He always looks straight at you when you talk. His big eyes bore into yours and you think that maybe he’s a different sort of parasite, a new kind, some kind that will manifest itself in your soul through your eyes.

A kind of parasite that will jump into your eyes and latch it there, sucking in all the sights you see, tainting your vision with cynicism, although he’s a die-hard optimist.

You always have to look down.

The little voice in the back of your head whispers what your mother would say, that he’s a boy, and boys are bad. Boys and dating and tank-tops and miniskirts are for Americans and not for you. Studying and good grades and becoming a doctor and marrying an engineer with a unibrow and bad breath are for you.

Your culture has made you too docile for you to disagree.

You’ll think vaguely, as he sits beside you and blabs on and on, trying to make you laugh (and you do, hoping he’ll stop and go away) of what it would be like to be the girl that’s labeled whore. To just go out for a cup of coffee with him like he always offers, to spend five minutes in his company alone.

The thought of it just makes you queasy and you squirm and look down at your shoes, wishing desperately to run back home to your mother, to your studying, to your chores to your safe sheltered life.

You’re a tease and you know it. Somebody had called you that before, before you really knew what it meant, but now it has meaning.

Sometimes you lie and say you have to pee, just so you can be out of the way and run to a place safe from men. So that you can rush into the bathroom and gulp deep breaths, ask God for forgiveness, call your mother and look into the mirror, to be sure that you don’t see a slut.

Sometimes, it hurts to know that there are girls out there who don’t try so hard. Who give in, and wear tank tops, and mini-skirts and 4.6 oz of makeup everyday but everybody still likes them. It seems to you that nobody judges them, but once you step out of the safety provided by the smelly public restroom, everybody is going to judge you and you’ll bring shame, shame on the family.

You know you’re pretty, and sometimes late at night, you stay up asking God to make you prettier, to make you thinner, for your blemishes to go away, for you to glow and make heads turn as you skip down the sidewalk, Calculus book in hand. It’s not till it’s too late that you realize that you might have made somebody look a little too hard, that you might have piqued the interests of the wrong person.

Sometimes, you wish that the girls labeled whores would get what they deserve, that they would be cast down in society and nobody would like them, not even the Americans. Especially the Americans.

But then you know you’re just as guilty for making the same boys stare, over and over again, for maybe reeling them in a little too quick without realizing you’ve caught them.

And you’ve turned your little fantasy flipside up. You’re not a mermaid anymore, eluding the handsome (American) prince swimming after you. Instead you’re the fisher(wo)man, casting a line of live, curry-dipped bait.

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Hang in there, all my fellow ABCDs. Don’t fall to the dark side. Over there, they only eat samosas every six months.