By Mihir Srivastava
Age is a number that in some cases doesn't add up.
We seek ways to challenge ourselves. Travelling away from the familiar to seek adventure in the new and unknown is thrilling. India has a lot to offer to travellers from across the world from spiritualism to organic living, a method in the madness, heat and dust, snow-clad mountains to desert. There are some who come for sexual gratification as well, especially those past their prime. There’s a certain category of tourists, elderly virile women, who come to India for a month or so, make friends with younger Indian men, and enjoy their togetherness.
This became a bit of a trend some ten years ago. The elderly women, mostly from Baltic and Scandinavian countries and also from Russia, during winters, when it’s freezing back home, a thick layer of snow blankets life in cities and towns, many come to the warmer climes, also India, for greener pastures.
For an Indian man to experience a blonde, irrespective of her age, is a kind of personal revolution. He could easily be her son’s age, but sleeping with a white woman is aspirational, and gives a sense of achievement. That life is good and they have done well in life. And such reinforcements.
“I'm more than willing to mingle and open to experiences. I try new things that one gets to see only in indecent movies,” explains Ramesh in Hindi.
Ramesh is 28 years old bachelor from Gorakhpur, short and petite with big impressionist eyes, soft spoken with tentative manners. He was a tour guide in Delhi and then joined a multi-national insurance company as an agent.
Ramesh spent a month with Swetlana twice, in the winter of 2019, and then after three years, in 2022. Swetlana is a 66 years old woman from St Petersburg, a retired executive, now a consultant.
Ramesh is a dejected man. Swetlana had made friends with another Indian, a burly Punjabi, and spent a couple of weeks with him when she was here last in April for work. Swetlana speaks good English, lived in London for a few years in the late 1990s, and also rudimentary Hindi. She has had a long connection with India as a traveller. She claims to “understand the country” –which is a courageous thing to say for a nation of India's diversity and complexities. “You’re referring to Indian men,” I ask. She smiles.
What is ample clear is that her travels to India are not out of the pull factor exerted by willing young Indian men, half her age; but the push factor is at play. It’s the need to escape from a dull predictable life, a period of ennui in cold winters.
“I have done what I had to, but I’m not over just yet,” she says, her hands clasped. “I like to get my hands dirty with Indian men,” that’s how she refers to her intimate liaisons here. She comes for a month or so, loves to spend time in sunny Goa and also enjoys the pace of Delhi's city life. "You can so easily get lost in the crowd here," she says.
The way Swetlana describes her quest to look for Indian men online, I can only think of one word: hunt. They chat up and become friends, she has an expectant man waiting for her when she arrives. She likes to stay for a few days in Delhi to get to know him better, before heading out of the city for a romantic vacation in the colourful Rajasthan. There’s no exchange of money between them, it’s not a job. She, however, foots the bill. Ramesh, on his part, habitually buys her a drink, every now and then, even if she doesn’t want it.
There are phases when Swetlana seeks her space, “Indian men understand, easy to persuade,” she says and they oblige her and go away for a day or two.
I met them together in a seedy cafe in Paharganj. Ramesh describes time with her as “best sex ever.” Swetlana looks straight at Ramesh praising her, almost untouched by his servile adulation. “I like the attention I get here. Ramesh is really interested in me. He makes me feel special. As if I’m a creature from a different planet–an alien,” she says with a straight face.
But it’s not Ramesh’s unflinching devotion that brings her to India again and again, but this overpowering need to escape life back home. She wants to try different men. “Each man feels different and makes me feel good about myself in a different way,” she says. And then after a pause, with a smirk on her face, she adds: “Hygiene is a concern.”
Ramesh, unperturbed, and perhaps to appeal to her maternal instincts, get an evening with her for the old time's sake, says in a complex mix of Hindi and English, “She gave me baths like a mother to a newborn.” Swetlana didn’t get it exactly but knew he was praising her to persuade her. Ramesh was desirous. Swetlana was circumvented. They couldn't communicate clearly.
I put a name to this practice. Sex tourism. She differs, “Too much emphasis on sex. That’s such an Indian thing. I’d call it an adventure, a bolt for freedom.”
Swetlana is a widow. Her son in his late thirties is a gay activist without a partner in Moscow. He’s not as patronising as Indian men and visits her only for a few days in the summers. She pays for his visit to her. Her son's visit only makes her feel more alone.
India, in contrast, rejuvenates her and makes her feel young and desirable. India also exhausts her. After a month of stay, she craves calm and solitude. “My usual self,” as she puts it before she’s ready for another escapade.
Ebba hasn’t come since Covid brought the world to a grinding halt. She misses India and plans to come this winter, she’d be 68. A native of Stockholm, I remember her as a big woman, six feet tall, weighing a quintal. Now a retired school teacher, she has been coming to India for the last 50 years. Goa is her preferred destination. Swetlana connected me to her.
Ebba travelled to India in the early eighties during her college days and had a yoga teacher as her boyfriend in Rishikesh who "used to feed street dogs with passionate compassion," she recollects. Ebba got married to a colleague in the mid-1980s. Three decades passed like a ‘weekend’, job, and children kept her busy.
She built a beautiful house on the outskirts of Stockholm, a wild red rose creeper canopying her entrance door. Her two children, both girls, are settled in the US and her husband died 10 years ago. She’s a big woman, despite managing to walk briskly taking big strides. Her circumstances in life have not conditioned the way she feels about herself: young as ever and craves experiences.
She had a “fair, bony, hairy Indian boyfriend” from Kashmir. They hung out in Connaught Place on Sunday evenings. “There are so many people. There’s something happening all the time. Alive and agog I feet in Delhi” she reminisces.
“People in my country are lonely,” Ebba informs, “especially the older people.” She just had a break-up with her much younger partner. “He is hardly here, a photographer, explorer, yoga teacher, and is travelling for the good part of the year, ” she explains. A good riddance. Indian men according to Ebba are “good when they don’t talk. They do a lot of mansplaining,” she complains. She has had multiple Indian partners, sometimes dating more than one man at a time.
Anna is a Finnish woman, 60, slender and tall, with expressive blue eyes shining behind her freckled high cheekbones. A lawyer, Sikh, Harinder, wears a big blue turban on his thin conical face, was barely 27 when he fell madly in love with her, and even wanted to marry Anna. He is five years younger than Anna’s youngest of the three daughters. The age difference is not a barrier, in their case, it acted as a bridge.
Harinder’s family came to know about Anna and threatened to report the matter to the police. Their lawyer son, Harinder, educated them that it’s not a crime. For “Anna made me experience pleasures unbound. I couldn’t have even imagined that my body is capable of such pleasures before she came into my life.”
It must be because of his family’s prayers that Anna lost interest in her kid-lover sooner than she thought. "She helped me disengage with her but it was painful,” Harinder says in retrospect. “She is a hedonist. I’m a lover,” he adds. He still believes they would have made a good couple.
(Names are changed. Pictures are indicative)
Comments