In case anyone has forgotten. .

Let's be quite honest. I am an American.

Just like I forget sometimes that I am in INDIA when I wake up in the morning, I sometimes forget that I am not an Indian. This may seem like a ridiculously pretentious statement, but let me explain. When I walk down the streets and the rickshaws follow at close distance in true stalker fashion trying to get my business, I ignore them--yet the attention suddenly reminds me that I don’t walk like an Indian woman. When I step into a fabric shop and get dizzy from the array of cloth, color, and embroidery, I remember that my mother never sifted through these colors and never bargained for my clothes when we shopped together. When I step out the door to go for a run and return with a gallon of sweat on my body, I remember that I was told to be “ladylike” as a child, but that “ladylike” still allowed me to run around with the boys at recess as long as I wore spandex under my skirt. When I talk to Indian students I remember that I am a native English speaker, awkwardly unable to understand people speaking my own language and unable to make myself understood. While I can use the bus system, go to the tailor, and eat chilis with my samosa, I’m still just wearing a costume over my American-ness.

Study abroad programs love to brag about cultural immersion, changing jeans-wearing, peanut butter-eating American students into sensitive bi-cultural world travelers. Us students love to brag about our latest bargain purchase on the streets of the Old City, how crossing the street seems entirely natural, and how the food at the Guest House seems bland. Let’s be honest. I’m still not giving up my jeans, and the student canteen still takes the spice out when they see light skin or blue eyes. It’s also going to take me a little longer than a month and a half to get used to bargaining for fabric that is packed into shelves with more patterns than one American store would dream of showing in twenty seasons, let alone one. My English will always be awkwardly enunciated. I will always attract more attention than necessary by overly zealous rickshaw drivers trying to make a buck in a wickedly competitive road.

With this sentiment in mind, I went back to FabIndia. Located in Banjara Hills, the ritzy, mansion-filled neighborhood of Hyderabad, I am essentially shopping in the Harvard Square of this city. When the CIEE program first introduced us to this shop a month ago, we whined that this was not “authentic India” and we did not come all the way here for them to show us the Americanized stores and malls of Hyderabad. As we've all discovered, the kind of people who come to India to study abroad are of a particular religion-and-philosophy-studying, neo-hippie mold. Our complaints are valid in some sense--we didn't come to act like tourists. Most of us also didn't come here because we are terribly enchanted by American consumer culture.

But let’s be honest. Two things are also true. First, who am I to tell the native Indians who shop in Banjara Hills that they are not Indian? Am I not American because I shop on a budget and love Chinese food and Italian coffee? India has a strong material culture all their own, just as unique as we like to think it is. Why else would thousands of plaster Ganesh statues find their way into the lake at the end of the week? Banjara Hills is just as much India as the tarp huts on the side of the road and the women who walk with baskets on their heads. Secondly, a native Californian who has never been outside of the United States is not going to be able to drift through the Old City bazaars with the ease of a woman who has been shopping alongside her mother, grandmother, and aunties since she was a girl. Hence, FabIndia. Genuine Indian cotton, connected to the store with no middle-man, cut into solid colored kurtas, “Indian skinny-pants” and salwars and presented in a manner that doesn’t make me feel dizzy. Suddenly this seems like a terribly wonderful idea, and a compromise rather than a cop-out. Of course it is ridiculous to remind myself that I’m not an Indian, but in the effort to throw ourselves into Indian culture sometimes I forget. I forget that this isn’t supposed to be immediate, or easy, and that sometimes I just need to buy a plain white kurta with no frills. I am, after all, an American.