Wo/men

I have not quite got the rules of how men and women should or should not interact here but the gender lines are much more bold than at home. Greg and I attended a wedding and we followed our female friends blindly into the wedding hall when all of a sudden I realised Greg was the only non-Punjabi-pyjama-clad-male in a room of sharee-shining-sisters. With wide eyes and urgency in my voice, Greg quickly too realised that he had to get out and get out fast. I didn't see him until 2 hours later when I found him outside the hall waiting for me, passing the time watching a crate of chickens meat a halal kill in preparation for feeding the next round of guests. We then informed the eachother about the the groom and bride according to our own respective genders.

A few weeks later, Greg and I were invited to a friend of a friend's lovely home in Moulvibazar as part of an informal reunion among college friends. We arrived and followed our hosts into the grand living room and the men walked to the right, the women to the left of the room intentionally decorated with two separate sofa, coffee table sets-- one for men and one for women. The men sat and conversed, the women huddled and chatted, husbands and wives separated. It felt odd and Greg and I probably overcompensated by not speaking to eachother and sheepishly avoiding eachother's eye contact the rest of the day. In fact later one when the other guests went to pray during the Friday afternoon prayertime, we maintained these rules by sitting on separate sofas. A man came in and laughed and said "you can sit together now!"

Assimilating to another culture's gender rules, allows one to reflect on the gender patterns she is most familiar with. It got me thinking is this really that different from Anglo-American family gatherings with women in the kitchen and men in the den?