"seeing my name, are you trembling with excitement?"

That's what my new cell-phone stalker from Kanchipuram asked me yesterday! I made the mistake of dialing a wrong number. All I said was "sorry, wrong number", but this was enough to titillate the man at the other end -- especially because he gathered that I was a foreigner. As a result, he called me constantly all day (I never once answered, until he tricked me by calling from a different phone) and texted me at least a dozen times with all sorts of ridiculousness. One was a picture message of a baby with its finger in its mouth saying in Tamil "Naan thaan" which basically just means, "It's me." Not sure where he was going with that. I never responded, which only upped the ante.

I had dialed the wrong number around noon. By evening, he had given me the name "Sandhya" and was trying to taunt me with all sorts of nonsense, such as "Time's up, Sandhya! Race me to the phone and call. I bet I will win!" The best is of course the gem that I put in the subject line. Cell phone stalkers are a dime a dozen in these parts. Cell phones are this sort of electronic appendage that affords men a chance to "interact" with women and maintain a sort of invisibility, without which they would never act. My non response was interpreted as an actual response, in that I was seemingly so shy and titillated by this man that I couldn't bring myself to call or write him back. This only ratcheted up the fantasy of said individual to the point that he invented a name for me and started calling me by all sorts of super informal vocatives. It's certainly the exact same thing in the U.S. with the internet: men take the anonymity of it as a kind of license to harass women in all sorts of ways. Here it is MUCH more benign, but nevertheless annoying. A few years back I had to make a complaint at the cell phone company because this guy got my number somehow and wouldn't stop calling me. Recently I had to stop going to a certain dry cleaners because the man there took it upon himself to get my number off the receipt and start texting me and calling me out of nowhere.

Chellapandi took care of the Kanchipuram stalker, however, and relished every minute of it. She waited for him to call and then answered the phone demanding, "WHO ARE YOU? WHY ARE YOU CALLING THIS NUMBER?" He was shocked, as he had expected me. I cannot really translate what she was saying to him, because Tamil affords all sorts of informal verb conjugations and vocatives that really give the sense of disrespect that we don't have in English. But basically she really gave him a dressing down to the point where he actually called BACK making up lies to defend himself and demanding to know why she was talking to him like he is a "rogue" and "scavenger" when he is actually a respectable businessman!

That's about it from here. I've been back in Madurai for one week. I've still got a lot of bureaucratic hurdles to clear, but so far, so good. People in my neighborhood were happy to have me back, which made me feel good. It was good to see them as well. I still want to write an entry called "Americans are anal." I will save that for tomorrow. I would like to share some revelations I made during my recent stint back in the U.S.