Watch as the stars disappear to nothing…

Despite my lack of contact with them, I love the kids here.
This morning when I walked past the neighbours, this tiny little child, who I would have sworn looked too young to speak, laughed, threw herself against bars on the window and cried out BIDESHI!! It took me completely by surprise and I laughed out loud which made all the women in the street turn and laugh at me too, Then a few other kids, maybe not more than five years old ran down the street after me calling “Auntie! Auntie!”
As I was eating dinner tonight, two little boys came to the door. One was five and one was seven and when Bipul answered the door to ask what they wanted, they told him that they had come to see me, the foreigner. He told them I couldn’t see them because I was eating right then and they said to him, “but she’s so beautiful!” There’s nothing like little boys to boost your self-confidence.
I’ve also created this pseudo relationship with the teenage girl who lives one building over across the street and one floor up. Every afternoon at about four, she sits at the window and waits for me to come sit on the balcony and we wave and smile at each other. She once shouted across the street to ask my name, but it was too noisy for her to hear me or for me to hear her name in return. And once she brought her little sibling to the window to wave at me. It struck me tonight though, as I am potentially leaving within the next few hours, how I will miss something that seems so insignificant. I’ve only waved at this girl a handful of times but when I was late coming home tonight all I could think about how she was probably waiting for me to come out and wave at her.
As I sit on the balcony right now writing this, she sits in her window watching me. And I’m starting to see myself through her eyes, and the eyes of those little boys and the children in the street. Just now two more girls have taken up their post in the balcony beside mine. And the just sit and watch me, waiting for me to look up and smile and then their whole face lights up and they smile back. I must look so glamorous to them. I am a celebrity quietly living among them. As if Julia Roberts took up residence on your street and you were the only one who knew about it. And it makes me laugh because I sit here self conscious and awkward and an island of loneliness in this place, but to them I am so very different than that. They have created for me a life, a personality, a confidence that is not mine. But perhaps, when I think about it, maybe they’re not so far off. Is it possible that someone’s idea of who you are could be closer to the truth that what you have believed about yourself?

To them I am the young foreign woman who has traveled all the way across the world to do something glamorous and fabulous. I have the bearing of someone who has not grown up in a gender discriminating society. I have the skills and intellect cultivated by higher education. I have the freedom and resources to travel and live independently and therefore I must be glamorous and confident and idealized by them.
My friend across the street is now doing her homework, still sitting in the window, no doubt feeling connected to me working on my laptop as she scribbles in her notebook. And the very nature of each action both connects us and shows the incredible gulf between us. Will she ever, in her entire lifetime, have the opportunities that I have had in the past month?

Perhaps waiting behind the bars of this balcony has taught me more than I expected.