust, I knew there were certain rules at play and I shouldn’t fuck around. But after three days of ruining my reputation as thoroughly internationally as I had already done domestically, I had started to feel at home. Besides which, my pasty complexion and total lack of assets aside, I was really beginning to feel like family. So when I approached the receiving line, all advice I had been given about Indian social transactions apparently flew right out the window. With my ill-advised, inappropriate dress flouncing around me like that of a dopey cartoon character en route to an impossibly distorted castle on a pink horizon, I bounded up to the bride’s father and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Given the gasps around me, I may as well have just unzipped his pants. The monolith of a man, who when I first met him, had only exuded warmth and acceptance, suddenly looked at me coldly, and told me, with stern, caste-driven admonishment:

“AIR KISSES ONLY.”

I backed away slowly, stammering an apology. My dress wilted in solidarity. I had suddenly become a stranger. The other family members in the receiving line sort of waved awkwardly and backed off. Some of them ignored me altogether. I was the most inappropriate person they had ever met, and now my shame was spreading like a contagion to their very cheeks. What could be next?­­—I’m sure they wondered—will she march an army of lepers into the wedding ceremony tomorrow? I went straight to the bar and asked them to make me the strongest drink they had, fairly certain that this would only enhance my status as a Western Libertine Whore. I didn’t care anymore. Try as I might to belong, I only managed to spew social ruin wherever I roamed, like some sort of untouchable-caste Rosemary’s Baby. There was nothing else to do besides try and lose myself in the crowd. This wasn’t easy. 2000 people is no small number, but 2000 people in a racetrack where almost everyone is being individually waited on by a hospitality staff of hundreds is a slightly harder feat. I tried to escape to the periphery, but all around the place were chefs, bartenders and hosts, each offering me some morsel or other. 10 kinds of kulfi here, 15 kinds of dal here, idli, dosas, lassi, kofta, paneer—no expense had been spared to provide every kind of comestible, and I was still residually nauseous from the previous night’s overindulgence so wanted no part of it. I absconded to the ladies’ room. There I ended up slinging my skirt up around my face so I could squat over a hole in the floor. My first thought—Isn’t this deliciously native!—was quickly scuttled when a roach the size of a hamburger bun scurried into my stall. I screamed and fled, unaware that the back of my dress was tucked into my underpants. An honest mistake, but one that was exacerbated by the fact that the panties I was wearing (given to me by my best friend as a joke) had “SOY LA LECHE” written on the ass in bright turquoise and red bubble letters (the illustrative counterpart to this text is an image of a cartoon cow on the crotch). I heard a woman scream and figured the roach had gotten to her too. Turns out she could apparently read Spanish.

Another excellent failure, I thought. I snuck out another way, leaving Kamlesh waiting where he had dropped me off. I hailed a cab—a shitty bumblebee-colored Fiat—since I couldn’t bear to look the man in the face.

The wedding ceremony itself was my last chance. I begged Kamlesh’s forgiveness the following day and asked him to help me. I told him I needed a sari, a good one, and would do anything and everything not to fuck the last day up royally. He brought me to Mumbai’s premiere sari shop, Kala Niketan, spoke to the owner personally, and within one hour I had been wrapped in a tailor-made silk sari, given bangles (real ones), a bindi (a real one), gold slippers and a beaded clutch. I finally looked the part.

The ceremony was a 3-hour affair, taking place under a massive canopy constructed entirely of red and white flowers. No one seemed to notice me. I was blending in! I could hardly contain my glee. And then it happened. The many arms of Vishnu reached into my large intestine and brought forth a hellish bout of I would later find out was likely a water-borne parasitic infection. I started running to the bathroom right in the middle of the service, flinging my gorgeous sari over my head so I could properly squat on the crapper. This happened about 8 times in the course of the service. All I can remember is, the bride was a vision, and probably the last thing I saw before I blacked out.

I came to in the hotel lobby, with a few of the groom’s aunties dabbing me with a wet cloth and trying to put water to my lips. The words “I’m sorry”—even if I could say them in Hindi—were beyond insufficient. If King Midas made everything turn to gold, I, Queen My-Ass, had made a mockery and a disaster of everything I touched. And now, I was being repaid with Vishnu’s Revenge.

I had it coming. I had expected to get to India and feel like a wealthy woman, and come home with a renewed appreciation for my socio-economic status and general personal blessings. By the time I rolled back to the U.S., a good five pounds lighter, I felt more broke than when I’d left. My non-profit job seemed even more profitless than I ever thought possible, and suddenly I began begrudging the jangling tip cups of homeless guys on the subway. I stopped holding doors for people, or shaking hands, thinking my kindness would only be rebuked by some mislaid sense of class-conscious propriety. I was a hair’s breadth away from donning a sackcloth and ringing a bell on my way to work the other day, and then I realized they were rehearsing La Boheme at the opera house, and I didn’t want to inadvertently be ferried onstage as an extra during a performance. I’m not union anyway—another reason for my unflagging poverty. I’ve stopped watching Films About Single Women Who Find Themselves Abroad—the category Netflix believes to be my most preferred. The only thing I seem to have found abroad is amoebic dysentery and a sari I’ll never wear again because it now smells like poop and incense. Perhaps the only thing of value I got in India is the cell phone number of a certain driver named Kamlesh. No matter how gargantuan a fool I made of myself, he still always drove me home. And come to think of it, I bet he would have been perfectly fine with a good old fashioned American bear hug.

Air kisses only? Please.