As the touts and tourist prices of Agra fade with my anger into memory, I find myself on a government bus to Jaipur crammed into a seat next to a skinny young Indian man.  He is on his way to take a test to become a police commander and he has questions for a white man like me.  These questions include:

“Can you get your female friends to e-mail me from America?”  Unfortunately, I forgot to write down his address, ladies.

“How many women have you had intercourse with in the last year?”  I wondered if he got this question from the Sexual Repression section of the Indian Census.

“In your country, women have sex in train stations and the street?”  Gee, I’ll have to ask my mom and sister about that…

Good times.  Eventually, I just said “This is the part where I stop talking to you.”

At the Amber Fort outside of Jaipur, a guy asks me to take a picture of him with the camera I’m carrying around.  He poses and I shoot the shot, then he smiles and walks away as I start to walk over to show him the picture.  Odd.

Another guy asks if he can take my picture.  Sure, why not?  Click.  As he walks away, I imagine his bedroom decorated with photos of scruffy and slightly bemused white backpackers.

Best of all, just as I’m leaving, a family asks if they can take a picture of me and then sends over their eight year old daughter.  As they snap the photo, I’m trying to figure out if standing straight armed and awkward like I’m doing makes me look like less of a pedophile than if I just pretended that it was normal for mom to want a photo of her young daughter with a random balding 29 year old foreign stranger.  Maybe they thought I was Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Or maybe that’s Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC: International Edition over by the ticket counter.  I run out of the fort shouting “I was framed!”  Ok, the last part didn’t really happen.

As I ride back into town, I wonder if Amber Fort isn’t listed in some Hindi guidebook as “A good place to take weird photos with white people.”