The Staring Disorder

Apparently it is a general subcontinental thing, but at least for Pakistanis I can attest to it - they just love to stare at you.

One instance was when on a Sufi festival a group of I should say almost a hundred people crowded around me, and just stayed there, staring. If I hadn't taken refuge behind the counter of street vendor, they would have probably put their feet exactly where my shoes ended. An organizer of the festival finally came and beat the crowd away from around me, brandishing a stick.

Female trekkers in the mountain areas are advised to urinate into plastic bags inside their tents, otherwise, if spotted by someone behind a bush, male villagers will find nothing odd in rubbing shoulders around the person watching her relieve herself. (At the rate that Pakistani men are pissing in public, I do wonder how they'd react if only one time women joined in in a game of pointing at their wieners...)

My acquaintance Khan Khattak from Islamabad thought it was a common feature of human nature: "If I came to a town in Western Europe, dressed in a Chitrali hat and with a Kalashnikov in hand, of course people would also crowd around me!" I assured him that would not be the case -please correct me if you think I'm wrong on this, Westerners-, people in the West would, for sure, individually look over their shoulders to follow with their eyes where this strange appearance would be going, but never ever ever, would they make it this communal sport of just standing around you, not going anywhere.
Except, of course, you put yourself immobile onto some sort of pedestal and they will think you are trying to busk for money.

However, it did turn out, there is one thing common to human nature when it comes to dealing with starers: When in the hotel garden in Chilas, a group of ginks goggled at me without so much as batting an eyelash for the entire half-hour of breakfast. Nasha's reflex it was to go inside. I refused with the words, "In this culture we are the weirdoes if we stay outside while being such a curiosity to these men. But in my culture, it is the starers who are the weirdoes, and I am not going to go inside and sit inside that stuffy, lightless room, when I have shady garden to sit in the breeze just outside the door!". So I dealt with the cohort of kooks in the way we do in the West and stared back at them with about as idiotic an expression on my face as they had mustering me.

It only took a few seconds and surprise, surprise, the treatment had worked wonders. The guy who'd had the most pronounced goggle eyes even felt embarrassed enough to turn his chair the other way from me.