Tennis in Ahmedabad: Traveling as a Single Woman in India

Dear Family and Friends,

I think that even I have finally gone too far. I am sitting in the
Indian-Chinese restaurant of the local club to which my tennis pro
belongs. This is a family restaurant with tables of 8 and 12 people and
young children running on the tile floor. As I walked in and headed for
a booth, all of the 12 people at the long table turned to stare at me,
as if to ask just what a single white woman might be doing in this
restaurant. It was also my question.

Last summer, when I visited Lake Manitou in Ontario, I met a group of
very good tennis pros, all of whom came from the city of Ahmedabad in
northern India. They told me of their tennis facilities and suggested I
come to visit. In all their years at Manitou, many guests had
apparently said that they would come to visit, but none had—except for
me.

Ahmedabad is the fourth largest city in India, and the second most
properous in western India. It is an industrial city known for its
textiles—and I am finding, a level of pollution that exceeds that of
Delhi. Getting off the plane, none of the officials could believe that
I wanted to disembark here. They repeatedly asked me if I was going to
Bombay. “No, Ahmedabad” was my response.

My “world class” club has no bath but a shower that fails to drain
completely and thus attracts mosquitoes. When I arrived there were no
towels but after pointing out their absence to the reception, a man
with white towels on his left arm arrived. I was allocated one skimpy
large towel for the shower and another tiny towel for my hands. Lacking
a shower mat, I decided to reassign the hand towel to the role of a
mat. I can hear the conversation of the club staff and their television
through the walls as well as sounds of construction. Ahmedabad is in
the midst of a construction boom and from the pool, I can hear four
different construction programs underway.

The table of 12 has stopped staring at me but now I find out that the
state where Ahmedabad is located is a dry state and I can’t order a
beer. The local staff are doing their best to communicate with me but I
have not yet learned how to disentangle the Indian accent in
English—and I may be resigned to my meal of spinach and bean curds,
Indian Nan bread and Aquafina water. It would be nice to have something
more but I don’t know if this is the Palak Paneer that I ordered or if
it was just a complementary appetizer.

Now, more of the same has just arrived. I thought that I was just
saying yes to more Nan. This is rather like the early stages of
learning a new language. You never quite know what you ordered until it
arrives, and then you feel obliged to eat even if it wasn’t quite what
you wanted. There is only so much spinach I can eat without turning
green.

I am not sure quite what to do. TP, the tennis pro, implied that
he had used all his connections to get me a room at the club. He
explained that it is wedding season and so all the hotels are booked.
Also the Lion’s Club is having a conference in Ahmedabad as are some
5,000 physicians. I am supposed to stay in this club for two days and
then move to another “next door” for the balance of the week. I thought
it might be worthwhile to see if the other club also was undergoing
renovation.

I wandered up on the highway, past the camel hauling cargo, past the
trucks and the buses and the bicycles and the motorized rickshaws. The
first building was a restaurant catering to large parties and the next
still wasn’t a club. I had walked for almost 15 minutes and figured
that I had gone in the wrong direction. It turned out that “next door”
was two kilometers away or over a mile. I gave up but decided to see if
my club had internet facilities so that I could check out the option.

The library with its silenced cell phones had two computers but
terminals were not connected to the internet, or so explained the nice
man in the library, who went on to tell me that one of his sons worked
for Verizon and another was working on IT and living in Redwood City. A
lady listening to the conversation then offered me a ride to a cyber
café. She was walking with an older woman who seemed to be her mother.
She seemed so nice that I accepted the offer. We drove through the mass
of traffic, participating in the use of the horn as a means of friendly
communication. The traffic here seems to have several cadences.
Beep-beep. “Here I am,” says one horn. Another beeps in and out to say
that he is also there. A third just screams at a level pitch.

We finally found the internet café and I spent an hour looking for
alternative hotel accommodation in Ahmedabad. Nothing was available,
but even the Meridien was priced at about the same rate as the
club--$42 a night. Then I found a cellular provider whose prepaid SIM
cards would work both in Ahmedabad and Delhi and it was time to get
back to the club.

Several people had suggested that I use the “auto-rickshaws.” I found
one that sitting waiting for a fare and showed him the name of the
club, Rajpath Club. When I asked him if he knew where it was, he said
yes and then stopped to ask the market-sellers on the corner where the
club might be found. Finally we arrived, after driving through bumpy
streets with no springs or seatbelts or even doors. All I had was a bar
to hang on to, as the rickshaw forced his way into the oncoming traffic
and crossed three lanes. When we arrived, the driver announced the
price was 15 rupees, about 25 cents. He had duly checked his meter,
which looked more like a round scale for measuring weight than a taxi
meter for measuring distance.

Now it’s after midnight and I am lying on my bed, listening to the
horns and the loud conversations of the club staff as they walk past my
room. It’s going to be a long night and not one that will give me the
strength I need for the hours of tennis I want to play tomorrow.


December 20, 2004

After such a disastrous start, my trip to Ahmedabad has improved. After
being awakened at 4:30 am by the constant horns, I decided I had to
find alternative accommodation—or head to Delhi right away and camp out
in Dede’s apartment with its cook and houseman. However just calling
Delhi was likely to prove difficult. The staff at the front desk of the
club understood not a word of my requests. It would surely be difficult
to figure out the necessary dialing instructions. What was needed was
modern technology—a cell phone number.

I have been wandering through central Europe, the Caucasus and the
Middle East with my triband Nokia that I bought in Dubai last July.
TP was confused on the technology, but fortunately had provided a
car and driver for me during my stay. Laxman’s English was not much
better than that of the front office staff but I told him that I wanted
a prepaid SIM card and he was off and running. We tried two offices.
The first was Hutch (which is presumably a short form of Hutchinson,
the Hong Kong telecommunications company). I became nervous when I
found I could understand of the words emanating from the nice
receptionist. Her hand signals suggested that I should sit and wait.
But the room was full of people waiting and after five minutes, I
decided to try another carrier.

“Idea Cellular?” I asked Laxman, hoping he might know where the office
is located. At the cyber café from the previous evening, I had asked
the receptionist to write down the address for the other cellular
carrier. I handed the little piece of paper to Laxman but again
wondered about my decision-making. We drove through street after street
of people living in makeshift tents and water-buffalo roaming loose
rummaging through the street trash. Such slums were hardly the place
one expects to find a modern office building. And yet, we finally found
an Idea Cellular office with no one waiting and a receptionist that I
could understand. Twenty minutes later I was equipped with cellular
service that would allow me to call TP and my driver when he was
sleeping in the shade—and Delhi.

With success under my belt, I decided to see if I liked the second club
that I was supposed to move into the next day—if I could survive
another night in my dungeon. The second club, Konavrati, was an
improvement, still not a five-star hotel but it was a little further
from the highway and I found a front office clerk with whom I could
communicate. I asked if I could see the rooms and he showed me three
that were available that night. I chose the one with wood floors and
felt that I had climbed the affluence ladder since the new room had two
skinny white towels instead of just one.

My few days have since improved dramatically. That evening, I went out
for tea with TP and his wife and kids. When I returned, the Lions’
Club celebration that had taken so many rooms in the Club was hitting
its final notes. As I stood by the edge, a handsome 40-something man
invited in, past the security guards. I watched as women in saris and
men in suits danced in big groups and finally one of the men dragged me
into the dancing area and handed me two plastic sticks. To Hindi music,
he showed me a three-part dance where you hit your own sticks once and
then the other person’s sticks from one side and then the other. It was
an easy rhythm to follow and when the announcer asked for all the women
to come on to the stage, my dancing companions pushed me up the stairs.
The beautiful women in the saris were initially none too happy to have
among them a western woman in jeans and an African shirt that says “my
boy” on the back. However after a while, a couple of the women started
showing me some the dance moves and I found myself part of a big
circle, dancing towards the center and then out again. When it came
time for applause, I was at the far end and did a curtsey, which seemed
to be an appropriate ending.

When I came off the stage, I found the good-looking fellow and said to
him, “You are responsible for this,” with a smile. The other men with
whom I was dancing gave me their business cards and asked for my mobile
number, which I refused to divulge. The good-looking fellow tried the
hardest, though. It turned out that he was jewelry merchant and he
showed me his booth of beautiful gold and diamond necklaces. His six
friends stood grinning waiting to see what would happen. I wished them
a good night. My friend gave me his business card and a gift of a small
red jewelry pouch.

Another evening TP invited me to dinner with his sister and family
and they told me how various family members had 20 houses in a gated
community that the family members owned. “What happens if someone gets
divorced?” I asked. The property, of course, stayed with the man since
the definition of their family was through the male line.

In the meantime, TP's coaching of three hours a day has done
wonders for my tennis—and I found a huge supermarket where I could buy
accepted handsome and a full role of toilet paper. The Club is not
particularly quiet, but with earplugs I can sleep through the night and
the reception staff and I can share meaningful conversations on such
important issues as to whether the cleaning staff will still clean my
room that day. Night after night I watch as the Club hosts receptions
of hundreds of people. As TP's sister explained over dinner,
Ahmedabad society likes to enjoy all the celebrations—Christmas, the
new season and their Lord Krishna. They also don’t seem very stressed,
as if life is fairly easy for them. It is a very different life from
that of the ball kids who can’t afford shoes to protect their feet, or
the women construction workers in saris who carry heavy loads of cement
on their heads, or the gypsies who live by the highway in their
makeshift homes of old cloth and wood, or the passengers falling out of
crowded mechanized-rickshaws.

December 23, 2004

My final night in Ahmedabad is in a five-star hotel--the type that I
thought did not exist in the city—and lo and behold the computers in
the business center are using Windows XP.

Merry Christmas to all.

Sue