It all comes down to eyebrows

[The weekend previous to the coast trip, Sunita arranged another homestay for me. This time it was with a farmer who is also somewhat famous regionally for his traditional mud art. I’ve posted pictures here and so won’t write a separate blog about that weekend itself.
What was even more interesting was the way there, so I’ve just typed up what I wrote down when I finally got to Radhakrishna’s.]

The voyage to my weekend homestay begins, as most of my adventures do here, with a bus ride.
As we idle in the Sirsi station, I sit gazing moodily out the window wondering how Sunita could be so confident I would get from Sirsi to the city of Sagar two hours away, then to Banghadde, a tiny village beyond there, with nothing but a slip of paper with my host’s address and my own nonexistent navigation skills. Rain muddies the window, turning the usual chaos outside into a brownish kaleidoscope of confusion.
Just before the bus starts moving, a mother and two little boys in school uniforms scramble on. The little boys lock their eyes on me from the time they first step foot on the aisle, and I shift my backpack to my lap to uncover one of the last available seats. When they reach my row in the back of the bus, they hang back awkwardly, unsure how to handle this – thing – that is between them and a comfortable ride. (Here, nobody just takes a seat, they always ask first, even when the bus is full.) Their mother gives them a prod forward and one of the little boys pipes up.
“Madam, who sits here?”
“Nobody. You sit here.” Cautiously, they climb on, and mom squeezes in across the aisle. I resume my brooding out the window, until I can no longer ignore the burning of four brown eyes into the back of my head. I turn to see what reminds me of two oversized baby birds in matching outfits straining upwards from a vinyl nest. I can’t help laughing a little bit, and this is all the encouragement they need. The boy closest to the aisle, obviously the brains behind the operation, whispers something in his brother’s ear. This one, the translator, looks at me and asks,
“Where are you going?”
“Sagar,” I say.
“And you come from Amerika?”
“Yes.” They’re thrilled.
“I like Amerika,” he says earnestly. His brother finally works up the nerve to speak and cuts him off.
“I like Bangalore.”
“I’ve never been to Bangalore,” I say, to shock and dismay from both my seatmates. Then suddenly the formalities are over.
“How do you spell ‘color’?” One demands. I tell him. Uproarious laughter ensues, echoing up and down the bus. A few people turn and look at me as if I’m from Mars.
“Nooooo, C-O-L-O-U-R!” They scream in unison. Whatever. I proceed to spell center and favorite for them, to more shrieks of glee at my complete ignorance of proper British English. When that gets old, their mom across the aisle has some questions, which the boys translate for me.
“In Amerika, the streets are very clean?” Reluctantly, I admit that yes, they are usually. How to explain to a third grader that our garbage is neatly hidden away in landfills, allowing us to produce more per capita than any other country on earth?
“And every house you have a dustbin and a bell?” I figure he’s talking about doorbells, which exist here too but only in newer homes. I tell them yes again.
After that, they examine with fascination my eyeglasses, not believing that I actually need them to see anything farther than two feet away, and my driver’s license, not understanding the concept of a certification to pilot a vehicle. Then, the conversation gradually deteriorates into babble about monkeys and arguments about the superiority of Bangalore over America.
They get off at a major stop, and as they wait in the aisle to disembark, the bolder of the two looks at me and points to his eyebrow.
“Black,” he says, the complete sentences of his relatively excellent English suddenly gone.
“Do I have something in my eyebrow?” I ask.
“Black,” he says again. “Your eyebrows – white.” I stop rubbing my lower forehead.
“Yeah,” I admit, “They’re pretty much white.” He cocks head, considering this. Then he seems to arrive at some philosophical conclusion about racial differences, shrugs his shoulders, and skips off down the aisle.