Even though I'd *mostly* come to my senses about Geeta, I still enjoyed going over and chatting with her and Mrunali, and Mrunali's cute little daughter, Manasi, who had a lot of fun running around with my camera. She actually had an interesting perspective in her shots, though!
Mrunali kept teasing me that Geeta was going to have to find her husband soon and wanted to know if I was going to her wedding. "I don't think so!" I'd say, and they'd laugh and ask why not? Mrunali told me that in Indian culture, the husband decides everything about their wife once they've married. If you don't like your wife's name, even, you can change it.
I'm sure there was already a lot of gossip in the small community about the English guy who kept hanging around Geeta's shop. Her oldest brother had already brought it upon himself to let me know his sister could only marry a Karnataka man (the state they were from), though Kiran told me that would probably just be a tactic to get something from me.
During my first visit, Geeta's phone had stopped working so I'd given her my old LG phone I'd brought as an alarm, but couldn't work outside of Korea. I offered to go into town with them and buy a new phone for her. On the way, we stopped by their house, a little ways inland, passed the Jewish house. There was a small group of little cement buildings in a clearing in the palm trees. It looked pretty run down without power or water. It was kind of a wake up call to their real life, away from haggling with the tourists on the beach. During the monsoon, they spend the months in their home town, planting rice in the fields, not a glamorous life by any stretch, hunched over in the mud, soaked in the rain.
Manasi's photos:
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